A picture of "my selfie" is full of dust and blood, which journalist Fabian Aoun took to reassure her people that she is still alive. In one moment, while she was stopping her car under a tree on Gemmayze Street across from Beirut Port, the features of the street, the city and the homeland changed.
Fabian heard 3 explosions, the last of which was pushing the windshield and outside mirror inside, and the tree fell on her car.
Hell on Earth
Fabian tells Al Jazeera Net that she gathered her strength and got out of the car, without feeling that a "blood spigot" was open in her head.
She was a few hundred meters away from the catastrophic explosion, not understanding what had happened; Cars in the middle of the street, rubble above them, people falling from balconies, blood, dust, corpses, shouting and sirens.
She walked with the person who had come for a press interview with him who was also bruised, behind the people to reach the Wardia Hospital in the area, and they arrived and found it destroyed, and the patients were evacuated. They tried to reach the Red Cross center, and they did not find anyone to help them because of the density of the wounded.
Fabian was praying to God to return her to her children. While she was walking without finding help, a person carried her in a 4x4 vehicle and put her next to 3 people, one of whom died upon reaching the hospital, and I later learned that this person had taken the car from the road to rid the people and help them, and then returned it to its owners.
In several hospitals, no one was able to receive them, but in one of them they put a bandage on her head so that she would not lose consciousness. Her family and her husband arrived at her and took her to a hospital in the Kesrouan region, where she waited for her turn according to the hierarchy of critical conditions.
"He wrote me a new age," says Fabian, after she underwent sutures for some of the wounds on her head, ear, hands and feet.
She added, "I saw Hell with my own eyes, healthily, I am better than others, but I am psychologically devastated. For a week now I have taken sedatives, and when I go to sleep, the scene of people flying from their homes and corpses returns as if it is a movie, as if it is a scene of Hell on Earth."
Fabian was afraid of the substances that were flying on her to be harmful, nuclear or bacterial, and did not allow her family to approach her until she was treated and bathed.
It is a human slaughterhouse
Journalist Hala Haddad was absent from her activist Facebook page, until one of the colleagues announced that she was injured and in critical condition. She tells Al-Jazeera Net that she heard the sound of flying, and that she was parked in front of her house in Mar Mikhael, and waited until six o'clock for the electric current to go up to the house .. She asked her mother and the household help to enter the corridor between the rooms where people used to hide for fear of the bombing of the air force.
Hala says that she felt the air carrying her over her sick father, and she thought that the cupboard fell on her, only to find that the aluminum and glass windows had smashed all over her body from behind, and blood began to flow from her, her mother, her father, and the domestic help as well. Meanwhile, her brother was in the elevator that was pushed up by the explosion, his door was thrown, and she heard his voice coming.
Hala thought that the explosion occurred in the building. She did not know how she gathered her strength after they tried to contact the Red Cross without responding, to get out of the destroyed building, stand on the road and shout for help, and found the wounded and the dead around her. People climb the stairs to reach the Roman Hospital, which was destroyed and evacuated patients.
Hala tells Al-Jazeera Net that a young man and a girl were passing by a small car, and her brother asked them to take her to the hospital while the car was running with difficulty among the rubble, and near a Red Cross car, one of them placed next to him the body of a decapitated woman, and everyone started screaming, "So we got out of the car and started walking towards the Wardia Hospital, which It was also devastating. "
Hala saw people carrying severed limbs walking towards hospitals, from one hospital to another, she moved with difficulty with her family to get oxygen, and in one of them, she had a nervous crisis, so she jumped off the chair because of the harsh scenes in the hospital emergency. She says that "it was not a hospital, the scene was like a slaughterhouse." Or a saga, where the body parts and internal organs of people got out of their bodies, and then transferred to another hospital.
She says that she felt that God helped her to breathe until she arrived at the hospital, and it turned out later that she had a puncture in the lung along with sutured wounds, and then she treated her lung. She was out after a week, and she's still recovering.
Not my father's face
Journalist Rana Ostah has a story about her father, Joseph, a taxi driver, who called her brother to avoid taking the Karantina road due to heavy traffic. Less than a minute later, Beirut exploded, and due to confusion, they did not realize that it had occurred before or after the explosion.
The family group on WhatsApp must check on everyone else, but the father did not answer, although he usually communicates all the time with his family.
Rana says that the hour and a half that passed was the most difficult time in her life. At first his phone did not pick up a signal, then it started ringing without an answer. "We learned later that he was in the office in Ashrafieh, and that the wall and ceiling had fallen and were scattered on them by glass, so her father rescued his colleague from under the rubble of the office and asked him to save himself and not wait for help because they might not reach them."
On the morning of August 5, Rana published a post on her page in which she talked about the injury of her father in the face, who was in the Ashrafieh area at the moment of the port explosion, noting that he had spent 20 years of his life in exile, struggled and struggled to return to his country.
Joseph started walking to the Roum Hospital, then the Hotel Dieu, and the emergency was very crowded, so he returned to take his car and went to the Mount Lebanon Hospital, and the situation was the same, there he was able to call her brother from the street, and his phone was still under the rubble of the office, and they took him bleeding to Bellevue Hospital, And "it was a battlefield for people to fight in their places, and there is no room for anyone. Emergency in which there are about 150 people, and the start was with the most dangerous cases."
Her father's injuries were deep wounds to his face, and part of his nose and cheek were cut by glass, and his eyes were frighteningly damaged. And she notes that the picture she shared on her account was the least terrible, after he was treated a little, and she does not know how many stitches are in his body.
It is not difficult, she says, "to discover that we who are reporting the news have become a part of it."