By Tom Perry
TYRE, Lebanon, Aug 16 (Reuters) -
As a truce held in south Lebanon on Wednesday, workers dug a mass grave
for more than 100 people killed during Israel's war with Hizbollah but
later postponed the burial so relatives had more time to claim bodies.
Corpses are being removed from the ruins of destroyed buildings in the south following the truce. Many are taken to a makeshift morgue at a hospital in the southern city of Tyre, where other unclaimed bodies have lain for days or weeks.
The hospital had been planning a mass burial of up to 126 bodies in a grave near an army barracks. Seventy-two corpses were buried there on July 21.
However, the latest burial was postponed because not all the bodies had been identified and some relatives, who had been unable to claim their loved ones in the upheaval of war, wanted to bury them elsewhere.
"There are names which are not clear," said Dr Moustafa Jradeh. "There are people who want to bury them in their villages. If we bury them here it will cause a lot of problems."
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 remained south of the Litani River, some 20 km (13 miles) 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."
UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE
UNICEF warned there could be 8,000 to 9,000 items of unexploded ordnance in southern Lebanon, posing another risk to returning civilians. It said at least 200 cluster bombs were found in Tebnin, some in the grounds of a local hospital. De-mining experts were working on defusing the bombs.
The WFP said it faced a severe shortage of funding for its logistics operation in Lebanon, which could halt aid efforts. It said it had received only $19.2 million of the $39.5 million needed for its three-month operation.
On Tuesday, the WFP 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, 90-95 percent 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. (Additional reporting by Michael Winfrey in Tyre and Gideon Long in Beirut)