The coffins were turned in the direction of Mecca, the Muslim holy city, and a Shiite cleric recited the prayer for the dead before the 31 plywood caskets were lowered on Saturday into a new mass grave.
The smallest of the crude coffins belonged to one-day-old Sawsan Tajeldin. She died in her mother's arms when an Israeli missile smashed into their white-flagged car five days ago. They were fleeing their home in Bazouriya for Tyre, just 5km distant.
Sawsan's body, along with that of her mother, was trapped in the car for two days before ambulance workers were prepared to risk the road to retrieve them, said Abdul Shadi, a volunteer civil defense worker in Tyre.
PHOTO: AP
At the grave site Sawsan's tiny body was taken from the back of a refrigerated truck where it had been kept with 30 other victims until the mass burial on Saturday.
The overpowering smell of decaying bodies hung in the air. Volunteers and Lebanese military men wore rubber gloves and surgical masks against the smell as they lifted each body from the truck and placed them in the marked coffins.
Yusuf Zainuddin, a lawyer and volunteer, wept when the task was done and the coffins had been lowered into the mass grave.
"I want them to be buried with dignity," he said. "These are human beings, they are not animals. I do this because they are all my family."
None were relatives, but like family in their common suffering, he said.
"Today it is them, maybe tomorrow it is me," he said.
The grave, dug by an end-loader that stood ready to cover the coffins, was shallow. Relatives were expected to retrieve the bodies and rebury them in home villages when the fighting ends.
All the victims were from southern Lebanon, the hardest hit region in the 18-day Israeli assault aimed at crushing Hezbollah guerrillas, whose kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers ignited the fighting.
In Lebanon 403 civilians are confirmed dead by the Health Ministry. A UN official said the figure probably was closer to 600. The official count was tabulated from reports from police and hospitals, but in many areas the police had fled days ago and hospitals were closed, said Ryszard Morczynski, political affairs officer for the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
Some of the mourners -- relatives who had not already fled northward -- said the killing would just give Hezbollah more recruits.
Outside the al-Hakoumi Hospital where the coffins were first collected and marked with the names of each of the dead, Khalil Qasir shook his fist and cried out:"From these dead bodies will come Hezbollah fighters. If Hezbollah wants people to come and fight they will come now," he said.
Qasir's 15-year-old niece, Maryam, was among the dead. She was killed last week when an Israeli plane blasted the road in front of her as she tried to flee the Israeli assault on Bint Jbail, scene of the bloodiest ground fighting since the Israeli offensive began.
Maryam was on a motorcycle with her Uncle Qasir and her sister when the plane attacked. Maryam died and her sister was wounded.
"The way she died trying to escape and then a plane comes and shoots this thing. I want to ask [US President George W.] Bush: `What are you doing? What is our country guilty of? What did my Maryam do?'" Qasir said.
Last week 82 bodies were interred in a similar mass burial in Tyre.
Shadi, the volunteer civil defense worker, consulted a small notebook that contained the names of all the dead and said the al-Hakoumi hospital in Tyre had received 150 bodies since the outbreak of fighting, meaning 27 remained to be buried or had been collected by relatives and buried elsewhere.
Sawsan and her mother were not the only victims from Bazouriya, which is the ancestral home of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
"We are all going to keep our heads raised high because of Nasrallah, because he is fighting for us," said Nazir Watfa, a 16-year-old whose grandmother was buried on Saturday.
Her mother, Amina, said she would return to Bazouriya after the fighting and bury her mother there.
She too had words for Bush: "How can he accept what is going on? Could he accept this for his family, for his children?" she said.
At the grave site, the cleric, Sheik Akil Zain, also was from Bint Jbail, led the prayers. Four of his relatives were among the dead.
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