Clustered in Fear, and Now Death

AINATA, Lebanon — All the dead were neighbors, killed as they huddled together in the basement of the Fadlallah family house in the old quarter of this southern Lebanese town. The Fadlallahs' two-story home had offered false hope against Israeli shells fired from the terraced hills above, blasts that scattered concrete blocks like dice and smashed the shelter into a tomb.

Now, with fighting suspended, the rubble gave them up: at least 14 bodies with perhaps more still buried, pulled free by neighbors' hands tearing at the stones. The dead were old men and old women, teenage girls and children as young as 3, postscripts to the roll call of victims from this summer's spasm of war.

"That's what we do here: When people get scared, they get together -- 30, 40 people," said Hassan Mansour, who grew up in Ainata and still comes back with his family every summer, even though he lives in Miami. "I had 30 people in my house when it was hit. And in the center of town, hundreds of people would come together to wait out the shelling."

Ainata is a middle-class Shiite Muslim town surrounded by tobacco and olive farms with a winter population that the residents estimate at 15,000 to 20,000. These are the people who elected a Hezbollah member to the Lebanese parliament when they got a chance after the Israeli occupation ended in 2000.

Yet Ainata also displays shades in its beliefs and politics that make it more than a simple pro-Hezbollah bastion. It changes character in summer, when the town swells with thousands of its sons and daughters who have gone abroad to work in North America, Africa and across the Middle East. They are a well-educated and well-paid expatriate class who love to return to Ainata's quiet and climate.

"We say here that every house has an engineer or a doctor in it," said Mansour, who runs a variety of businesses in Florida and has built an expensive house in the hills overlooking the town for his annual summer return. "These are mostly secular people, not religious people. We are not fanatics. We are hard-working, 100% law-abiding good people.

"These are the people Israel has hit badly."

It was the traditional people who elected the Hezbollah lawmaker, he explained, because the religious organization had led the Israeli resistance during the occupation and, unlike so many Lebanese political parties, remained free of corruption. The election was also held in winter, he said, when the more cosmopolitan summer crowd was out of the country and barred from voting.