"'Horror and tears' Panic hits Lebanon's hospitals

The rescuers struck at the concrete with jackhammers, excavators and even pickaxes, pausing occasionally and demanding silence, straining to hear anyone still trapped under the collapsed building.

- William Christou

Beneath the rubble, nothing stirred. They resumed, many working through the night after Israel carried out airstrikes on residential buildings across the street from Rafik Hariri university hospital, killing 18 people including four children, and wounding 60 on Monday night.

Qassem Fakih, 39, whose skin was ghost-white with dust after digging for hours trying to find his relatives who lived in the block of flats, said: "They accuse us of belonging to a culture of death, but it's not true - we have a culture of life, we are a people who love life. They are the ones who are killing us." The dead bodies of four of his cousins, all children, had been pulled from the rubble, and he was working to find two more family members who were still missing.

Rescuers called for a stretcher, they had found a body. A man - Fakih did not know him - was placed in a black bag and carried off to be identified.

The small cluster of buildings on the edge of Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, was referred to as "the neighbourhood of the neglected". Its inhabitants were impoverished, some refugees from Syria and Sudan and others Lebanese who eked out an existence on at most a few hundred dollars a month - "enough just to eat and drink", a resident said as he watched his former home exhumed one concrete block at a time.

A little after 10pm on Monday, Israel had dropped a bomb on the neglected neighbourhood without warning. The Israeli military said it had struck a "Hezbollah terrorist target" near the hospital.