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nike dunk shoesSouth Lebanon Sunday witnessed its deadliest day since the month-long Israel-Hizballah 2006 war when 10 Palestinian demonstrators were reported shot dead and another 112 wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on protests along the border fence. The casualties came as a massive crowd of Palestinians gathered at Maroun er Ras, a small hilltop village overlooking the border with Israel, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when the state of Israel was established. By Sunday night, the militant Lebanese Shi'ite group Hizballah was on alert and United Nations peacekeepers, known as UNIFIL, and Lebanese troops were planning heightened security measures along the border to prevent the retaliatory firing of rockets into Israel and a continuing escalation of cross border violence. (See photos of today's violent intifadeh.) Coach SunglassesThe protests were not an isolated event. Other Nakba demonstrations were held in Jordan, Egypt and Syria, where up to four Palestinians were killed in a rare infiltration of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria. (Israel said that one infiltrator was killed.) Some organizers of the Nakba commemoration had hoped that it would herald the onset of a "third intifadeh" of peaceful mass protests to compel Israel to honor the rights of Palestinians living under occupation or whom were expelled from their homes during the first Arab- Israeli war in 1948. The biggest of the border protests by far was in Lebanon, where an estimated 50,000 Palestinians were bussed from refugee camps scattered around Lebanon to Maroun er Ras. Luxury Coach Outlet The huge turnout surprised even organizers. "I was expecting 21,000 at the most. We ran out of buses to carry everyone," said Mahmoud Zeidan, a protest organizer from the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon. "Ain al Hilweh looks deserted. I haven't seen it so empty since the 1982 Israeli invasion when everyone evacuated," he said. (See photos of flaring tempers between Palestine and Israel on the Nakba.) With the narrow winding road leading to Maroun er Ras blocked by parked buses, entire families from toddlers to stooped and wrinkled old men began climbing the steep northern slopes of the hill to reach the village. Across the verdant flower-speckled hillside, thin rivers of humanity defied gravity to steadily flow uphill, red, green and black Palestinian flags fluttering in the balmy spring breeze. Stout grandmothers wearing thick cotton dresses and white headscarves panted and wheezed, red faced, as youngsters scrambled past them. birkin bagThe vast majority of those participating in the event were born after 1948 and have never seen their original homeland, let alone visited their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. On cresting the hill at Maroun er Ras, a vast expanse of western Galilee — forested hills and belts of apple orchards — could be seen stretching away to the south. "I am lost for words," said Tarek, the 28-year-old owner of a laundry business in Beirut.