BEIRUT: Bassam Mokdad worked for half an hour to separate the bodies of a mother and child so he could pull them from the rubble in the Lebanese village of Qana. “I saw a mother, clutching her son, covering him to protect him,” said Mokdad, who pulled 10 bodies from the remains of a building hit by an Israeli air strike on the village.

“It took me about half an hour until I could raise the arm of the mother from him and until I could lift the child from her chest,” said the Lebanese Red Cross volunteer. “I wept and immediately thought of my children.”

Mokdad heard of the bombing which killed 54, including dozens of children, just after the air strike in the early hours of the morning. But having been targeted by Israeli warplanes in three weeks of war, his rescue team only moves in daylight.

“All those killed had no shrapnel or wounds on their bodies. They all died of suffocation. The debris fell on them — their colour was blue,” said Mokdad, in Beirut for the day before heading back to rescue duties in the south.

“If I had been able to arrive earlier, I could have found people alive.”

Rescue workers often can do nothing to help when they arrive at the aftermath of Israeli attacks, such as that on Qana, in southern Lebanon. The victims are either killed instantly or buried under rubble.

The Lebanese government says dozens of bodies have yet to be recovered after such attacks, some of them in cars hit by Israeli missiles. The government has so far put the war’s death toll at 750, including un-recovered bodies.

Fifty-one Israelis have been killed in the conflict between Hezbollah and the Jewish state.

Rescue workers are trying to move into some of the devastated areas hoping to treat the wounded, but they frequently find only corpses. Forty-nine bodies were recovered on Monday alone.

“Often, they are dead. But there are wounded people,” said Hussein Hudruj, another Lebanese Red Cross volunteer.

“The priority is for the wounded, then we return, as much as we can, to take out the martyrs,” said Hudruj, who usually runs a hair salon.

Hudruj pulled the body of an 18-month-old baby from the rubble in Qana. Exhausted from hours of digging, Hudruj, Mokdad and his colleagues refused to give up even though they could find only dead women and children.

“Maybe there were people alive. If we’d stopped we would have been participating in the crime,” he said.

“Sure, we were tired, but when you pull out a body, you forget fatigue. You forget everything. You just want to get the body out,” said Mokdad, a central bank employee.

“In one village, we found people alive under rubble after four days. They were wounded. We took them and now, thank God, they are okay,” he said.

“Yesterday, we took 19 bodies from the villages around Tyre and Bint Jbeil. Some of them had been there for two weeks or a week on the roads,” he said.

Despite the body count, he still believes there are wounded to be helped. “We won’t stop. There are many people in need of us and our work.”—Reuters