With flowers, tears and defiance, thousands bury nearly 100 Lebanese in mass funeral
Thousands of mourners in southern Lebanon attended a funeral for nearly 100 Lebanese killed last year during the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
It was the largest mass burial ceremony in Lebanon since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire three months ago. It followed last week's burial of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's former leader, and his top aide in Beirut attended by tens of thousands.
The emotional ceremony was organized to mark the return of the bodies of those killed to their hometown of Aitaroun, one of the largest villages in southern Lebanon, which was devastated during the war. The 95 bodies had been temporarily buried elsewhere and were exhumed for the reburial.
Israeli forces left the border village in early February, allowing thousands of residents to return.
The mourners, some visiting from nearby villages, threw flowers and sprayed rose water on the trucks carrying the coffins of the 95 killed in the war. Five others killed were still missing and organizers said they are still working to find and identify their remains.
At least 51 reburied in the village cemetery were Hezbollah fighters killed in Aitaroun or in other southern villages. Relatives raised posters of those killed, some as young as 18, parading them through the streets of Aitaroun, lined with destroyed buildings and damaged fruit orchards. The killed also included five children, 16 women and 10 civil defense rescuers.
"My heart is broken," said Fatima Hejazi, 36, who came to rebury her younger brother Ali, 29. "Look at all these young men. It is a big loss. The country lost its young men. But thankfully they were killed on the path of resistance, and they continued until the end and didn't surrender."
Hezbollah is believed to have lost hundreds of fighters since Israel escalated its war with the Lebanese militant group in late September. The exact number of fighters killed has not yet been declared by the group, which had said until September that more than 500 fighters were killed in a year of low-simmering war.
In the Aitaroun mass funeral, Hezbollah and many of its supporters struck a defiant tone.
"Be prepared to welcome the heroes," one of the organizers shouted from the podium, rousing the crowd to greet the coffins carried on four trucks as they drove into the village. A former Hezbollah-allied minister, Ibrahim Bayram, told the crowd that the militant group has suffered but is not down. The group is backing the government, he said, but called on it to act independently.
Among the dead was a 10-month-old girl killed in an Oct. 14 Israeli airstrike on a residential building that killed 23 people, all of them displaced from Aitaroun.
At least 32 of those reburied Friday were killed in two of the deadliest Israeli attacks in Ain el-Delb in southern Lebanon and Zgharta's Aito, in the country's Christian heartland. They had all been displaced from Aitaroun.
One of the mourners, Atef Khouzeirat, said an Israeli strike on a building killed his son Hussein, a volunteer with the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee.
"My son stayed for 56 days inside the building after his death, without rescuers being able to recover his body," Khouzeirat said. "Where is the humanity? Where are the human rights?"
Khouzeirat added that his son had studied radiography at university. "He was not a terrorist," but a volunteer "in the service of his country."
The ceremony was attended by Iranian, Iraqi and Yemeni delegations.
Hezbollah began firing rockets across the border on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after a deadly Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. Israel responded with shelling and airstrikes in Lebanon, and the two sides became locked in an escalating conflict that became a full-blown war in late September.
More than 4,000 people were killed in Lebanon and more than 1 million were displaced. Over 100,000 have not yet been able to return home. On the Israeli side, dozens of people were killed and some 60,000 are displaced.
