Tearful families gathered Friday in the southern Lebanese village of Qana to bury the 29 people, including 16 children, killed in an Israeli bombardment on a shelter last month.
The families were there for the arrival of cooling trucks in which the dead had been kept since the July 30 attack. Women and men clad in black passed through the village carrying pictures of children killed under the rubble when Israeli jets struck their refuge shelter. Fatima Farhat, who lost all her cousins, stood speechless at the site of the waiting graves before the bodies were finally buried. "I have no one any more.
They are all gone," she told Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa. "They (Israelis) were fighting children and women in this war." Under a tree overlooking the open field where the 29 graves had been dug, stood a bearded man smoking a cigarette. Mohammed Shalhoub had lost all his family in the strike. He had sat alone before the burials, waiting for the truck carrying his loved ones. His eyes red from weeping, his hands shaking, he said: "What do you want me to say? I am waiting for my whole family to be buried in this open field." Shalhoub had shed much weight since his family was killed. He looked weak, pale and could barely speak. His relative Ahmed said Shalhoub had been refusing to eat since his family died. "He only drinks juice and smokes." "It was double grief for him - since July 30 having his family in a container parked outside the hospital in Tyre and not being able to finally put them to rest," Ahmed added.
Hospital morgues had already been filled with bodies, so the trucks were brought in as improvised morgues. "It is not enough they killed my family - they did not allow me to bury them until today," Shalhoub said. The deadly strikes on Qana triggered an international outcry against Israel's offensive. Qana had also been the scene of Israeli strikes which killed 109 civilians who had sought shelter in a UN bunker in 1996 during the Jewish states's "Grapes of Warth" offensive on Lebanon. As Koranic versus echoed in the area, Shalhoub knew that his loved ones were approaching home. Dozens of people carried the coffins on their shoulders as they entered their village. Most of the coffins were wrapped by the Lebanese flags except for three, heading the funeral procession, which were wrapped in yellow Hezbollah flags. The sound of wailing women broke the silence in the village and rice and flowers were thrown as the coffins were laid to rest while nearby mosques called for their sunset prayer.