Jaafar Annan has been posted up on the sidewalk outside the emergency room of Rafik Hariri University Hospital, on the southern edge of Beirut, for so long that he’s become a permanent fixture.
“The hospital has become my home,” Annan said, exhausted.
Last week, an Israeli strike leveled the building where Annan’s family lived in Kayfoun, a town in the Mount Lebanon governorate, west of the Lebanese capital.
“I buried my father,” he said, “but my mother is still missing.”
Since then, his days have become a single-minded search for any sign of his mother, Fatima, who is 56. Like several others searching for missing family members, Annan gave a sample of his blood to the hospital, hoping he can get some closure with a DNA match to unidentified remains.
“I walk through hospitals in the Mount Lebanon region. I stare at injured faces. I go to the morgues. I look for a mole, a mark,” Annan said. “Then I come back here. Waiting for the sample results.”
The cold-storage units at the Hariri hospital have been fashioned into ad hoc laboratories to identify a relentless influx of dead bodies.
The unprecedented scales of DNA identification of corpses is born of a macabre need. Last week, after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, Israel pressed on in its Lebanese front with a ferocious blitz of airstrikes. The toll was staggering, leaving demolished buildings and infrastructure, along with the attendant skyrocketing casualties — the violence rending people into unrecognizable forms.
“The bodies arrive completely disfigured,” said Hisham Fawwaz, director of the hospitals and dispensaries department at the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which operates the hospital. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles.”
Hellbound and Down 