Unnerved Israeli City Buries Its Dead

The last mourners were saying goodbye to Shimon Zribi and his young daughter, Mazal, their shrouded bodies buried side by side in dirt the color of henna. A few feet away, down a rocky hillside, women were already sobbing over another dead man, Albert Ben-Abu. One funeral hadn’t even ended when another began.

Israel on Friday buried its dead: eight civilians killed a day earlier in the Jewish state’s single bloodiest day in more than three weeks of fighting.

Five were residents of this northern coastal city who had emerged from bomb shelters, thinking the coast was clear, only to be cut down by Hezbollah rocket fire. The other three were Israeli Arab youths who had leapt from their car for safety, only to take a direct hit -- there was not a scratch on their vehicle.

It is the randomness of the killing that so unnerves Israeli civilians in the danger zone, leaving them with a nagging sense of impotence and confusion. Three more civilians were killed Friday in the Hezbollah barrages across the north.

“You just don’t know what to do,” said a bleary-eyed Moti Tamam, 45, whose brothers Aryeh, 51, and Tiran, 49, were among those killed Thursday. Tamam marveled that he had stayed out of the bomb shelter to remain at home with their mother, who uses a wheelchair, while his other brothers went into the hot, cramped basement room, leaving it for a brief moment when they felt safe.

Yet it was he who survived.

The Tamams will not be buried until Sunday, beyond the usual 24-hour rule under Jewish law, because the family was awaiting the arrival of a fourth brother from Italy.

Still, the city’s main cemetery had plenty of sadness to bear Friday.

At the funeral for Shimon Zribi, 44, and his 15-year-old daughter, mourners clung to one another, sobbing between prayers as they gathered around the two bodies.

“Why? Why?” cried one of Zribi’s friends, a stocky man in a black T-shirt and matching yarmulke, as he knelt at the side of the grave.

Under a red-metal awning at the entrance to the graveyard, men bobbed forward and backward. Women, on the other side, separated by a wooden partition, crumpled soggy tissues in their fists and moaned in anguish.

A government minister gave one eulogy, the mayor of Acre, Shimon Lankary, another.

“We did not want this war,” Lankary said. “It was forced on us. We are a peaceful city, a city of Jews and Arabs, living together.”

On Thursday afternoon, Zribi and his daughter ventured out to inspect the damage from a Katyusha rocket that had slammed into their Acre neighborhood. Seven minutes later, a second barrage killed them.

“I guess curiosity kills,” said Yossi, Shimon Zribi’s friend and co-worker at an aluminum factory. Finally regaining his composure after breaking down at the grave, Yossi did not want his last name published.

“He went out to see what had happened. Can you blame him?” Yossi said, shaking his head. “I know he is gone, but I just cannot believe it. We were just the other day sitting, laughing, drinking.”

Miriam Ben-Yishai, a social worker with the city, also was in attendance in a show of support. She said the city tries to ensure that shelters have air conditioners or fans, plus water and anything else they need. But no one likes whiling away the hours in such confines, she said. “How long can they sit inside?”

Others at the funeral vowed that these deaths would not be in vain.

“This is the most terrible thing that can happen, civilians targeted, but the terror must end,” said Shulamit Cohen, a family friend. “This is not just Israel’s war -- this is a global war.”

Not 20 miles away, a funeral was being held in the Israeli Arab town of Tarshikha for the three local youths who were killed Thursday when they tried to take cover. In slatted wooden coffins, opened to expose their faces, the three were mourned first in their homes, then, together, in the town’s Muslim cemetery.

They were friends. Mohammed Faur, a 17-year-old high school senior who wanted to be an engineer, and 19-year-olds Shanati Shanati and Amir Naim, both of whom worked on their family farms. The boys had grown up together, gone to school together and lived within a few blocks of each other.

And they were buried together Friday. Their bodies were lowered into a pit ringed with wreathes of flowers wilted by the heat. An imam prayed as about 100 men crouched at the edge of the grave, under three pistachio trees.

The funeral was cut short, however, by the whine of air-raid sirens warning everyone to take cover. Residents ran to their homes or stood glued to thick walls lining the town’s alleyways.

“God gave him to us, and God took him away,” Mohammed Faur’s mother, Ola, said later in her home, where women clad in black gathered and the men sat outside in plastic chairs to receive condolences from the village elders.

Mohammed was the apple of his family’s eye, the eldest son who was going places. They showed a photograph of him, an earring in one ear and an impish, all-knowing grin on his face.

Anger in Tarshikha was directed not at Hezbollah, however, but at Israel and the United States, blamed for failing to stop the conflict.

At the funeral, a couple of residents held up a sign calling on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to end the war now. “Enough!” it said. “Our loved ones are dying.” And several residents said they believed Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah when he said he would stop firing rockets into Israel as soon as Israel stopped its aerial bombardments.

“War only brings more war. The Israelis have been fighting this for 24 days, and this isn’t working,” said Younis Khorshid, an Israeli Arab engineer and father of two whose bright yellow house sits atop the village’s highest ridge.

“We understood at first, but now they [the Israeli armed forces] are overreacting. I can’t see the end of this one.”

At the Acre cemetery, the funeral for Ben-Abu, a Moroccan-born Jew who had become Orthodox in recent years, was winding down. “No! No! This cannot be!” cried out members of his family, including his five children -- among them 12-year-old son Yishai, two months shy of his bar mitzvah.

After the men finished burying Ben-Abu, a small group of women, arms linked, walked slowly to the grave.

A blue shawl wrapped around her head, Ben-Abu’s widow, Hagit, nearly collapsed, propping herself against a white stone tomb next to her husband’s freshly dug grave. She clenched her eyes, murmured a quiet prayer, then caressed the dirt over her husband’s body, using her right hand, the one with a glistening wedding band.

His 14-year-old daughter, Morag, followed her lead. The girl -- tall, skinny, gangly, bewildered -- watched her mother and wept softly. She touched the dirt, brought her fingers to her lips.

Hagit and Morag Ben-Abu embraced and left the cemetery, pausing for the last step in the Jewish burial ritual: washing their hands at a nearby water basin. Then, arm in arm, mother and daughter walked away.