This article was originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and is republished with the author's permission.

A general view of the damage done to al-Nabatiyeh hospital in southern Beirut by ongoing Israeli airstrikes. (Raoul Kramer, Maan Images)

Last Sunday's Israeli massacre of refugees at Qana was preceded by many others, perhaps less numerically dramatic, but just as poignant. Here in Beirut, we are overwhelmed by images of the dead and wounded, the villages destroyed, the unimaginable environmental damage, the entire blocks of our cities leveled by Israeli air raids. All of Lebanon has shared in the care of almost 1 million refugees, thousands of volunteers offering social, financial, medical and other forms of assistance.

But in the midst of the horror, it was the photograph of a little girl with gold earrings that especially moved me. She was lying on the floor of her house, alongside her brothers, sisters and mother, all of them covered with bloodstained shrouds.

Perhaps that little girl entered my heart because when she died, my husband and I were looking after our two little granddaughters while their parents were traveling. It was my special role to wipe away their every tear, to kiss every bump and cut, and to hold their precious bodies close as I read them a story and prepared them for bed each night.

When I saw that little girl's picture, I felt that if I had picked her up she would have felt warm and soft like my granddaughters. But she was dead and I could not bear the cruelty of it.

My son and his wife had left before the war began and were now frantic to reach their daughters. The morning they were to make their perilous journey home, my husband and I watched the children play in the garden, not voicing our fears to one another. Suddenly, we heard the scream of jets overhead, and then two loud explosions. I froze. My husband rushed to the radio. He returned a few minutes later, ashen. The Israelis had bombed the road they were on. We sat there, silent, with no way to find out if they were alive or dead, or left to die in a burning car, screaming for help, as so many others had.

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An hour passed. A car drove up. I saw my son, and his wife. I never wept as I wept then. Later, they told us they had passed a convoy carrying emergency medical supplies, including several ambulances. Israeli jets had bombed that convoy just minutes after they passed it.

Our story had a happy ending. Not so the hundreds of thousands who have been made homeless, or the hundreds, many of them children, who have been killed. I have seen dead children pulled out of the rubble of their homes; children weeping over the bodies of their dead mothers and fathers, and parents weeping over the bodies of their dead children. I have seen little faces pockmarked with shrapnel wounds, their beauty ruined forever.

But somehow I always return to the little girl with the earrings. Perhaps her grandmother had lovingly given them to her with a hug and kiss, as I had kissed and hugged my grandchildren. Perhaps that is why I feel I knew her well, though I never met her or said her name.

The cruel Messrs. Bush and Blair, and the well-dressed Condoleezza Rice, say the deaths of this little girl and other innocents are aspects of Israeli "self-defense". They issue pious statements regretting the "tragic loss of innocent lives," yet say they are determined to continue their struggle against "evil," and that there will be no cease-fire until "the job is done."

That these people use the language of morality to justify Israeli war crimes, not only in Lebanon but also in Palestine -- where they have granted active support for decades of unimaginably vicious military occupation -- adds to their complicity in murder. People of goodwill must demand that the Israeli war machine, which cannot operate without American support, be bridled at once.

Only then will the terrible suffering and unforgivable slaughter of children like my little girl with the gold earrings come to an end.

Jean Said Makdisi is the author of "Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir" and "Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women."