Mourners Throng Mass Burial of 90 Killed During Lebanon Attack

QANA, Lebanon â€”  With chants of grief filling the air, 90 wooden coffins were passed hand over hand above a frenzied crowd of mourners Tuesday at the mass burial of refugees who died April 18 when an Israeli missile hit a U.N. base.

The procession began with a mass funeral in the coastal city of Tyre, evoking a solidarity seldom seen among Lebanon’s Muslims and Christians. Israel’s 16-day offensive against the Shiite Muslim guerrillas of Hezbollah unified a country long tormented by its religious and political diversity.

Sheik Mohammed Shamseddine, Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric, told mourners: “The Jews have committed a holocaust in Lebanon.�

Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, stood next to Shamseddine. Nearby stood Roman Catholic bishops who represent 45% of Lebanon’s 4 million people. Muslims make up the remainder of the nation’s religious mosaic.

In Qana, thousands of mourners jammed a vacant lot and climbed buildings overlooking the mass grave next to the U.N. base where Lebanese civilians had thought they were safe from the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

Hundreds of soldiers, civil defense workers and mourners took part in a chaotic effort to remove the wrapped bodies from the coffins and then lower them into the grave, side by side.

Fewer than half the bodies of the Qana victims could be identified. Estimates of the death toll range from 91 to more than 100. Apart from the 90 coffins brought to Qana, the remains of a Christian woman were interred at a Christian cemetery in Tyre.

Meanwhile, security sources speaking on condition of anonymity said outposts of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army militia at Sojod came under machine-gun fire Tuesday afternoon.

Sojod is at the edge of the Israeli-occupied buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Israeli and SLA artillery gunners returned fire, the Israeli army said in Israel. There was no immediate word on casualties.

Under the U.S.-brokered cease-fire that went into effect Saturday, neither side is supposed to fire at civilian areas. But the cease-fire agreement says nothing can stop either side “from exercising the right of self-defense.�