'Help, dad and mom are dying': Child pleads after Israeli strike on southern home

“I beg you, come help me! Dad and mom are dying! Dad and mom are dying! Dad and mom are dying! Come help me quickly!” says a toddler girl in an audio recording that went viral after a deadly Israeli strike overnight on a house in the southern town of Qabrikha.

The strike killed the father on the spot as the mother succumbed later to her wounds. The child survived but was wounded.

In an interview with Al-Mayadeen, the girl said she was playing on her phone inside the house when the first missile struck.

“I waited until the dust subsided. I thought I was in a dream. I thought that I was asleep. I started pinching myself as hard as I can in order to wake up from my dream, but I couldn’t. In the end, when I heard the second strike, I knew that it was not a dream and that it came from Israel,” the girl added.

“I ducked under a wooden table and started praying to God to protect me. I pretended to be dead so that the enemy doesn’t strike again. When the dust subsided, I went outside to check on mom and dad and I found my mom lying on the ground,” the girl said.

“I shouted, ‘Mom!’, and she said, ‘Zeinab’, and I stopped hearing her breaths, while my father wasn’t breathing at all,” the girl added.

She then explains how she took her parents’ cellphones and how an ambulance arrived on the scene.

“I shouted as hard as I can to the ambulance, because I wanted to rescue myself. I wanted to live because I’m still a little child. I want to live my life and my childhood and I don’t want to die. I want to live my life like other children,” the girl added, describing her slain parents as “the best father and mother in the world.”

The Israeli army has not commented on the strike but it has repeatedly bombed Lebanon, claiming that it is targeting Hezbollah operatives and military sites, despite a November ceasefire that sought to end over a year of hostilities.

Under the agreement, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of the Litani river, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli border, leaving the Lebanese Army and United Nations peacekeepers as the only armed parties in the region.

Israel was required to fully withdraw its troops from the country but has kept them in five places it deems strategic.