Lebanese man loses entire family minutes before ceasefire

Hassan Abu Khalil's family miraculously survived six weeks of war in southern Lebanon, but tragedy struck in the final minutes before a ceasefire took effect. An Israeli strike late Thursday killed 13 of his relatives, leaving him the sole survivor.

Abu Khalil, 36, went out just before midnight to see friends, at a time when a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, brokered by the United States, was supposed to halt fighting that had raged since March 2 between Israel and the armed group Hezbollah.

"I heard a very loud bang, and when I returned to the neighborhood, I found this," Abu Khalil told Reuters, watching an excavator dig through the mountains of crushed concrete that were once his home in the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre.

"More than 13 members of my family are missing in this building under the rubble. What now, Israel? Just before the ceasefire, it was one massacre after another against us," he said.

Later on Friday, Lebanon's state news agency said rescue teams had pulled 13 bodies and rescued 35 injured people from the rubble of a building hit the previous evening. It said 15 people were still missing.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the strike.

My future is gone.

Thousands of Lebanese passed through Tyre today on their way to their villages in the south, crossing an earthen embankment that Lebanese soldiers had built over the ruins of a main bridge that Israel had destroyed earlier on Thursday.

Many were relieved to return to their villages in the south, even if they were destroyed.

But Abu Khalil spent the first day of the truce in a fog of despair, unable to eat or sleep.

He stood, wringing his hands, next to the excavator clearing the rubble, never taking his eyes off the huge hole in which the rescuers were searching.

"I've been here since the impact and I haven't moved. Every time they pull someone out, we run to see what happened, who it is - my friend I grew up with, my friend's mother, my friend's father," Abu Khalil told Reuters.

He said he had been living in the UK, but had returned to Lebanon to be with his extended family.

"Who stayed? No one stayed. I wish I hadn't gone out for that coffee and stayed with them," he said.

"My future is gone here. This was my life, this was my family - what now? What's left after this?"