Lebanese Search for Buried Relatives

"Where is your brother, where has he gone?" an elderly lady asked Ahmed Najd who lost his elder brother in the five-week Israeli onslaught, Reuters reported.

His eyes welling up with tears, he replied: "Leave it. You know where's he's gone. God have mercy on him."

Ahmed's brother is believed to have been buried under the rubble of his house with at least five others of his family for nearly a month.

But as soon as a UN-brokered truce took into effect on Monday, August14 , rescue workers made their way to the destroyed villages in south Lebanon to search for bodies trapped under the debris.

The body of a woman was recovered from the rubble on Tuesday, August15 .

"We think there are five bodies under there," said civil defense worker Rabie Taleb.

"There are five over there too," one man told Taleb, reminding him of more missing villagers.

Up to1 , 150Lebanese civilians, a third of whom were children, were killed and almost a million people displaced in the five-week long Israel war.

The death toll continues to rise as villagers and rescue teams dig up more bodied from under the ruins of their homes.

Flattened

The devastating Israeli attacks have flattened thousands of homes in the southern Lebanese villages.

In Hay al-Jaami, where the Najd family had lived, it was hard to tell where the rubble of one building ended and the next began.

"This is my niece's house," said 70 -year-old Mariam, sitting in front of a two-storey building whose front wall had been blown off.

"My house is still smoking," she said over the roar of a circular saw being used by Lebanese civil defense workers to slice through the masonry nearby.

Electrician Malak Jaber, who like most of the villagers had fled the Israeli hell, returned to help in the search.

"This is the first chance we've had," he said, lowering the face mask he was wearing to protect against the smell of corpses and the concrete dust thrown up by the work.

Their job is potentially lethal because of the unexploded Israeli ordnance.

Taleb warned there was an unexploded shell nearby.

"The army is coming to defuse it," he said.

The front of many still-standing buildings in the village had been sheared off by the Israeli bombs.

A pile of the crop half incinerated by a blast lay rotting in the street.

Cars lay twisted at the bottom of bomb craters and the streets were strewn with rubble.

Martyred Heroes

In the southern town of Nabatiyeh, the mood was a mixture of sadness and exhilaration as dozens of women sat huddled in a small porch mourning and celebrating loved ones who died defending their country.

"Martyrs love God. They are not scared of anything. They are heroes," said the mother Emad Haj Ali, who was killed while fighting the invading forces.

"They terrified the United States and the whole world. God chose them to be martyrs," said Ghada, rocking back and forth mourning her son's loss.

"He was martyred ... God destroy Israel."

Ali had died a week ago. His mother had fled to Beirut, but his aunt said she would never leave her home even in the fiercest of fighting.

"We the people of the south, the mothers, are never scared," Ahlam Moselmani, who lost her12 -year-old son, told Reuters.

"Of course the loss is very painful, but when we think of how God will reward them in heaven, it cools our heart a bit," she added.

Both Ali and another fighter, Abdul-Raouf Nasser, had their funeral procession on Tuesday down the main street of Nabatiyeh.

Hundreds of men, women and children trailed behind the two coffins which were shrouded in Hizbullah's trademark yellow flags.

"Death to America! Death to Israel!" they chanted beating their chests systematically in line with Shiite tradition. Women threw flower petals on the procession.

Nabatiyeh saw some heavy Israeli air strikes, particularly during the last few hours before the end of hostilities.

Residents felt no vindictiveness or bitterness towards Hizbullah over all their losses.

In fact, Ghada saw it as a religious duty to fight the Israeli aggression.

"How can we give Israel our land that's drenched in our fighters' blood?"

http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-08/16/02.shtml