"Look at this!" he shouted. A murmur passed through the crowd. "Oh no, no, no," a man muttered. "God is great!" shouted others.
Family members waiting in the crowd came forward to unwrap their relatives from the plastic, line their coffins with bedsheets and say goodbye. But most of the victims had no relatives present; their coffin lids were nailed shut by strangers.
A woman named Wafah Abdullah broke from the crowd around the coffins and walked dizzily in a circle. "I just saw my nephew," she said.
She wandered over to a flowering shrub, stood staring at it for a moment and then walked some more. She flapped her hands in front of her face as if she could push away what she'd seen.
Then she spoke: "He was beautiful."
Bombs exploded in the distance; jet trails were visible against the blue sky. On the ground, a woman dressed in black sat by an empty coffin and sang a traditional mourning song.
"Where are the young men?" she sang, and then sang it again.
When the lids were hammered tight, men spray-painted victims' names onto the coffins. Once the fighting subsides, families will be able to reclaim their loved ones from the mass grave.
They carried the coffins through the hospital gates and then lined them up along the muddy road. The hospital is in the middle of a Palestinian refugee camp. They would bury 72 on Friday and leave the rest for another day. Fresh graffiti on the wall read "72 martyrs."
Onlookers muttering curses against Israel and America milled around the stairs and shop doors of the refugee camp, which were covered with old pictures of Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian Authority president.
The sun was hot, the flies thick and the crowds persistent. Sunni and Shiite Muslim clerics prayed over the dead.
The Lebanese army sent trucks to collect the coffins and soldiers to serve as pallbearers. Four soldiers hoisted each coffin; they stacked them in the backs of the trucks. The streets held the unnatural quiet that settles uncomfortably over a crowd awed by death.
By the time the green army trucks made their way to the vacant lot, shadows had grown long.
As the coffins lined the trenches, a man with white hair began to yell.
"This is what Bush wants! This is what this dog wants!" he cried. "It's full of children!"
An elderly woman in black perched at the edge of the grave. "My darling Mariam, my only daughter," she moaned. "Twenty-seven years old, my darling, 27 years old."
It was a singsong of grief. People stood by silently. In the town, fresh smoke rose into the sky. Another bomb had fallen.
