The St. George Hospital where Soha Khalaf works as a nurse lies less than a mile from Beirut port. She had no time to recover from the enormous explosion that blasted over the city.

The ceiling crashed onto her head and tears streamed down her face, but she stuck to her task.

“People ran here yelling, ‘Please, we need the ER.’ But the ER was gone. And wherever I turned, I saw staff rushing down from other floors screaming,” recalled Khalaf, assistant head nurse at the emergency room of Lebanon‘s oldest hospital.

Needles flew across the hall. Blood covered the floor. The lights went out.