Fatima, one of the few survivors of the massacre that flattened the building to the ground, tells Annahar about moments that felt to her like a “dream or a nightmare,” the day she decided to stay in her home despite the difficult conditions, because her young daughter could not endure moving between schools, shelters, and cramped places.

She says: “That day, when I heard the sound of the explosion, I immediately held my daughter and wrapped her in my arms. I couldn’t see anything anymore… everything around me turned into darkness.”

Only seconds passed before the building violently shook from side to side, before collapsing entirely over the heads of its residents.

Amid the dust, stones, and twisted metal, Fatima did not think of herself. Her only concern was keeping her daughter alive. “I was holding her tightly, I didn’t want to let her go.” When the sounds faded and an eerie silence took over, she felt something heavy on her back and could no longer breathe.

An hour passed, then more, without anyone hearing her.

During this time, despite her injuries, Fatima was trying to remove the rubble from above her daughter, stone by stone.

She was about to lose hope when she heard a small voice that brought life back into her soul. It was her daughter calling “Mama.”

Fatima screamed at the top of her voice, calling for help, until she heard her son’s voice from outside: “Mom, if you’re still alive, give me a sign.”

That call, she says, was the only thread that tied her to life in those moments. She answered with a broken voice: “Yes, my son, I’m still alive… come save your sister.”

Then she guided him to a small opening at the edge of the rubble, and together with those who had gathered at the scene, they began trying to widen it.

She told her daughter: “Go out, your brother is waiting for you.”

When the rescuers managed to pull the child out first, Fatima felt that part of the battle had been won. “When they took my daughter, I kept saying thank God a thousand times. I stayed alive for her, and for her I endured and made it out.”

From the site of Israeli airstrikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Nabil Ismail)

For her, survival was not a passing event, but an internal decision made from the very first moment: “I used to say that if anything happened to my daughter under the rubble, I didn’t want to come out… I wanted to die with her.”

Fatima emerged from beneath the rubble with three pelvic fractures, but physical pain was not the only burden she carried with her. She also came out without a home, without clothes, and without even the most basic necessities of life.

“I need everything,” she says plainly, without hesitation. “No medicine, no wound dressings, no gas, no belongings, not even clothes for me or my daughter.”

From her bed, after narrowly escaping death, Fatima is not asking for much. Her message is simpler than the scale of the tragedy she lived through, but far more painful: “I hope everyone who watches this video… judges me with humanity. Nothing more."

In Hay el Sellom, it was not only a building that fell. Entire families’ lives collapsed in a single moment. And amid the rubble that swallowed both stone and people, Fatima Taqi emerged carrying her daughter on one side, and a heavy load of loss on the other.

The mother survived, and the child survived, but the four hours under the rubble were enough to leave an imprint in their hearts that will not easily fade.