In the village of Srifa, just 10 minutes outside Tyre, 60 to 80 corpses remain trapped in the rubble of a building, according to the Red Cross.
"There's no way to get them out," said Qasim Chaalan, a Red Cross volunteer. "The firemen are afraid to go to that area, and they're the ones with the equipment."
At least one Red Cross ambulance has been hit by an Israeli missile, Chaalan said, and there have been near-misses as well.
Rescue workers have decided that there's no point in risking their necks to pick up a corpse.
"They'll take the risk if there's a wounded casualty," he said, "but not if there's just a body."
In Tibnin, hard against the border with Israel, about 1,200 wounded have been rushed to a hospital that has no doctor, said Stephane Sisco, a physician with the French humanitarian group Doctors of the World. He sat in an army office in Tyre on Friday, pleading for help getting to the border.
His prospects didn't look good.
"Too many people are dying because we can't get to them and give medicine. It's the same with food," Chaalan said.
"Most times the volunteers are just sitting by themselves and just crying because they can't do anything for these people."
Nearby, the mass burial was about to begin.
It was an oddly workmanlike event, largely lacking in the outbursts of wailing and keening that often provide catharsis at funerals. There was a hardness in the air, perhaps brought forth by anger, exhaustion and a general sense of dread.
The coffins were plain and thin, hammered together overnight. They had been stacked tidily in the hospital gardens, their lids off to one side. Some were short, designed for children.
A man with a canister sprayed clouds of formaldehyde over the empty pine boxes; the haze of chemicals caught in the breeze and carried over the crowd. The mourners and townspeople coughed and rubbed tears from reddened eyes.
Then the hospital workers opened the back doors of the refrigerated truck full of bodies, and the ritual began: A man in a surgical mask stood in the back of the truck. He shouted out the name of each dead person as he lowered the remains. Whole bodies had been shrouded in blankets, wrapped in sheets of plastic and bound by duct tape. Other bodies, more badly broken, were handed down in plastic trash bags.
The man held aloft a baby so tiny it was unclear if it was a late-term fetus or a newborn. Its skin was mottled and purple.
