AINATA, LEBANON -- Once, this was a quiet market town, a place where poor farmers sold olives to rich neighbours who made their fortunes far away from Ainata, but still spent summers close to home.

But Ainata, like other parts of southern Lebanon, was a place of grief and despair yesterday as residents who had fled during more than 30 days of warfare returned to see what was left of their village, taking advantage of a truce that held for a second day. As the returnees took in the scope of the destruction — entire villages laid to waste with barely a building left standing, the dead still being counted — the victorious mood of a day earlier as they streamed back waving Hezbollah flags, quickly evaporated.

In its place rose a deeper-than-ever hatred of Israel, as well as something newer and rarely voiced: anger at Hezbollah for having brought the ire of the Israeli army raining down on their village.

Fouad Ibrahim watched with ferocious eyes as the mini-bulldozer pushing through the rubble of his neighbour's home in the centre of Ainata paused with the discovery of another body.

Umm Ali, or Mother of Ali as the 50-something woman was known to her neighbours in the local form of address, was lying face down on a blue couch, her last expression mercifully buried in the pillows. The body was so badly decomposed and covered in cement dust that Umm Ali was recognized first by her long black hair.

Seeing the rotted corpse of a woman he had known for most of his life being placed in a body bag was difficult for Mr. Ibrahim. But the 35-year-old schoolteacher sensed there was worse yet to come. Somewhere in the rubble, he knew, was Zahra Fadlallah, a 20-year woman who had just graduated from the school in nearby Bint Jbeil, where he taught.

Mr. Ibrahim's fury rose as he waited for the rescue workers to dig further down into the basement, where at least 14 people from different families had taken shelter during the height of the war. They had been buried alive when an Israeli missile crashed into the building above, bringing two floors of concrete and furniture crashing down on them.

“She was an angel,” he said quietly as he waited for proof that Ms. Fadlallah was indeed dead. “Israeli forces, if they see one Hezbollah fighter shooting among 1,000 civilians, they will shoot the 1,000 civilians. They don't care.”

This was an area that for long days was on the front line between Hezbollah and Israel. As the bulldozer pushed rubble away from the building covering the bodies, it piled the material in front of another structure that had its outer wall torn away, revealing a child's bedroom with drawings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the English words “The Disney Land” scribbled on the wall.

“We won, but we are destroyed,” said 20-year-old Ali Arbid, who watched red-eyed as the rescue workers placed another misshapen body into a bag and scribbled the name “Fayez Khenafer” on it.

“He was a friend,” Mr. Arbid said, fighting the urge to gag as the stench of death became nearly unbearable. “No Arab will forgive Israel. We hope that the war is over and Israel will now disappear from our lives.”

Not everyone in Ainata was willing to blame only Israel for what happened to this town.

As he walked through the rubble-strewn streets, Mohammed Arbid reminisced about what it had looked like before the war. “It was an oasis,” the 36-year-old optician recalled. In the winters, Ainata was a quiet place of 3,000 or 4,000 people, mostly poor farmers living on incomes of a few hundred dollars a month. In summers, the place swelled to 10,000 as people who had left Ainata for more profitable labour in Beirut, the Persian Gulf, Canada, the United States and Australia returned, injecting the town with cash and a temporary energy.
Mr. Arbid had not seen Ainata since July 23, the 10th day of the war, when he and his mother fled the city heading north. He said he was “depressed” by what he saw on his return yesterday.

First he saw his uncle's house, where an intact 155-millimetre Israeli artillery shell lay amid the ruins of the veranda. At the sight of it, Mr. Arbid's depression turned to fury. “My uncle hated Hezbollah,” he said. “Tell the people in Canada how we lived. We had gardens, we had flowers. We're not terrorists.”

His spirits sagged even further as he entered the two-storey building next door that belonged to him and his elderly mother. Just completed — the paint job was done a week before the war — he was supposed to have lived on the top floor with his soon-to-be wife, with his mother staying downstairs.

That dream was in pieces yesterday. The front door was dislodged by the force of a blast nearby. Inside, bits of concrete and shattered glass covered everything: the long couches, the carpeted floors, the two single beds. More than a dozen holes had been torn in the ceiling by what appeared to be several separate small explosions.

Mr. Arbid had been expecting such a scene, and had left his mother behind in the city of Tyre to spare her the sight. “If I tell my mother what has happened, she will die,” he said, staring at the pock-marked ceiling. As he raced through the house checking to see what was salvageable, he was worried about one thing in particular.

He sighed with relief when he opened a closet to see the grey suit he had planned to wear to his July 30 wedding still hanging where he had left it, undamaged but with a layer of dust. The Rolex watch he had planned to wear that day was still ticking, a bottle of his favourite Paris Hilton cologne had even survived. He smiled with satisfaction at his bit of luck, but the depression quickly returned. “We will not have a wedding now for three or five years,” he said. “The money for getting married will go now to rebuilding the house.”

Anger rising, Mr. Arbid launched into a string of unprintable curses aimed at both Israel and Hezbollah.

“For me, Israel and Hezbollah are the same. I just want to live in peace, and to collect some money,” he said. Despite Hezbollah's propaganda, there was no victory for the Lebanese people to celebrate, he said. “I can't explain how it feels. I'm so sad, I'm so depressed.”

The battle for Ainata was a long-range one, the bearded fighter said, until the final two days. In a last push before the fighting stopped, Israeli troops and tanks moved toward the city, only to be repelled by a group of 45 members of Hezbollah and its allies from Amal, another Shia militia.

“We were fighting them face-to-face,” he said, a walkie-talkie dangling from his green cargo pants. He gave his name as Nassif, and said he was the head of the “regional military command” for Amal.

Hezbollah and Amal had used Kalashnikov rifles and anti-tank missiles to stop the Israeli advance. The wiry 42-year-old led the way down the town's main street, pointing at villas on the other side of a valley of olive trees that he said was the limit of the Israeli advance into the city. Across from the villas were a row of shops filled with the spent shells of anti-aircraft guns the fighters had been firing at their foes.

Still nervous, he kept out of the sightlines of anyone who might still be in the buildings even as he claimed victory. “There was a massacre of Israeli soldiers here,” claiming that the Israelis had to call in air strikes to give them time to recover their dead.

While the Islamic fighters were running short on bread and fuel, he said, they never lacked for ammunition. “We have enough ammunition here for three years,” he said.

He said he did not expect the current ceasefire to hold, and that Hezbollah and its allies would continue “as long as Israeli forces are in our land.”

As Nassif walked back toward the centre of Ainata, where five more corpses from the Fadlallah home were being laid out in front of the mosque, a few people nodded at him in recognition. But there was no clapping, or anything resembling a hero's welcome.

Most ignored him, their eyes transfixed on the bodies in the square.

The Globe and Mail; 16 August 2006