Thousands of mourners in southern Lebanon on Friday attended a funeral for nearly 100 Lebanese killed last year during the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The emotional ceremony was organized to mark the return of the bodies of those killed to their hometown of Aitaroun, one of the largest villages in southern Lebanon, which was devastated during the war.
The exact number of fighters killed has not yet been declared by the group, which had said until September that more than 500 fighters were killed in a year of low-simmering war.
Among the dead was a 10-month-old girl killed in an Oct. 14 Israeli airstrike on a residential building that killed 23 people, all of them displaced from Aitaroun.
Separately on Friday, Lebanon’s new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, toured areas near the border with Israel that suffered wide destruction during the 14-month Israel-Hezbollah war.
