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Lebanese Villagers Return to Corpses, Devastation
By Tom Perry, Reuters
Lebanon
August 15, 2006
Mariam Najd sat on a pile of rubble, tears in her eyes, as the bulldozer dug into the bomb crater where her brother's house once stood.
His body has yet to be found. It is thought to have been buried with at least five others of the same family in the debris for nearly a month.
A truce which started on Monday allowed rescue workers to reach the village and begin their grim task.
"Where is your brother, where has he gone?" the elderly lady asked Ahmed Najd, a younger member of the family.
His eyes welling up with tears, he replied: "Leave it. You know where's he's gone. God have mercy on him."
Rescue workers made it to Sriefa on Monday to hunt for bodies trapped for more than three weeks under the debris of buildings destroyed in Israeli air strikes. The body of a woman was recovered from the rubble on Tuesday.
House after house in the village has been flattened. 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 Defence workers to slice through the masonry nearby.
Electrician Malak Jaber, who like most of the villagers had fled the onslaught, 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.
The job is potentially lethal because of unexploded ordnance. Civil Defence worker Rabie Taleb warned there was an unexploded shell nearby. "The army is coming to defuse it," he said. "We think there are five bodies under there."
"There are five over there too," one man told Taleb, reminding him of more missing villagers.
Israel's war with Hizbollah killed at least 1,110 Lebanese, with many more feared buried under rubble of buildings hit in air strikes.
The war killed 157 Israelis, who accused Hizbollah of firing rockets into their country from areas populated by civilians, effectively using them as shields.
In Sreifa, a tobacco farming village, bombs had sheared off the front of many buildings. A pile of the crop half incinerated by a blast lay rotting in the street.
"We resisted, we were steadfast and we were victorious," read a Hizbollah banner draped over the remains of buildings at the entrance to the town. Cars lay twisted at the bottom of bomb craters and the streets were strewn with rubble.
Villagers returning on Tuesday tried to salvage what they could from the debris.
"Come down, come down," one man pleaded to his 83-year-old father Hussein Najd who was trying to gather clothes into a bundle on the first floor of his house.
"I'm not coming down. I'm going to die here," the old man said.
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