The Israeli raid on September 29 against Sarafand, a city one and a half miles from the coastal city of Sidon in southwestern Lebanon, leveled a residential building to the ground.
15 people, many of them relatives of Ali, were killed according to eyewitnesses from the area. The rescue team had given up hope of finding any survivors in the ruins.
But then Ali was discovered among the debris in a excavator scoop. He was barely breathing after being buried for 14 hours, his uncle Hussein Khalifeh told AFP's reporter.
Several operations
The uncle sits by the two-year-old's hospital bed in Sidon, where he is connected to a respirator.
Ali was lying on a sofa and sleeping when the attack occurred. He is still sleeping... we are waiting for the surgical operations to be completed before he can wake up.
Two-year-old Ali's right hand has been amputated, and several operations to restore his face and jaw will be performed.
But the world he will wake up to is shattered, scarred, and his family is dead: his parents, a sibling, and both his grandmother and grandfather.
Israel intensified the war against the Islamist movement Hezbollah at the end of September, with repeated attacks against, among other things, Sarafand. Lebanon's Health Department estimates that 2,600 people have been killed since September 23, when Israel announced that a new front had been opened against Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Then, the war between Israel and the terrorist-stamped Hamas had been raging since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 last year.
Psychological scars
Another close relative of Ali Khalifeh survived the raid, 32-year-old Zainab, who was buried for two hours before she could be rescued. Severely injured, she was taken to the hospital, with a bandage over one eye. The other was lost.
When Zainab woke up at the hospital, she was told that her parents, her husband, and three children aged three to seven years had been killed.
Zainab's psychological scars are much greater than her physical injuries, notes her doctor Ali Alaa el-Din.
