Mass grave readied for scores of Lebanon war dead

TYRE, Lebanon, Aug 16 (Reuters) As a truce held in south Lebanon today, workers dug a temporary mass grave for more than 100 people killed during Israel's war with Hizbollah.

Hospital officials in the southern city of Tyre said up to 126 bodies would be buried together near an army barracks unless relatives claimed them. Seventy-two corpses were buried there on July 21 to clear overflowing hospital morgues.

The officials said the bodies had been identified, but relatives had been unable to claim them in the upheaval of war.

The corpses were earlier reported to have been unidentified.

The tenuous truce, in force since Monday, has prompted tens of thousands of mostly Shi'ite Muslim refugees to head home, even though Israeli bombing has wrecked many towns and villages.

Aid agencies are trying to help the returnees, as well as up to 120,000 people who had remained south of the Litani River, some 20 km from the Israeli border, during the war.

''Our major concern is not so much the fact that so many people have returned to their homes, but the fragility of the ceasefire,'' said Robin Lodge, spokesman for the U N World Food Programme.

''We're worried that if it doesn't hold, a lot of these people will once again be in a perilous position.'' VIRTUALLY LEVELLED The WFP yesterday took more than 100 tonnes of food, water and fuel to Rmeish, a border village 25 km (16 miles) southeast of Tyre. The supplies should last 6,000 people for a month.

The village had been cut off, with no fuel to pump well water, forcing people to drink pond water at one stage.

Another WFP spokesman, David Orr said many villages in the south had been virtually levelled.

''In the town of Aita al-Shaab, 90 to 95 per cent of the town has been flattened,'' he said. ''They had been shelled from over the border and then when the Israelis came into Lebanon they continued to pound it with tanks and air strikes.'' Orr said many people who stayed in the south had moved within the region to take refuge in Tyre or mainly Christian towns that were relatively spared from fighting.

''There is severe damage to infrastructure and quite a bit of shortage in the villages but I don't think the people stayed in the ones that were heavily bombed. They got the hell out.'' In Tyre, the WFP began unloading a ship that docked with 21 trucks, food, water and fuel for 18 hospitals.

Lodge said one aid convoy was heading from Beirut to a Palestinian refugee camp near Baalbek in eastern Lebanon and another was heading to Tyre.

He said a ship laden with 500 tonnes of aid items was expected to arrive in Lebanon on Saturday from Italy.

REUTERS MSQ HT1618