They put the 86 corpses into plain wood caskets. Many were just big enough to fit a small child

Dozens of dead buried in temporary mass grave until fighting ends

By Clancy Chassay in Tyre

07/22/06 "The Guardian" -- -- In the driveway of Tyre's Government hospital yesterday the sour smell of rotting flesh mingled with spray paint as the chief coroner wrote the names of the dead on their coffins.

Empty wood caskets, which had been neatly stacked by a large white freezer truck - one of two being used to store the bodies of many of those killed during Israel's bombardment of south Lebanon - were now being filled; 86 of the 150 corpses in the truck were to be buried in the afternoon.

The continuous drone of Israel's Apache gunships could be heard over a clamouring crowd that had gathered to witness the burial. As an old man nailed coffins shut, friends and family members of the victims wept or stared at the bodies, loosely wrapped in plastic or bloodied blankets, as they were passed out of the truck. The noisy gathering quietened each time a smaller bundle emerged from the makeshift morgue.

Once sealed, the coffins were placed along the length of a wall outside the hospital each underneath a large black painted number. Several hours passed before they were finally ferried to a nearby field where two trenches had been dug to serve as a mass grave. It will not be their last resting place. They will lie there until the fighting subsides and the bodies can be exhumed and handed over to their families. The caskets, many only big enough to hold a small child were laid in two large trenches, less than 100 metres long, two metres wide and no more than a metre deep.

Watching the burial was Qasim Shaala, the chief medic at Tyre's Red Cross offices. "Most of the casualties are women and children," he said. "They [Israel] are not letting us save them. Ambulances aren't allowed into areas after they are shelled."

For the past four days, Mr Shaala and his team of 50 volunteers have been ferrying people from the Red Cross centre in Tibnin, near the border with Israel, to Tyre. Earlier that day Mr Shaala described the dangers and difficulties his ambulance workers had faced.

"We are being bombed as we try to get to the victims, and when we try to bring them back. Many of the roads are destroyed so we have to take detours through the orchards and farmland."

He said that on every trip the teams had to stop their vehicles several times to clear large chunks of debris from those stretches of road that could still be used. Several of his drivers had been wounded by Israeli air strikes and one of his five ambulances was rendered useless.

"One of my drivers is in the hospital, with shrapnel wounds to his head, hands and feet." He only survived the attack by the helicopters because he was wearing the bright orange body armour issued to all Red Cross workers in the area.

Another driver from his team was wounded as he tried to bring injured from an attack near Qasmieh refugee camp. A bomb landed 10 metres from the ambulance as they arrived at the scene. The previous day nine ambulances had braved the road from Beirut to pick up patients from the Jabal Amal hospital in Tyre to clear the hospital in preparation for the many casualties expected from the south.

As they were leaving the coastal city, the three ambulances at the tail of the convoy were driven off the road when an Israeli shell landed 100 metres to the left of them. "I have been an ambulance worker for 15 years and I have never seen it like this before. In 1996, [when Israel launched an operation to destroy Hizbullah, killing 170 civilians] we never had these problems," said Mr Shaala.

Mr Shaala and his 50 staff are all volunteers: they receive no payment, it is the same for all ambulance workers in Lebanon. "I have told my staff they are free to go whenever they feel the risk is too great." But no one wants to quit. "The victims they are our people, our countrymen, our family: we must save them."

Ahmad Ghanen, one of Mr Shaala's team, described coming under Israeli fire as they tried to retrieve the bodies of a baby and her mother along with two others who were killed in an air strike on their car. He had found the tiny body lying under a tree in a nearby orange grove, her mother was a few metres away, her leg severed above the knee: She had bled to death waiting for an ambulance that could not reach her.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006