Road Through a Landscape of Death

A woman weeps over a coffin in Tyre before the mass burial there of 82 Lebanese bombing victims. (By Marco Di Lauro -- Getty Images)

He said he suspected he might watch for a while in a war he predicted would last weeks, maybe a month. "Israel has Hezbollah clenched in its teeth, and Hezbollah has Israel clenched in its teeth," he said. "Neither is going to open its mouth."

The road returns to Tyre, where the city prepared to inter in a temporary grave 81 corpses collected from the villages of southern Lebanon. Once the fighting subsided and the roads were safe again, their families would bury them in their own towns.

Through the morning, workers hammered cheap plywood into coffins, each one with a small copper emblem bearing a number. On the covers, the victims' names were scrawled in black, gray, red or pink. Workers wore blue surgical masks in the sun as they placed the bodies in the coffins and then lined them up against a white wall marked with a row of numbers.

The places of origin of the dead read like a map of southern Lebanon: Zibqin, Aitaroun, Naqoura, Yater, Shahour, Bozuriya Maroun al-Ras and Marwaheen, where at least 16 residents fleeing the village were killed in an Israeli attack Saturday. Identification numbers were paired with the names: Saeed Hamza Abbas, No. 39; Zeinab Mehdi, No. 44; Hussein Farid, No. 49; Haitham Farid, No. 50.

"This is so inhuman," said Rabia Abu Khashb, 28, as he surveyed the coffins, 15 sized in half for children.

"God protect them," he said softly. "God awaits them."

By afternoon, the military brought them to an open field, where a bulldozer had excavated two trenches 70 yards long and two yards deep. Across the field a house of concrete and cinder block had been struck in a bombing, its floors pancaked. In the backdrop, Israeli air raids targeted the city's outskirts, columns of debris rising into a dusk-shadowed sky.

In the first coffin lay Mustafa Ghannam, one of those fleeing Marwaheen. Then his cousin, Hussein Mohammed Ghannam. Down the row were the coffins of two children from the same family: Qassem Mohammed Ghannam and Zeinab Mohammed Ghannam.

A women in black sobbed. "My sweetheart, yesterday you were playing with me. Who will I play with tomorrow?"

Others offered testaments -- photos taken by cell phone or a bystander's whisper: "There is no strength and power save in God." One man yelled, "God is greater than Israel!" Many simply stood, their faces drawn, in silence.

"These people, what was their sin to die?" asked Ziad Shahadi, one of the onlookers.

"None of them was carrying a weapon. None of them was wearing a uniform. None of them were soldiers on the ground," he said. "They were all civilians. There's no military honor in this, none. How could there be? Killing the young and the old."

More coffins were heaved into the grave from the back of an army truck.

"Bring number 32!" one soldier yelled. "Number 32 is with you," a colleague answered. "There's no 32 here," another responded.

Nails popped out, and a soldier hammered them back in with a rock. A jet trail passed. "Hurry!" one soldier shouted.

As the rest of the coffins were lined up, a bulldozer began pushing in fine sand. And as the sun began to set, a last coffin arrived, holding the victim of bombing a few hours before in Burj Shamali, on Tyre's outskirts. The name and number were scrawled with black marker.

Fatima Shaib was No. 82.