Families claim their war dead in south Lebanon

TYRE, Lebanon, Aug 17 (Reuters) ''The martyr Anis Youssef'' read the handwriting on the lid of a coffin being unloaded from a refrigerated container crammed with Lebanese war dead.

The casket, made of rough wood, was put into an ambulance outside Tyre's government hospital and driven away by relatives for burial in the village of Halousiyah.

More than 100 other bodies have yet to be claimed.

Some have been in the morgue for weeks, the peril of travelling on the roads of south Lebanon having prevented next of kin from collecting them.

The truce which ended fighting this week has allowed the bereaved to finally bury their dead.

''It's the first chance we've had. We've been on the road for 11 hours,'' said Raouf Shayato, who had arrived at the hospital to collect the body of his cousin Nazira, killed on July 22. She was hit while fleeing the village of Teeri.

''The Israelis told them to leave and then bombed them on the road,'' Raouf said.

Israel said it did not deliberately target civilians during the conflict in which at least 1,100 people in Lebanon and 157 Israelis were killed.

Hospital workers wearing face masks pulled the coffins from the truck and stacked them on the pavement so relatives could identify their loved ones.

STILL LOOKING The name and village of each victim was written on every coffin.

The dead included residents of Sriefa and Ghandourieh -- two of many villages devastated by more than a month of war between Israel and Hizbollah.

Scores of coffins were then loaded back into the container and the doors were bolted shut by hospital workers worried that the bodies had been exposed for too long to the summer heat.

A grocer closed the door of her shop, the smell too much to bear.

Abed Naeem collected the body of his father, killed in an air strike on their village on July 20. Six more of his family are missing under rubble in Silaa, east of Tyre. ''We found others but they were in pieces,'' he said.

The hospital has been forced to bury around 140 bodies in waste ground in Tyre, the morgue unable to cope with the strain of the war.

Plans to bury another 126 bodies at the same site on Wednesday were cancelled, partly because families returning home wanted to bury them in their villages.

Some were too late. A woman dressed in black showed a doctor photos of her sons Haitham and Hassan Masjid. She broke down when he told her both were dead and had were already buried in the mass grave.

Others are still looking. Faisal Khanatar checked the hospital list of the dead but could not find his nephew Kazim.

''They told us they are bringing all of them here,'' he said.

''We'll go to Nabatiyeh, maybe he's there.'' REUTERS PDS PM0434