Death in Southern Lebanon

News from Tyre:

Families Torn Apart and Travelers Uprooted, With No End in Sight - New York Times: By HASSAN M. FATTAH: TYRE, LEBANON: In the End, Numbers Become Names Again. For a few minutes on Friday, they became people again: Zahra Abdullah, formerly victim No. 7; her son Hadi, victim No. 10; and her daughter Myrna, No. 9. For days they were among the nameless, corpses with numbers.... In a daylong event that was not quite a funeral, not quite interment, but a brief goodbye for a few grieving families that could attend, hospital workers and volunteers worked furiously to assemble the coffins, remove bodies from the truck, spray them with formaldehyde and bury them in the mass grave a few blocks away. In all, they buried 82 people, including more than 24 children who died in the past week.... No. 37 became Sally Wahbi, a 7-year-old who died in an attack on the Civil Defense Building in Tyre on Sunday. No. 35, Alia Alaedeen, who suffered serious head injuries as she was escaping the town of Sarifa on Wednesday and died Thursday. And No. 73 became Mariam Abdullah, who along with Zahra, Hadi and Myrna was among the 23 people killed in an Israeli attack on a pickup truck escaping the town of Marwaheen last Saturday.... The scene continued for several hours as bodies in plastic bags, some of them soaked in blood, were photographed and placed into coffins, which were then nailed shut and lined up. The numbers on the wall corresponding to those on the coffins only went up to 74, but the men continued to place bodies into coffins....

Halfway through, there was a bang as a plane dropped leaflets over the crowd warning them to move at once. "Due to the terrorist acts against the state of Israel that came from your villages and your homes, the Israeli Army has been forced to respond immediately against these acts even within your villages, for your own security,"the note read in Arabic. "You are ordered to leave your villages and head immediately north of the Litani River"...