Tyre… Morgue of South Lebanon

TYRE — With the smell of death hanging over this southern Lebanese port city, Tyre has become the morgue of South Lebanon, hosting the bodies of dozens of Lebanese civilians killed in the blitzing Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

"Tyre has now become the morgue for the whole region," Tyre's mayor Abdel Mohsen Husseini told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Thursday, August 3.

Some 26 corpses of Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli bombardments were brought to the city to be buried in a mass grave in the town square at the entrance of Bass, where thousands of Palestinian refugees live.

Protected by masks and rubber gloves, Lebanese soldiers and civil defense members opened the black plastic bags containing the corpses, searching their pockets for identity papers.

The bodies were rapidly decomposing and the stench is unbearable.

The corpses are placed in wooden coffins, with their names, preceded by the title of "martyr", marked in black on the lids which are quickly shut.

They will eventually be placed in a temporary mass grave.

Amongst the victims were ten bodies from a single family, a couple, the husband's parents and six children, said Raed Salman Zeineddine, the director of the local government hospital.

A mass burial of 80 Lebanese victims, 27 of them were killed in the Israeli massacre in Qana, was planned on Wednesday, August 2.

But the funerals were postponed over the relentless Israeli air strikes at the entrance of the port city.

Up to 60 Lebanese civilians, including 37 children, were killed in an Israeli air strike on a three-storey building in the southern village of Qana on Sunday, July 30.

More than 900 people were killed, third of whom were children, since Israel launched a four-week blitz on Lebanon on the claim of seeking to free two soldiers taken prisoner by the Islamic resistance movement Hizbullah.

Deserted

The relentless Israeli onslaught on the city has forced inhabitants to flee the area, leaving only street cats to take over the port city.

Mountains of rubbish, uncleared for more than a week over the Israeli attacks, have become a haven for hundreds of hungry felines who dodge dogs and the occasional trash fire to get their claws on the contents of the black bags.

The smell of the rubbish heaps hangs over the city like the odor of the plague. The silence is broken only by the sharp cries of the cats.

Earlier this week, Tyre was still home to some 100,000 people, both long-time residents and refugees from other war-ravaged towns of south Lebanon.

But now, only an estimated 10,000-15,000 people remain, according to local authorities.

The shops are now shuttered and padlocked.

The construction sites which were a sign of Lebanon's revival after the end of its civil war in 1990 are eerily quiet, with the bulldozers that were meant to transform the port into a tourist hub now lying abandoned.

The seafront promenade, which with its wide walkways and palm trees had aimed to rival that of Beirut, is also deserted. The Roman ruins are likewise empty, and the guard has fled.

Tyre is almost completely cut off from the outside world.

The bombed seashore highway is useless, and the only route north to Beirut is a dirt track crossing through neighboring banana plantations.

Roads are still open towards the south and east, but that route is too risky as the Israeli troops are edging ever closer in their offensive in Lebanon.