"Don’t die, please don’t die!" Ali begged his mother. (Courtesy: NY Times)

CAIRO — The Shaito's family had thought they were on the road to safety when they decided to leave their home in their tiny Tireh village in southern Lebanon to escape the Israeli bombardment. But the road turned out to be a highway of death.

"Don’t go to sleep Mama, look at me," Ali shouted, tears streaking his bloodied face as his mother's eyes rolled back, reported The New York Times.

"Don’t die, please don’t die!"

An Israeli missile had pierced the roof of the family's white van on Sunday, July 23, instantly killing three passengers sitting in the third row and wounding sixteen others.

As the mother teetered near death from shrapnel wounds, medics screamed at her and her son Ali begged her to stay awake.

Behind her black veil, her eyelids were slowly sinking. "I'm going to die," she sighed.

"Don't say that, mama," Ali begged, and then slid to the ground in tears.

Leave

Without much food or water, the family gave up its stand to stay home and decided to pack up and head north toward relative safety.

"They said leave, and that’s what we did," Musbah Shaito, Ali's uncle, told The New York Times, speaking of the Israelis who dropped leaflets warning residents to leave the area and head north of the Litani River.

His niece, Heba, 16, cried hysterically behind him for her dead father, whose head was nearly blown off.

"This is what we got for listening to them," Shaito said.

The family had waved a white flag from the van, signifying to Israeli aircraft that they were non-threatening. But to no avail.

In recent days, many families like the Sha'itas were killed in Israeli shelling as they were escaping the south's inferno.

With bridges on the main coastal roads destroyed and secondary routes blocked by smoldering trucks or craters, there was no way out for many Lebanese residents in the south.

Six Times

The Sha'itas were not the only family devastated on Sunday.

Witnesses told The New York Times that Israeli warplanes hit people escaping by vehicle from their villages at least six times.

The Zabad family and their relatives, the Suroors, gave up their stand to say too on Sunday.

Suddenly an Israeli missile hit the Suroors’ sedan, killing Mohammad Suroor, the father, and Darwhish Mdaihli, a relative, and severely burning Mohammad’s son, Mahmoud, 8, and wounding his two brothers and sister, the Times said.

As soon as the Zabads saw the car hit, they sped past, hoping to get to the Najm hospital on the outskirts of Tyre, less than a mile away.

But a minute later a missile struck near them, setting the car on fire, and the family jumped out.

The hospital nurses rubbed cream on an 8-month-old baby for burns until they found her mother, Mrs. Suroor.

Despite the severe burns on his face, Mahmoud turned to his mother while in the emergency room and asked where his father was. She did not respond.