There are only two families in the Karheiba neighbourhood on the outskirts of Qana: the Hashems and the Shalhoubs. So all of the more than 54 people who died yesterday - buried alive, crushed and suffocated in the basement of Abbas Hashem's unfinished house - bore the same two family names.
The house was at the edge of town, clinging to a hillside. As shown by the drying tobacco leaves, the olive trees on the terraces, and the plough outside, the Hashems and Shalhoubs are farmers. They thought their wives, children and disabled would be safe in the Hashems' basement.
Mohamed Ali Shalhoub was the first man I saw carried out on a stretcher when I arrived with civil defence workers from Tyre at 8.30am. He was writhing with pain, but I was able to speak to him six hours later in a hospital in Tyre.
"We were sleeping when the first bomb hit at one in the morning," Shalhoub said. "I was thrown across the room. I fell on my face and my legs were buried under the rubble."
His wife, Rebab, herself wounded, used her hands to free the couple's four-year-old son, then freed her husband.
Mohamed is a paraplegic, so Rebab dragged him outside and placed him under a tree. For 7¾ hours, he lay there with a broken leg and badly bruised face. "I could hear Israeli planes and helicopters and drones the whole time," he said.
"There were explosions 150 metres away. I was waiting to be hit again."
Doctors put Mohamed, Rebab and little Hassan Shalhoub in the same hospital room, and the wife listened, interjecting: "May God destroy Israel."
Though Rebab saved their son, Hassan, three close relatives were killed: the couple's six-year-old daughter, Mohamed's brother and his paraplegic sister. "If the Israelis had not continued bombing around us, we could have saved half the children," Rebab said.
About two-thirds of more than 25 bodies I saw dug out of the rubble were children. One dead girl, aged about four, looked normal except that the backside of her trousers, was soaked in blood. Another child had its face smashed flat. Several had severe gashes on their head and blood matted in their hair.
A driver showed me something he considered supernatural. In the back of an ambulance a little boy with a bloodied face lay beside a woman. The child died with his index finger pointing, the gesture Muslims make when they say, "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet."
The deaths of the children deeply shocked the Lebanese. "Twenty dead children, 20 dead children," a woman wailed in a house on the rubble-strewn path between the ambulances and bomb site. She stuffed belongings into a hold-all, and her teenage son, sobbing, pulled his grandfather by the arm. Having survived almost three weeks of war, they were taking their chances to flee throughout the bombardment outside.
Flies and wasps swarmed around the bodies. Rescuers tried to maintain some dignity for the dead. When a blanket slipped off a dead woman being carried away on a stretcher, I glimpsed her pretty face and gold jewellery. A civil defence worker put two women's handbags and a bundle of clothing in an ambulance in the hope that relatives would identify the belongings in the morgue.
The whole time Israeli aircraft roared overhead, dropping bombs in the surrounding countryside, elsewhere in the town, and on the road to Tyre. From time to time a drone whined overhead. Lebanese particularly fear these pilotless aircraft, which relay images in real time and guide weapons. In 1996, the last time Israel massacred civilians at Qana, a UN peacekeepers' video refuted Israel's denial that a drone was present during the bombardment.
If there are good guys in Lebanon, they are the civil defence workers who risk their lives to rescue the wounded.
Yesterday they laboured in just a few square metres, beneath the buckling ceiling of the basement, blown open on to the hillside. The ceiling and the weight of the three-storey building risked collapsing on the rescue workers at any moment. They had to give up before retrieving all the bodies, and the army moved in with heavy equipment.
As the press army now based in Tyre braved the bombardment to drive up to Qana, Naim Rakka, a civil defence worker, lost his temper with a journalist. "I am fed up being asked the same silly questions over and over," he shouted. " 'What's your name? How old are you? What did you see?' We are sick of being used as guinea pigs for Israeli weapons."
A civil defence worker who was one of the first on the scene of the 1996 Qana massacre recalled seeing dozens of children cut into pieces by Israel's proximity shells then. "My heart is black like this shirt," he said, pulling the fabric from under his flak jacket. "It no longer feels emotion."
The outcry that followed the 1996 massacre forced Israel to stop its "Operation Grapes of Wrath". There was speculation yesterday that the deaths in Abbas Hashem's basement might speed up an end to this war.
Ahmad Abu al-Shebeb, the Palestinian imam in a white scull cap, had come from Tyre to watch the rescue. "Rashidiyeh (the main Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre) was bombed a week ago," Shebeb said. "They destroyed seven houses and a bakery and wounded 10 people."
If, as the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, promised yesterday, Israel suddenly allows humanitarian aid to reach Qana, the aid workers will not find many takers.
The war has displaced 800,000 people, most of them from the south, and Qana is a ghost town.
Just off the main square, I found white-haired Youssef Bourji, a blacksmith, and his wife, Aliya, sitting out the bombardment in the shade of their great arbour.
"I stayed here through 1978, 1982, 1993 and 1996," Bourji said. "I'd rather die at home than die of hunger and thirst somewhere else.
"Our children fled to Beirut," Aliya said. "When the bombing gets too close, we go inside and wait for it to end."
We heard a half-dozen outgoing rockers, and decided it was time to head back through the broken glass and rubble, the bomb craters and tangles of downed power lines.
At Tyre government hospital, I found Mohamed Kassem Shalhoub, a skinny construction worker with a boxer's nose whom I'd seen carried out that morning with a broken arm and bloodied face.
He lost his five children, wife, mother, two uncles and their families in the bombing. "I heard people screaming, 'Stop the bleeding! Pull my son out of the rubble!'," he said with extraordinary calm. "I managed to pull three people out."
Mohamed Kassem repeated a thought I heard voiced several times yesterday: "The Israelis tried to fight mujahideenat Maroun al Ras and Bint Jbeil, and they lost. So they take revenge by bombing children."
After yesterday's massacre, the thirst for revenge is on Hizbullah's side. On Saturday night Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the group's leader, threatened to fire longer-range missiles at towns in central Israel. Yesterday he swore that Israel "will assume the consequences of the massacres of Qana and elsewhere", and promised that the Qana bombing "will not remain unpunished".
Support for Hizbullah is tied up with religious fervour among the Shia of southern Lebanon. After listing his dead relatives Mohamed Kassem Shalhoub said: "We have an example to follow in Imam Hussein and we are all ready for Hassan Nasrallah."
His eyes welled with tears when I asked what he would do without his wife and children: "I have a god, I don't know what to do. He took my family, he will take care of me . . ."
Halla Shalhoub lay half-delirious in hospital, her head wrapped in bandages. "I lost my two little girls, 1½ and 3½. My two little girls will go to heaven, Thank God. I have memorised much of the Koran. To die with honour is better, Imam Hussein will see to it we will win."
The only survivor who talked of politics was Mohamed Ali Shalhoub, the paraplegic.
"I am not a fighter", he said. "My sister was sleeping beside me and she was also paralysed. Most of the children were under the age of 10. Are these people resistance?" he asked angrily. "Is this the new Middle East that the US is preaching?
"This is what they want for Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. The terrorism is coming from America."
Shalhoub understood the Israelis' strategy. "They are bombing civilians because they want to revolt against the resistance. If they kill us to the last person, we will still support the resistance. We will not be humiliated."