Familes return home in Lebanon

TIBNIN, Lebanon -- Ghazi Mussa poured bottled water into his face, washing the tears from his swollen red eyes for a second.

He leaned against the frame of a borrowed car, breathing in the stench of rotten meat and burnt feathers from the wreckage of his butcher shop.

Mussa, 37, had just brought his family home.

His wrenching tale mirrored thousands of bittersweet homecomings across bomb-torn southern Lebanon, where yesterday families for the first time emerged from shelters or returned from safer cities to the north to see if they still had houses.

``No one will look after the poor man," Mussa sighed, his head hung and his voice a breathy whisper. ``I cannot live in my house anymore."

Nearby, another family returned to its home in the village of Qana, where two weeks ago an Israeli bomb killed 27 people, mostly women and children living in the basement of an apartment building. Hezbollah fighters fired hundreds of Katyusha rockets from Qana.

Mohammed Mahmoud Shalhoub, 61, took his surviving family members away from Qana on July 30, the day of the bombing. The dead came from two families: Shalhoub lost his wife, brother and three children, and two grandchildren.

They returned yesterday afternoon, drawn by an inexorable pull of home, but unsure about what to do. They sat in plastic chairs in a courtyard next to the wreckage of the building where their relatives had died.

``We don't care about buildings. We care about the dignity of the Shi'ite people," Shalhoub said.

Next to Shalhoub, one niece sat crying quietly, absentmindedly playing with a baby in her lap. She threw a piece of bread at a wailing cat, and burped her baby, not wiping away the milk that splattered over her black dress.

``I'm sorry I couldn't host you under better circumstances," Shalhoub said.

Back at the Mussa home in Tibnin, the stunned children roamed through what remained of their four-room apartment after an Israeli bomb plunged through the kitchen roof, the floor, and into the shop below.

One daughter cried quietly in the living room. Her brother curiously turned pieces of rubble -- once the kitchen cabinets -- in his hand.

For 19 days, Mussa, his wife, and six children hid in the basement of the Tibnin hospital, just a few hundred meters down the hill from their house. They could hear the bombs crashing around them, but until yesterday afternoon hadn't moved beyond the hospital courtyard.

Mussa said he is not a member of Hezbollah, and doubts the party will help him rebuild his house. ``I have nothing to do with this war. I worked all my life to get this," he said. ``Now they've destroyed it."

Roses blossomed next to the living room window, the crimson color showing through the patina of crushed concrete.

His wife, Layla, mounted the stairs into her house, carrying one of her young girls in the crook of her left arm.

``For me, the war is still going on," she said.