HADIL MAALALA lies in her bed in the Jebel Amal Hospital, bandages swathing her stomach wounds, unaware that her mother and father and all her brothers were slaughtered around her in Israel's massacre of the Qana refugees.
She doesn't cry. She says she doesn't remember what happened at Qana. "I haven't told her she has no family left," Dr Ahmed Mrouwi says quietly. "I told her that her mother and father will be coming to see her soon. Of course, it is untrue."
The bliss of ignorance cannot be bestowed upon 56 year old Saadallah Balhas. A bandage covers the socket where his right eye was cut from his face by an Israeli shell fragment at Qana a week ago. His body is peppered with shrapnel holes. But the real wounds are far deeper.
"The UN soldiers came to our village of Siddiqin before the shelling and told us we would be safer in their UN compound," he says. "We did as they advised us, all 23 members of my family. My wife and sons and daughters and my brothers and their children all drove in our cars to Qana and went into the compound for safety."
Saadallah Balhas holds a handkerchief to his left eye, the only eye with which he can now weep. "We were in the room where the Fijian soldiers had their open air restaurant and then the Israeli shells came down on us and killed them all. All of them. It was the last of the shells that killed them: my wife, my five daughters, my four sons, my brothers and their wives and my grandchildren. I saw them lying there in front of me like dead sheep."
Even the doctors and nurses put their hands to their faces, hardened men and women who had to cope with 50 bodies and 50 wounded in the hour that followed the Israeli shelling, trying to fathom which heads fitted which corpses, which were the arms of the living and the dead. Room after room contains the surviving victims of the massacre, armless, legless.
A walk round the wards of the Jebel Amal Hospital when all the world is talking about a ceasefire is a visit to hell.
"All our patients have pieces of shell inside them," Dr Mrouwi says. "In their chest, abdomen, neck, legs. We have many amputations. But many people reached here without hands and legs. We still have two children from the ambulance at which the Israelis fired a missile almost two weeks ago. One of them has her face burnt off. She has no eyes.
"The war was not against Hizbullah, as the Israelis claim. All the victims are civilians. It was their purpose to kill them." Dr Mrouwi will not discuss Israel's claim that it was an accident, a slight miscalculation in the gun trajectory when its 155mm artillery batteries responded after Hizbullah men fired two Katyusha rockets and four mortars 350 metres from the UN compound.
"The Israelis have their super technology and they had been boasting of it all week," he says. "The wounded in my hospital cannot believe what Israel said. Ask them for yourself."
And each room of pain and agony produced the same response. How could this have been a mistake? "We saw the pilotless drone over the UN compound before the shelling," Suleiman Khalil says. "They could see on television cameras where they were hitting and they went on tiring even among the wounded."
He moves with pain on his bed, a swathe of pale brown bandages round the stump of his leg. When we ask what will become of the 23 year old agricultural worker now that he will forever be a cripple, the doctor turns to us and says: "I cannot ask him that question."
In the next room, Fatmi Deeb cries. She has shrapnel wounds up her legs and a fearful cut that embraces both her lips. She is 1 1/2 years old. Her father, a Lebanese army soldier who was on duty in Tyre when the Israelis killed the refugees of Qana, stands by her bed. "They killed my wife and my two sons and Fatmi is all I have left," he says. "What can I say to you?"
Ahlam Khalil, a beautiful young woman of 20, lies with her head on a pillow, a blue scarf covering her long dark hair. "I did not support the Hizbullah but I blame Israel. The Fijian soldiers told us they had told Israel there were many civilians there and that Israel would never bomb us.
"I was wounded by the first shell. So was my husband. He lay over our only child during the shelling and protected it from the shrapnel. Our child was saved, but he was very badly wounded. They say he is in another hospital but I don't know much."
Hadil Maalama, the girl who never cries, answers our questions monosyllabically. She says she is Iraqi and that it was "Saddam" who attacked the refugees.
"Maybe her parents fled here after the Gulf War and she saw the pictures on television of the bombing of Iraq," Dr Mrotiwi says. "But we have no way of knowing. There isn't a soul who knows her or anything about her family and they were all killed."
"I will be the one to have to tell her some day that all her family are dead," Dr Mrouwi says softly.
"No, I don't yet know what I am going to say. I don't know the words. But if there is no one, I shall adopt her myself and bring her up with my family."
. The US, France, Russia and the European Union have agreed to a consultative group to oversee the reconstruction of large areas of southern Lebanon destroyed in the past 15 days of Israeli bombardment. France is already shipping generators to Lebanon to restore the Bselim power plant, which was deliberately destroyed by Israeli aircraft in the first week of the war.