Reclaiming bodies and shattered lives in Lebanon

AYNATA, Lebanon -- At a bombed house in this southern Lebanese village, a loosely organized team of men using a Bobcat bulldozer, picks, crowbars, and their hands peeled the wreckage of the home off of the 14 bodies buried under the rubble.

``You're messing up the bodies!" the Hezbollah official in charge of the exhumation yesterday shouted at the bulldozer driver after the machine yanked at a piece of rebar and tore a corpse apart. ``You take out the bodies one by one, and I will put them in the bag."

The official, who reluctantly gave only his first name, Fuad, sternly ordered the chastened team back to work. ``There's lots of bodies here. We have a long way to go."

Lebanese Red Cross volunteers in orange jumpsuits, Hezbollah men in black T-shirts and neatly cropped beards, and neighbors in dress shirts swarmed over the house, which residents said was destroyed in an Israeli bombing 10 days into the month-long war.

Flies circled amid the stench of the bodies, which had broiled in the sun for three weeks or more, despite the quicklime sprinkled on the bodies to cut the odor. Young Hezbollah members poured cheap lemon cologne on their hands, noses, and surgical masks.

One relative, a 38-year-old woman, sobbed through a handful of napkins pressed over her nose. A teenage man wiped cologne over his upper lip to counteract the smell. Still, it was so overpowering that two Red Cross volunteers donned gas masks.

Two stories of a concrete house had smashed down on the people inside, crushing them atop foam sleeping mattresses. Several heads of hair peeked through the chunks of concrete. In another corner, an arm was visible, bent like someone sleeping on their side, but with the flesh ripped off and the radius and ulna visible.

Everyone deferred to Fuad, the Hezbollah official; he said little about himself, only that he was 46 and worked on an oil rig in Abu Dhabi before returning to Aynata, his native village, a decade ago.

Standing on a ledge above the ruined house, he ticked off the names of the missing he expected to recover from the rubble. One of them was his niece, Rima Salhat, 27.

``They're martyrs like the others. What can we do?" Fuad shrugged. ``At this point it's useless to be upset. We have to look for survivors and bodies. When the people come back to the town, then we will mourn together."

The Shi'ite Muslims of southern Lebanon, many of them deeply bound to Hezbollah, are returning to reclaim shattered lives: counting the dead, learning whose houses still stand, and what can be rebuilt.

Nuhad Mahmoud Nasrallah, 47, was one of the thousands who returned yesterday to their villages in southern Lebanon. She had parted ways with her daughter -- Salhat -- in Aynata 10 days into the war when Israel began a punishing bombardment of the village, one in a web of Hezbollah strongholds around Bint Jbail. Nasrallah headed for Beirut, while her daughter and son-in-law and their four children planned to shelter in a nearby Christian village.

But her daughter and her family never left their village. Perhaps they changed their minds, fearing death on the road. Perhaps Salhat decided to stay out of solidarity for Hezbollah.

She ended up dead under the rubble with the rest of her family in a house just off Aynata's main road, near the mosque.

In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a bomb hit her house and killed Nasrallah's husband and 3-year-old son, she recalled. Yesterday she found out that another war with Israel had claimed another generation of her family -- in addition to her daughter and son-in-law, her four grandchildren, Ali, 6, Abdullah, 5, Mohammed, 3, and Dimoua, 2.

``I came here today to wait for my daughter, until I discovered the truth, that they were under the rubble," Nasrallah said.

For the last 20 days, she said, she had dialed her daughter's cellphone every day, getting the musical recorded message saying it was out of range.

``Imagine I have to live with this loss. The loss of a son, of a husband, now my daughter. My heart is full of sadness," Nasrallah said, sitting on a relative's porch crying in the cool breeze, just up the hill from the spot where her daughter had died. ``God will look after me."

Down the hill, Aziza Ibrahim, 45, a pharmacist and neighbor of Nasrallah, sat on a block of ripped concrete, wearing a freshly pressed black robe, a gray patterned headscarf, and surgical gloves. She smoked a cigarette and waited to see if she could help the volunteers.

Ibrahim had good news when she returned to Aynata yesterday morning. She hadn't heard from her elderly, wheelchair-bound uncle for the past month. She had assumed that he had died in the barrage of bombs that hit Bint Jbail. Yesterday, she came to claim his body from the rubble and was shocked instead to find him alive, still full of good humor after a month hiding in his home.

Ali Mustafa Ibrahim, 75, and his daughter Samira, 40, had survived on boiled cracked wheat, tinned meat, and for the last week on tea alone, when their food supply ran out. He couldn't run when his neighbors did, and he told his daughter to leave him alone in the home. She refused.

Grinning in his wheelchair yesterday, he wore the same filthy button-up shirt he'd worn all month. His uncut toenails were a half-inch long and packed with dirt.

``Every bomb shook the house," Ali Ibrahim said, recalling a month of terrifying explosions all around his home. Ali's house sits near the bottom of a valley, surrounded by fig trees. Hezbollah fired rockets and mortars from the fields below, a hundred yards away; huge scorch marks pockmarked the fields.

``The resistance would fire rockets from the hills, there, there and there," Samira said, pointing to the grassy fields around the house. ``Then I would hear the planes, and the bombs in retaliation."

Her hands were still shaking, two days after the last explosion.

Samira slept wedged between a wall and a wooden dresser on the basement floor. ``I knew it wouldn't really protect me, but it's all I had," she explained.

Aziza returned to the town center to help rescue workers dragging bodies from the rubble of the destroyed home. ``The massacres are so terrible that we don't cry anymore," Aziza said. ``We just throw up."