The memories from the blast day are stinging clear for Dima and those like her who suffered unimaginable losses from the blast. Her mother and two of her sisters passed away, three people of at least 190 lost and 6,000 injured in the blastwave that sent a mushroom cloud into the air and forever changed 300,000 Beirut residents’ lives.
The memories from the blast day are stinging clear for Dima and those like her who suffered unimaginable losses from the blast. Her mother and two of her sisters passed away, three people of at least 190 lost and 6,000 injured in the blastwave that sent a mushroom cloud into the air and forever changed 300,000 Beirut residents’ lives.
As we donate to provide emergency relief in Lebanon, we hear heartbreaking personal accounts from the day of the explosion. Stories like Dima’s. Her mother was cooking chicken, her father preparing sweets, and she and her sisters were laughing together. The explosion rocked Beirut and reverberated. The reverberation still lives in the heavy hearts and minds of Beirut’s people and their families abroad.
The memories from the blast day are stinging clear for Dima and those like her who suffered unimaginable losses from the blast. Her mother and two of her sisters passed away, three people of at least 190 lost and 6,000 injured in the blastwave that sent a mushroom cloud into the air and forever changed 300,000 Beirut residents’ lives.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon. To God we belong, and to Him we return.
Dima survived and searched through her home’s remnants for objects and memories. She holds a toy — a stuffed red dog — but she lost much, much more than she has found.
Her eyes reflect her pain. Beirut’s pain. Lebanon’s pain. She, her surviving sister, Diana — who was sent to the intensive care unit at a nearby hospital — and her father hold onto the past’s pleasant memories while looking forward with hope. Now, among the destruction, her family and her people face food and medical supply shortages.
Zakat Foundation of America has been providing warm meals and helping clean the streets. Aside from the sheer destruction from the explosion, Beirut’s medical infrastructure has been impacted. This means less resources for a pandemic that is only getting worse. In just one month since the explosion on Aug. 4, there have been more than 13,000 coronavirus cases in Lebanon. Until the explosion, there had been fewer than 5,300 total cases in Lebanon.
There had been just 65 coronavirus-related deaths in Lebanon until the explosion, and there have been 107 since then. Lebanon needs medical supplies. Its hospitals are overloaded, and food prices are rising.
The structural and financial damage in Beirut are vast, but we are more concerned with the human cost. Thousands upon thousands are left homeless, endangered as debris is all around them.
“I grabbed him so tightly, but the drastic explosion separated us, and the wood fell on my head and the glass on his body,” a mother in Beirut said in Arabic to Zakat Foundation of America’s field representatives.
As our emergency relief workers help rebuild the city, they stop to listen to firsthand accounts of the people they help. We are in awe of the strength, grit, and resilience in Lebanon.
As with every catastrophe, the people suffering need each other’s help and external support. Dima, Diana, and their father need your support.
