LEBANON: Houada fixes one hazel-coloured eye on a point high above her hospital bed. Her other eye is gone, gouged out by a piece of shrapnel when an Israeli missile hit her family's home this week.
In its place is a thick bandage that fails to hide the row of stitches crudely keeping one side of her face together.
Houada is eight-years-old. Her body, burned, broken and pocked with scores of tiny shrapnel wounds, looks small and vulnerable under the white hospital sheets.
With her mess of dark brown curls spread against the pillow, Houda never takes her eye off that invisible point over her bed.
On a chair nearby, her aunt, Mariam Khalid, keeps vigil. Houda's father and two brothers died in the air strike, she whispers, but the family has decided not to distress the the child further by telling her the full truth of what happened the night the Israelis came.
"They are beasts," Mariam hisses. "Beasts, animals - this could only be done by beasts. What did she do? She is just a child."
With tears threatening to overwhelm her, Mariam talks about the destruction the family left behind following the air raid on their small village in the Marjeyoun region of southern Lebanon.
Close to the border, it has borne the brunt of some of Israel's heaviest bombing in the last 10 days. Israel says it is hitting Hizbullah targets and territory, but the harrowing stories that trickle north to Beirut tell of entire communities being laid to waste.
"They are bombing and destroying everything down there," says Mariam. "You would not believe it. They say they are hitting Hizbullah only - is someone like Houda a Hizbullah target? They are hitting homes, schools, hospitals, killing everybody.
"All this is happening and what is the world doing? Nothing. Nobody cares. We have been left to die."
Others who wander dazed through the gleaming corridors of Beirut's Rafik Hariri University Hospital recount similar horrors.
Many travelled from the ravaged south to accompany seriously injured relatives for treatment. They braved bombed roads and the threat of random air strikes on a journey that took most of a day.
Considering themselves the lucky ones, they tell of those who have been left stranded because their injures are too severe for travel. Health workers say they face huge difficulty reaching the worst hit areas of the south because of the ferocity and frequency of the attacks.
Those southerners who have fled anyway tell of terrified families trapped in underground bomb shelters and basements for more than a week while their villages and towns convulse under the weight of Israeli bombardment. Ahmed Al Khalil thought he and his family would be safe in one of the shelters in Bayda, another village close to the Israeli border.
He didn't expect the shelter to buckle and break under the force of one particularly fierce night of what he claims was cluster bombing by the Israeli army. He didn't expect to lose both legs in the blast.
His chest drenched in sweat, Ahmed stares down at the stumps that remain where his legs used to be. Relatives gather round his hospital bed, ashen-faced and lost for words.
"I thought it was the end, I thought I was going to die. There was so much blood everywhere," he says. "I'm alive but look at me, I'm a cripple. What am I going to do now? I was a taxi driver, how can I support my family? What future do we have?
Ahmed's wife and five children were also injured, suffering from burns and injuries to the head and limbs. Lying rigid in a bed on the floor above, his daughter Fatima ( 12), can barely mouth her name, her injuries are so severe.
In a nearby room her mother Ikhram cradles her two other daughters, Alia and Alaa, both under three years. Their backs, arms, legs and hands are riddled with shrapnel wounds that look like hundreds of pin pricks. Alia's hair is still matted with dried blood and Alaa's thumb is gone. Their aunt leans over the bed sobbing quietly.
In yet another room, two of the family's cousins lie motionless on their beds. Twelve-year-old Roula and her brother Ali were visiting from Dortmund in Germany when the bombing started. Both German nationals, they were visited the day before by embassy officials who hope to evacuate them as soon as possible. Roula has undergone surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel lodged in her head, both Ali's legs are broken.
Another cousin, Hussein Yassin who lives in Beirut, goes from room to room to check up on his relatives. "They thought they would be safe in the shelter and now look at them," he says, shaking his head.
"But at least they are here now and people are taking care of them. There are many others down there in the south, still underground, still buried under rubble. God knows what will happen to them."
Doctors at the hospital, named last year in memory of Lebanon's assassinated former prime minister, have treated numerous victims of the Israeli bombardments.
Located at the point where the city centre proper begins to give way to the southern suburbs, their patient list has increased in tandem with the number of strikes levelled at the adjacent area of Haret Hreik, Hizbullah's Beirut heartland. Some of their patients were transferred from Haret Hreik's Sahel hospital when an Israeli missile strike on the nearby highway bridge to Beirut airport blew out windows in the treatment rooms and damaged power supplies.
Health workers across the country have warned of rapidly depleting medical supplies as the number of casualties rises. More than 350 people have been killed in Lebanon since the crisis erupted, according to government officials. The UN has said that a third of those dead are children. More than 12,000 have been injured. Because the country has all but been sealed off by the Israeli air and sea blockade, doctors acknowledge that the chances of securing desperately needed medical supplies are slim. A number of vehicles carrying such items from the Syrian border have been targeted in air strikes.
"We are in the right," declares a man injured on a bed in the emergency ward. "We know God is with us because he is always with those who are in the right. But where is the rest of the world when we need it?"