'We lost everything': Syrian refugees caught up in Beirut blast

More than two weeks after the Beirut blast that killed half of her family, Dima Steif, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee from Idlib, is still in shock.
Dima’s face is gaunt and emotionless as she recalls August 4, the day she lost her mother Khaldi and two sisters, 22-year-old Latifa and 13-year-old Jude.
Her 18-year-old sister Diana was wounded while her father was not home at the time of the explosion.
“We were at home, talking and laughing, when we heard the first explosion. We thought it was a fire, but then the next blow came and the whole earth shook underneath us,” said Dima, as she hugged a shaggy red stuffed animal that belonged to Jude.
Along with a printed scarf that Latifa used to wear and her own journal, the stuffed toy was among a few things Dima managed to pull out from the rubble of her family’s home days after the blast.
“The roof had already collapsed before we could get out of the house,” said Dima, who lived in Karantina, a poor Beirut neighbourhood near the port. They had come to Lebanon in 2014 after escaping the civil war in Syria.
Dima and her father have been temporarily staying at a hotel paid for by an aid organisation, while Diana is undergoing treatment in a Beirut hospital.