As yet another body was removed from the wreckage yesterday morning, Naim Raqa, the head of the civil defence team searching the ruins, hung his head in grief: "When they found them, they were all huddled together at the back of the room ... Poor things, they thought the walls would protect them."
"Where is the humanity? Why are these massacres being committed against civilians?” asked Naim Raqa, the head of the Lebanese civil defence unit in nearby Jawaya, who was helping the rescue.
Naim Raqa, head of civil defense in the nearby town of Jouaya, sat on a pile of rubble, his black uniform covered in a fine concrete powder.
"I was in Qana in '96," the exhausted rescue worker said. "Israel, when it is weakened, commits bigger massacres.
"We were told about this massacre -- I don't know what time it was. We couldn't move at night, even in ambulances, because of the shelling. They should allow us to move so we can work."
He wiped beads of sweat from his brow.
"They were still asleep, hiding. They were all near the walls, huddled in fear. We found many of them like this," he said, drawing his knees and elbows into his chest in a fetal-like position. "The poor things thought the walls would protect them. I had the honor of removing about 15 of them."
His break was interrupted by a colleague calling for stretchers as the bodies of two more young boys were removed, their tiny pajama shorts and T-shirts covered in soil and dust.
Raqa didn't wait for the stretchers to arrive. He scooped up one child; a bystander carried the other.