Mass grave for Lebanon dead
2006-07-21 14:20
Tyre - Flooded with casualties from Israeli bombardment, a hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre began burying the dead in a mass grave on Friday.
Officials at the main 60-bed government hospital said 72 bodies were being interred temporarily in the yard of an army barracks until they could be returned to relatives.
The officials, who declined to be named, said the hospital
needed to clear space in its morgue after receiving 106 bodies,
including 22 not identified. Relatives had taken away 12 of the
bodies, they said. Some bodies had come from other hospitals.
"May God destroy Israel," said Kamel Abdallah, 35, whose
pregnant wife, five children and father were killed in an air
strike on the border village of Marwaheen.
"The circumstances don't allow me to take them back now, so
I'll leave them here," he said, as he watched the bodies of his
family being placed in the temporary grave.
Israeli air strikes have damaged many roads in south
Lebanon, where fighting between the Israeli army and Hizbollah
guerrillas has also made movement difficult and dangerous.
Humanitarian aid
Israel's campaign in Lebanon, launched after Hizbollah
captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight on July 12, has
forced up to half a million people to flee their homes and made
it hard for relief groups to get aid to distressed civilians.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was sending its
first convoy of two trucks to Tyre on Friday with 24 tons of
food, first-aid kits and medicine, along with a surgeon to
assess conditions in the city's main hospital, a spokesperson said.
"The siege on Lebanon is not letting humanitarian aid in,"
the ICRC's Hisham Hassan added. "The south is isolated."