Deir Qanun al-Nahr, Lebanon ? A road of death and desolation coils through southern Lebanon.

It begins in Tyre, where 82 people killed in Israeli attacks this week were sheathed in hastily crafted wooden caskets Friday, their faces pointed toward Mecca, as custom dictates. Each coffin bore a number, and a name, sloppily handwritten on top.

Under a blistering sun, they were lined up along a wall, smaller ones for children, including a stillborn baby. Women in black uttered prayers; some sobbed in grief. As the temperature climbed, others lifted a corner of their veils to shield their drawn faces from the stench of death. Together, they waited for military trucks to carry the corpses to a temporary mass grave in an empty sandlot.

The road ends in Deir Qanun al-Nahr, a town of 3,000 in the hinterland beyond Tyre, where Fatima Diab and more than 100 other people huddled in a sweltering basement Friday, as Israeli strikes pummeled the villages and valleys around them. She arrived a week ago with no food, no spare clothes and no water. Three radios crackled with news of the war. People prayed. And at times, Diab tried to sleep in the cacophony of bombing and trails of Israeli jets that, on this day, subsided only briefly.

“I don’t think this war is ever going to end,” she said in the dim basement, her face framed in a veil.

A hospital worker walks past the coffins of Lebanese victims of the Israeli warplanes bombardment, during preparations for a mass burial in the southern port town of Tyre, Lebanon. Israeli warplanes resumed strikes Friday on targets across Lebanon as Israel warned hundreds of thousands of people to flee the south immediately, as its troops prepare for a likely ground invasion.

Bleak landscape awaits

In peacetime, the road trip from Tyre to Deir Qanun in southern Lebanon is 10 miles. In war, the town is reached after a 60-mile trek of more than two hours, past pulverized homes, roads blocked by craters, rubble and the burned stumps of citrus trees, forsaken villages with not a resident in sight and long stretches of deserted streets seized with fear of Israeli attacks. The lucky – with money and means – have left. The less fortunate, like 19-year-old Diab, hide, as an abandoned, bleak landscape awaits an even fiercer war.

“Take my number! Write it down!” pleaded Abu Hamadeh, a 35-year-old dentist standing in the street in Maarake, on the road to Deir Qanun. “If you know someone who can get to me to Beirut, I’ll pay. Everyone’s gone. Tell me how to get there!”

Bombing rattled the iron gate of his building every few minutes, as reverberations of the blasts echoed along the street.

“Lebanon has gone back five years,” he said. He stopped, shaking his head. “I take that back. Not five, 50.”

Lebanon’s wars often have held unintended consequences: Israel’s invasion in 1978 helped create the southern suburbs of Beirut that are being bombed today; its 1982 invasion forged the climate for Hezbollah’s creation. And the Israeli occupation that ended in 2000 helped incubate the myths and mystique that Hezbollah draws on today.

Death, destruction

In Tyre, the city prepared to inter in a temporary grave 81 corpses collected from the villages of southern Lebanon. Once the fighting subsided and the roads were safe again, their families would bury them in their own towns.

Through the morning, workers hammered cheap plywood into coffins, each one with a small copper emblem bearing a number. On the covers, the victims’ names were scrawled in black, gray, red or pink. Workers wore blue surgical masks in the sun as they placed the bodies in the coffins then lined them up against a white wall marked with a row of numbers.

“This is so inhuman,” said Rabia Abu Khashb, 28, as he surveyed the coffins, 15 sized in half for children.

“God protect them,” he said softly. “God awaits them.”

By afternoon, the military brought them to an open field, where a bulldozer had excavated two trenches 70 yards long and two yards deep. Across the field a house of concrete and cinder block had been struck in a bombing, its floors pancaked. In the backdrop, Israeli air raids targeted the city’s outskirts, columns of debris rising into a dusk-shadowed sky.

In the first coffin lay Mustafa Ghannam, one of those fleeing Marwaheen. Then his cousin, Hussein Mohammed Ghannam. Down the row were the coffins of two children from the same family: Qassem Mohammed Ghannam and Zeinab Mohammed Ghannam.

A women in black sobbed. “My sweetheart, yesterday you were playing with me. Who will I play with tomorrow?”

“These people, what was their sin to die?” asked Ziad Shahadi, one of the onlookers.

“None of them was carrying a weapon. None of them was wearing a uniform. None of them were soldiers on the ground,” he said. “They were all civilians. There’s no military honor in this, none. How could there be? Killing the young and the old.”

As the rest of the coffins were lined up, a bulldozer began pushing in fine sand. And as the sun began to set, a last coffin arrived, holding the victim of bombing a few hours before in Burj Shamali, on Tyre’s outskirts. The name and number were scrawled with black marker.

Fatima Shaib was No. 82.