DEIR QUANUN AN-NAHR (Lebanon): The low murmur began as the coffins were taken from waiting vans and hoisted onto the shoulders of dozens of young men. By the time the nine corpses were carried half a kilometre to the cemetery in this southern Lebanese town, it had reached a crescendo of anguish.

Chants of “Hezbollah” became shrieks of grief among women gathered on balconies and rooftops of collapsed buildings, and even the hardest of the young men broke down. They pushed their way into the grim parade to put themselves among the pallbearers.

The Hezbollah bastion town of Deir Quanun An-Nahr on Saturday was burying still more of those killed in Israel’s devastating month-long offensive against the Shia militia that ended in a volley of shells and bomb strikes last week.

The fighting left at least 1,287 people, nearly all civilians, dead in Lebanon and 4,054 wounded, according to an AFP count based on official figures. Hezbollah announced the death of 74 combatants.

After a fragile truce took effect on Monday, villagers began gathering their dead from piles of rubble that had once been homes, and from battlefields where the Muslim fighters had clashed with Israeli soldiers.

“Yesterday we had buried seven. Today we’re burying nine. There might be many more —- we don’t know. We collect them on the way,” one mourner said while hundreds of others began to gather on a road before the funeral. Several fresh graves, including those of a mother and her two young sons, lay under Lebanese and Hezbollah flags.

The funeral detail is a purely militia affair. An “honour guard” of young men in black military uniforms and yellow Hezbollah caps had assembled earlier under the orders of older men shouting into two-way radios. They gathered in a line to receive the coffins before the slow climb to the cemetery.

The dead — eight fighters and one civilian — included an apparent senior militia member whose wooden casket was more elaborate than the pressboard coffins given to the others.

Each casket was draped in a yellow Hezbollah flag. Photos of the dead, young men staring stoically into the camera or kneeling dressed in fighters’ uniforms and armed with automatic rifles, were hastily taped to the front of each casket.

A four-wheel-drive vehicle adorned with portraits of Hezbollah’s leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah led the procession. Young men zipped up and down the road on motorbikes with Hezbollah flags trailing behind.

Shops around Deir Quanun An-Nahr were shuttered and village life turned completely towards burying the dead. Young boys in camouflage army costumes played with toy guns, seemingly oblivious to the grief that surrounded them.

“Israel and America thought wrong. (Israel) came and then it ran away... but we’re still here,” said one area resident, Mariam Salhab. She stood beside a tangle of shattered concrete and twisted metal bars that had been her home in a village, about 20 kilometres from here.

“This is our country. We are strong. This makes us, Hezbollah stronger,” she said, taking in the wreckage around her.

“Southern Lebanon — all the men, women, all the children — we are all Hezbollah.”—AFP