From Beirut to Jerusalem 2 The Sabra – Shatila Massacre Autumn 1982 Ch 6

 

PART II 

The Sabra – Shatila Massacre 

Autumn 1982 

   

Chapter 6  

All our worst fears started to come true the next day. It was the morning of 15 September. I was sound asleep in the foreign medical volunteer apartment in Hamra when I was rudely woken by the planes screaming overhead. They were coming in from the Mediterranean and heading south towards the area of West Beirut where the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were located. Beirut International Airport had been closed ever since I arrived. These planes were flying low, breaking the sound barrier. They were not airliners. It was about 5.30 AM. My first reaction was it must be another Israeli air raid, and I immediately thought of Gaza Hospital and the camps. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my toothbrush and towel, cleaned myself up, hastily put on some clothes and, leaving my volunteer colleagues behind in their beds, ran downstairs to catch a taxi to the camps. There was no time to waste. Once an air raid started, my chance of making it to the camps from Hamra would be nil, and I would not be able to treat the wounded.  

‘Hurry, please hurry,’ I pleaded to the taxi-driver, desperate to get to the camps. The bumpy roads were deserted – no cars and no pedestrians. There was not even anybody at the checkpoints. Where on earth had everybody gone? We drove straight to Gaza Hospital without stopping, arriving at around 6.30 AM. I cannot remember how much money I had to pay him – loads, since all the other taxis refused to drive anywhere near the camps. He made a sharp U-turn once I got out, and drove away at high speed. It was already bright by then.  

I dashed into the Accidents and Emergency – but there were no patients. All the PRCS medics were up and having a discussion. The atmosphere was tense. Strangely, the planes had stopped flying, and no bombs had fallen yet. The news bulletin announced that Israel was invading West Beirut ‘to flush out two thousand “terrorists” left there by the PLO’. That could only mean trouble for the camps, we knew, but we wondered why no bombs had been dropped.  

The medics started the morning by discharging all in- patients well enough to go home, to make room for expected casualties. All elective operations were cancelled, and everyone was put on standby, waiting for the wounded to be brought in. I went up to the orthopaedic wards and explained to all my patients that I could not do their operations now, as we needed to reserve the operating facilities for new casualties.  

One of my patients said, ‘Never mind, Doctora, we understand that you did not cancel our operations. Sharon did.’ Ariel Sharon was the Israeli Government Minister in charge of the armed forces.  

It was not until 8 AM that we heard the first explosions. They sounded like shelling from tanks, not bombs from the sky. I went up to the top of the hospital – to the tenth floor – and watched the shells exploding on the houses of West Beirut. With hindsight, the top of a tall building was perhaps not the safest place to be while the shells were exploding, but none landed on me. I was soon joined by other foreign volunteers, who also wanted to know where the explosions were happening. To begin with we saw shells landing in one direction from us. By midday, shells were landing around Gaza Hospital in a circle ten kilometres in diameter. I thought of all the roads being cleared of heaps of sand and roadblocks over the past few days. I could not help wondering whether it was in preparation for tanks to advance into the streets of West Beirut. Soon, Gaza Hospital was surrounded by a circle of smoke from burning buildings.  

Only walking wounded came to the hospital that morning, as the roads leading to the hospital were closed to ambulances. These were patients wounded by shrapnel from exploding shells. Later, people who were more severely wounded were carried into the accident room by their relatives. The patients told us that Israeli tanks were coming into West Beirut from different directions and were firing shells in all directions as they advanced. Two PRCS ambulances had been sent out on a rescue mission earlier. They never returned.  

The shelling came nearer and nearer. By roughly a quarter to four in the afternoon, we reckoned that the zone of shelling and explosives had closed in to about three quarters of a kilometre away from the hospital. People who tried to leave the camp returned and said that all roads leading out of the camps were blocked by Israeli tanks.  

At 4.30 PM news arrived at the Gaza Hospital that Israeli troops had invaded Akka Hospital, and shot dead nurses, doctors and patients. They had begun to surround Sabra and Shatila camp. People fled into the camp, with news that tanks were following them. At 5 PM we were told that Israeli commandos were on the main roads of the camps. I had not seen an Israeli soldier since coming across the Green Line from East Beirut. They had always attacked West Beirut by air or sea, or from across the mountains. Why did they want to make it on land this time? Perhaps they dared to come in now that the PLO fighters had left. Perhaps they wanted to check if the camps were holding terrorists or not. If their mission was the latter, I thought to myself, I could easily have told them that the PLO fighters had actually left.  

By nightfall, it was clear that we were entirely surrounded. The shelling stopped, but the rattle of machinegun fire continued throughout the night. The skies above Sabra and Shatila were lit with military flares. I must have dozed off to sleep some time after 4 AM, since that was the last time I remembered looking at my watch.  

An hour later, I was again woken up by aircraft screaming over us at a low altitude. It was the morning of Thursday, 16 September 1982. We heard shelling and explosions continuing after that, and could distinctly hear machine-gun fire. The fact that the shooting was still going on made me wonder if there were some PLO men around after all.  

Frightened people began to come into the hospital. In the middle of the morning, casualties poured in. The first of them was a woman shot in the elbow. Her entire elbow joint was missing – and out through the disorganised mess of bleeding flesh jutted the ends of the humerus, radius and ulnar bones. She lived in the camp, and had been shot as soon as she stepped out of the door of her house. Following her came a stream of women, shot in the jaw, the head, the chest, the abdomen. Most of them had been shot in the streets of the camp while going out to buy food, or on their way to the water points to fetch water for their families. Their injuries were high-velocity gunshot wounds consistent with sniper fire. They kept being brought in, and with only two functioning operating theatres, Gaza Hospital could not cope. Some of them were then transferred by PRCS ambulances to a neighbouring Lebanese hospital, the Makassad. We only transferred those whom we thought might survive: moribund patients just had a drip put up, and were given some painkillers. The rest we operated on ourselves in the basement theatres of Gaza.  

Very soon, the pattern changed. The wounds were still being caused by bullets, but by around noon it was evident from the casualties being brought in that gunmen had gone into homes in Sabra and Shatila and had started shooting people there. We were told that these were not Israelis, but gunmen with a Ba’albek accent. I made a mental note of that, but had no time to ask any questions – I just kept seeing patients and operating. Mercifully, there was water and electricity – they had been fixed up two days before.  

The medical team – we were two surgeons, two anaesthetists and five residents – worked non-stop. In less than twenty-four hours, about thirty very seriously wounded people were brought in and died while still receiving first aid treatment. About another thirty were fit enough to be operated upon. About ninety wounded were treated in the Casualty Department. Another thirty or so patients were transferred to the Makassad Hospital.  

After only twenty-four hours, the hospital’s supply of food ran out. We had nothing like enough provisions to feed the hundreds of people who sought refuge in the hospital. No one could leave the hospital to buy more food because of the continuous shooting and shelling outside. I was too busy to eat anything, but at one point Azziza Khalidi, the hospital administrator, insisted that I stopped operating so that I could at a slice of pitta bread and some olives she had brought down to the theatre for me. It was only much later that I found out she had given me the last food in Gaza Hospital. How many times did I take for granted the kindness and consideration which the Palestinians extended to me!  

By nightfall, we estimated that over two thousand of the camp people had flocked into the hospital seeking refuge, and were sleeping all over the hospital staircase and floors. As I came up from the basement operating theatre to assess the wounded waiting in the Accident room, I had to wade my way among families lying and sitting all over the floor. In-patient numbers had increased from forty-five to over eighty by the small-hours. About eight were critically ill.  

Throughout the night, the camps surrounding the Gaza Hospital were lit up by flares shot into the sky, and the shootings continued. I did not sleep that night, neither did the rest of the medical team. Among other operations, I amputated limbs, and opened chests and abdomens to remove damaged and bleeding organs. High velocity gunshot wounds were heavy going one at a time, but when they were piled up and pushed into the theatre along what felt like a never-ending conveyor belt, they were almost impossible to handle. One bullet through an abdomen could easily transect the intestines in several different places, explode the liver or kidney, and fracture both the spine and pelvis on its track in and out of the body.  

To do a proper job on one high-velocity gunshot wound in the abdomen would take an experienced surgeon in a wellequipped outfit from four to six hours. But after the first few hours I realised I could devote no more than two hours to any one of the wounded, or I would not get through the work load. Dr Per Miehlumshagen, a volunteer orthopaedic surgeon from Norway, did the same. He did all the operating in the other theatre. The PRCS doctors and nurses were really good, and performed with such excellence throughout that I regretted I had no time to tell them properly how wonderful they had all been.  

Per and I had been operating through the night into the morning of Friday 17 September. The rattle of machine-guns continued throughout. People wounded by gunshots continued to be brought in. At about seven o’clock that morning, Per came to tell me that we had almost caught up with the backlog of wounded, and that I ought to go and get some rest before it started all over again.  

‘What about you, Per?’ I asked.  

‘I had some rest already,’ said Per. I did not believe him, but was too tired to argue.  

Although I put my head on my pillow, I was so jumpy that I could not possibly sleep. So I went off to look for Azziza, thinking that perhaps she would be able to tell me what on earth was going on.  

‘Something terrible is happening,’ she said and that was all she could tell me. From her harassed and pale looks, I thought she probably had not yet had enough time to put two and two together. But Azziza told me that she must try to contact the International Red Cross. There was no food left, the place was filled with wounded, medical supplies had run out, and gunmen in the camps were terrorising and killing at will. She was going to appeal for more medical workers and medicines – and food for the many people sheltering in the hospital, and notify the International Red Cross of the presence of twenty-two medical workers from Europe and the USA. She also wanted to contact the Israeli Army which was surrounding the camps, appeal to it to lend protection to the foreign medical workers and ask it to control the terrorists now rampant in the refugee camps. She left at about ten in the morning.  

After she left, I went up to the intensive care unit to look at the patients operated on over the last two days. The intensive care unit was packed with very ill patients, all on drip and some being ventilated. I grabbed Dr Paul Morris and asked him for a brief report. He told me that the mortuary was full of dead bodies. We went down to the mortuary. It was jammed with those who had died before we managed to operate on them. There were bodies of old men, children and women. They had to be piled on top of each other through lack of space. It just made no sense.  

The ground floor of the hospital was packed full of people – some wounded and awaiting treatment, others trembling with fear. Most of them were so scared that they could not speak, all they could manage was to clutch at any doctor or nurse who passed by, as though we possessed some supernatural power to protect them. I still was not wholly aware of what had gone on, and why everyone was so frightened. The kids sensed I was unafraid and so they started to cling on to me, calling me a brave doctor. I was not brave at all, merely uninformed. Anyway I had been working so hard that I had no time to be afraid.  

When Azziza returned at about midday, she told us she had done all that she had set out to do, but something very terrible was about to happen. She then told the camp folks hiding in the hospital that Gaza Hospital was no longer a safe sanctuary, and that at any moment, the Kata’ebs, or even worse, the Haddads, might move in. (Both the Kata’ebs and the Haddads were Lebanese Christian militias. The Kata’ebs – or Phalangists – were the Israelis’ allies, but the Haddads were actually on their payroll.) On hearing this, the two thousand or so refugees evacuated rapidly. Many of the wounded were also carried out by their families, some with drips still running. She then proceeded to instruct the remaining handful of PRCS personnel – two resident doctors, and some nurses and technicians – to leave while there was still time. Some PRCS medics at first refused to go, and had to be firmly ordered to leave by Azziza.  

At around 4.30 PM, she came to the foreign medical team, and told us that she too was going to have to leave. Although she carried Lebanese papers, she said she was in personal danger, as the hospital was already infiltrated. I did not even have the sense to ask her by whom.  

The International Red Cross then arrived and brought some food and first aid equipment. Two doctors and two nurses from the Middle East Council of Churches had also come to help. This visiting delegation also included the Norwegian chargé d’affaires. He tried to persuade the Norwegian medical volunteers to leave, but they all chose to stay with the wounded and refused to go with him. The Red Cross team left with six very ill children and Azziza Khalidi, who promised to return the following day. She left us a large bunch of keys – to the kitchen, the pharmacy, the outpatients, the ambulance station, and the mortuary.  

The hospital quietened down that night, although shelling and machine-gunning continued outside in the camps. The explosions came very close now, and the glass in the windows of the intensive care unit began to crack from the vibrations caused by the blast of the shells. More patients were now discharging themselves voluntarily and others were being discharged by their families. The last casualty of the evening was an eleven-year-old boy, shot three times by a machine gun, and left for dead under a heap of twenty-seven bodies. When the killers left, friends rescued him and brought him to the hospital. All he could tell us was there had been Israelis, Kata’ebs and Haddads. Then he went into shock. His arm, leg and index finger had been injured by bullets, but he survived his injuries.  

In the theatre, I operated on a woman and a child. The woman had major surgery for a gunshot wound of the abdomen. It was a difficult operation, as I had to remove a third of her liver, and anastomose – or join together – transected large and small bowels. She was waking up from the anaesthetic, when the child was brought back from the theatre recovery room. I nipped back in to see both of them and remind the nurses in intensive care to give both of them blood transfusions. I was told that the packet of blood being transfused into the woman was the last one. There was no blood left for the child. We had run out. The child had been wounded by a hand grenade chucked into the midst of a group of little kids. He had lost a fair amount of blood through a severed splenic artery, but otherwise he was stable after his operation. Both needed blood and they were of the same blood group. The Palestinian woman overheard the nurses talking to me and asked us to give blood to the child instead of her. Then she asked for some painkillers and died shortly afterwards.  

That evening, the foreigners held a meeting to discuss what to do if the Israelis, Haddads or Kata’ebs did come into the hospital. We decided that our priority would be to negotiate for the lives of our patients. I did not have any bright contributions to make during that discussion, as some of our little patients kept distracting me by asking me when Major Saad Haddad was coming into the hospital to kill them. At that time I did not have the faintest idea who Saad Haddad was, but I told the kids that if he was the troublemaker I would ban him from Gaza hospital. The kids made me wonder if this Saad Haddad was responsible for all these casualties. But I did not dwell on that at all.  

For seventy-two hours, from 15 to 18 September 1982, I was basically working flat out in the basement operating theatre of Gaza Hospital, inundated with casualties. I only managed to leave the operating theatre for a few minutes at a time to assess new arrivals so that we could decide who to operate on and who to let go.  

That night, Paul Morris wrote a letter to his wife Mary, and then he asked me to deliver it if anything went wrong with him.  

‘Hey, Paul,’ I said, ‘you’re talking as though you’re going to die. You’re joking, aren’t you?’  

But he was very serious, so I took his letter and promised to do as he asked.  

On Saturday 18 September, an American nurse spotted some soldiers outside Gaza Hospital at 6.45 AM and one of the doctors was sent down to negotiate with them. After a little while I went down to join him and asked for the officer in charge. A young man with a moustache stepped forward and, in English, said, ‘Do not be afraid, we are Lebanese.’ His uniform was clean and well-starched, and it crossed my mind that he could not possibly be one of those who had been murdering people in the camps for the past three days.  

I said, ‘Of course I’m not afraid. What do you want?’  

He asked us to assemble all foreign medical personnel to be taken for interrogation. After some discussion, he said he was prepared to allow a Swedish nurse and a German medical student to remain behind to look after the critically ill in intensive care.  

We were escorted out of Gaza Hospital and down the main road of the camp, where we were passed on to a different lot of gunmen, who were rough, untidy and nasty. They kept poking us with their machine guns, and once or twice I nearly told them to get lost. We were made to walk along Rue Sabra. By the road were some bodies. At one point I was pushed so that I stumbled over the body of an old man. He was wearing a long blue gown and the white cap of a Haj. Thinking I knew him, I tried to look at his face. He had been shot in the head and his eyes had been dug out. On both sides of the camp road, groups of women and children had been rounded up by soldiers wearing green military uniforms, green baseball caps, but no insignia.  

Our estimate was that eight hundred to a thousand women and children had been rounded up, some of whom had been hiding in Gaza Hospital the previous day.  

Large bulldozers were at work tearing down shelled buildings and burying bodies inside them. I could hardly recognise the camps. The houses were now heaps of rubble. Within the rubble, I could see newly-hung curtains and pictures. The dynamited, partially bulldozed homes still had fresh paint on them.  

Gunmen lined the sides of Rue Sabra while we were marched down it at gunpoint, and we could all see what was going on – the bodies, the smashed homes, the rubble, the terror in everyone’s faces, the desperate mother who wanted to give me her infant – the baby boy which I held in my arms for a brief moment before it was cruelly snatched away by the gunmen. We knew what was about to happen. When, later, I was able to return, I roamed the length and breadth of the camps, looking for mother and child. I found neither. A Palestinian employee of the PRCS had come along with us from Gaza Hospital, but was discovered almost immediately, taken away and killed. It was as though they had been instructed to kill Palestinians but not foreigners, and kept to their orders.  

I thought of all those who died, and the ones rounded up by the gunmen on the roadside. From the terror in their faces, they knew they were going to be killed once we left them. Suddenly I found myself wishing that the PLO fighters had not been evacuated. They could have defended their people! I felt myself getting angrier and angrier as we were marched further down the road. A doctor is a doctor, but a doctor is also a human being.  

We were taken down through Shatila camp to the courtyard of the United Nations building on the edge of the camp, which was about ten minutes’ walk away.  

The United Nations building had been taken over by soldiers who claimed they were Christian Lebanese. In the courtyard of the building our papers were checked, and we were questioned about our political affiliations. Although they tried to impress on us they were Lebanese, I had my doubts. The place was full of newspapers and magazines in Hebrew, and tins of food and drink bearing Israeli labels. They took orders directly from Israeli army officials. They were no bandit army, for they never did anything without consulting an Israeli official, either directly or via the walkie-talkie.  

We had no doubt of their hostility towards us: they shouted at us and insulted us for being friends and supporters of the Palestinians. One of the soldiers was a good-looking woman with long, black curly hair and icy blue eyes. Her behaviour was absolutely hideous: she was wild with rage when I told her I was a Christian. She shouted: ‘You are a 

Christian and you dare to help Palestinians! You are filthy!’  

They subjected us to a mock execution: I was so involved in a furious argument with them that I did not realise it was happening at the time. All I was thinking was that this awful bunch had dragged us out of the hospital so that they could kill our patients. My colleagues told me later: we were actually asked to surrender all our belongings, remove our white uniforms and stand against a wall. Two bulldozers were ready to knock the wall down over us. A group of soldiers with machine guns were standing as though they were ready to shoot us all down.  

Thinking back, I realise that what they told me did happen. I remember taking off my doctor’s coat, and walking up towards a wall. I even remember looking to see if the bulldozers were trying to bury bodies behind the low wall. But I was blinded by anger, too angry even to be paranoid. Mock executions worked by creating fear. But on that morning I was too angry to be fearful. We were held in the courtyard for more than an hour. At about 9.15 or 9.30 AM, an Israeli officer came by and told them to take us to the Israeli headquarters, which was within walking distance, on a road parallel to the main road of the camp. This was a five or six storey building on high ground where I could see Israeli soldiers on the upper floors looking into the camps with binoculars.  

In front of an Israeli film crew, we were assured that everything possible would be done to keep our patients safe. We were also assured that we would be helped to leave West Beirut, and we were given food and water. Two male doctors and one male nurse were allowed to go back to Gaza Hospital to help out, but the rest of us were taken by two Israeli Army trucks to the American Embassy outside the camps, and told to stay there. When more of us said we wanted to go back to Gaza Hospital, the Israeli officers warned us that it was highly unsafe, and only those three people were escorted back.  

Back in the camps, the murderers were at work. The Swedish nurse who had been left in Gaza Hospital later testified that, half an hour after we had left, they heard continuous machine-gun fire lasting twenty to thirty minutes, accompanied by the screaming of women and children. That was followed by complete silence. That happened between 7.30 AM and 8.30 AM.  

A BBC correspondent who arrived about 9.30 AM at Gaza Hospital said that heaps of dead bodies piled on top of each other – in groups of ten or more – lined the main road of the camp, the road down which we had been marched earlier on. Most of the dead were women and children. Half an hour later a Canadian film crew recorded Rue Sabra with numerous dead bodies piled on top of each other on either side of the road.  

Later journalists who arrived on the scene saw bulldozers at work tearing down buildings and burying bodies in the rubble. The patients, the German medical student and the Swedish nurse left in Gaza Hospital were later evacuated by the International Red Cross.  

The Israelis dropped us at the compound of the American embassy in West Beirut. I did not want to go into the embassy: I wanted to go back to the camps. But I knew that I could not. While the rest of the team went into the embassy, I decided I would walk to the Commodore Hotel to talk to the journalists there, to see if I could find out more about what had happened Paul Morris came with me.  

It was early in the afternoon when we got to the Commodore Hotel. We went to the press room, where TV crews had just returned from the camps, and were reviewing what they had just videoed in Sabra and Shatila.  

First there were shots of the main road of the camp, the road we had been marched down early that morning. Heaps of corpses on both sides of the road. The people rounded up by the gunmen had been shot after we left. Then close-ups of the bodies filmed in the side alleys of the camp. Bodies piled on top of each other – mutilated bodies, with arms chopped off – bloated decaying bodies that had obviously died a day or two before. Bodies whose limbs were still tied to bits of wires, and bodies which bore marks of having been beaten up before their murder. Bodies of children – little girls and boys – and women and old men. Some bodies lay in blood that was still red, others in pools of brownish black fluid. Bodies of women with clothes removed, but too mutilated to tell whether they were sexually assaulted or just tortured to death.  

I started to cry. For the first time I grasped the scale of what had happened. The truth hit me painfully. I had been so busy that I had no time to think. But now, I knew that while we had been trying to save a handful of people in the operating theatres of Gaza Hospital, the camp folks had been dying by the thousands outside. Besides being shot dead, people were tortured before being killed. They were beaten brutally, electric wires were tied round limbs, eyes were dug out, women were raped, often more than once, children were dynamited alive. Looking at all the broken bodies, I began to think that those who had died quickly were the lucky ones.  

The machine-gun rattle that we had heard from the hospital was not fighting between PLO terrorists and Israelis as I had vaguely assumed, but had been the sound of whole families being shot dead in cold blood. The heavy explosive noises we had heard had been the shelling of the camp homes. The camps were completely sealed in by Israeli tanks, and not even a child could sneak out past them. When we asked the two thousand people hiding in Gaza Hospital to run away, they had nowhere to go. So they were all captured when they left the hospital, and indeed, many of them were murdered later that morning. People full of hope and life were now just mutilated corpses. These were the folks who after months of bombardment had come back from the bomb shelters to live in the camps. They had been so optimistic just a few days ago. They had believed the promises of the USA and other powerful nations that they would he left in peace, if the PLO left. They all thought they were being promised a chance of life.  

I had watched them rebuilding their shattered lives and homes just a few days before. I had spoken to women who had watched their sons, brothers and husbands being evacuated with the PLO under the peace agreement and then had taken the guns they left behind to surrender them to the Lebanese Army or throw them away on the rubbish dump. I had eaten in their homes and had drunk Arabic coffee with them. My surgical skills had enabled me to treat a few people, to save them so that they could he sent out into the streets, unarmed, to be shot down again, this time successfully. I hated my own ignorance which had deceived me into believing that we all had a real hope of peace in Sabra and Shatila, a real chance of a new life. Like everyone else from the West, I thought things would be all right once the PLO left. I thought they were the ones whose presence caused all the attacks on the camps.  

I had thought the old people could retire when the PLO went, and the children could grow up – instead of having bullets put through their heads, and having their throats slit. I was a fool, a real fool. It had never occurred to me that this would happen, it was a grim moment. I felt forsaken by God, by men, by a world without conscience. How could little children suffer the agony and the terror of watching scenes of torture, of their loved ones being killed, of their homes being blown up and bulldozed over. For these children, the mental scars, the psychological wounds would probably never heal. It was one thing to die suddenly. it was entirely different to watch loved ones being tortured and killed, while awaiting one’s own turn.  

I left the press room in the Commodore Hotel physically and mentally exhausted. I had no desire to see or talk to anyone, so Paul took me to a friend’s place, an empty flat. I could be alone there. Why had this happened? My feelings were gone – it was as though my heart had died. It had been trampled on and murdered in the alleys of Sabra and Shatila, and buried there. To me, there was nothing worthy left in life any more. Everything was over now.  

  

Bodies in a Shatila alleyway after the massacre, 18 September 1982. 

Per came to the flat to see me in the evening, and asked whether I was in good enough shape to visit the camps the next day. I cannot remember whether I said yes or no. But on the morning of the next day, 19 September, we were able to return to Sabra and Shatila. We saw dead bodies everywhere: whole families must have been shot together, and in one particular case we saw the body of a man (presumably the father) who had obviously tried to use his own body to shield his wife and children from the killers. They were all butchered mercilessly. 

The total number of bodies counted by then was one thousand five hundred. We tried to go to the camp again that afternoon, but found it sealed by Lebanese tanks and troops. We also saw ten to fifteen Israeli tanks withdrawing from the scene.  

Who was responsible for all this? It mattered little to me who pulled the trigger. It was who had organised the whole operation – and directed it. The Israelis were obviously responsible. They had invaded Lebanon. They had invaded West Beirut. It was meaningless to say that they had nothing to do with the massacres, because the killings happened precisely as the Israelis invaded West Beirut with the declared intention of flushing out Palestinian ‘terrorists’. The Palestinian refugee camps had undoubtedly been their main objective. But it was not obvious that the individuals who had walked into the camps to slaughter their defenceless people were Israelis. So what? They took orders from the Israelis. They were fed on Israeli food, and they read Israeli newspapers. They were mercenaries of the Israelis. The camps were illuminated at night by Israeli flares shot into the sky above them, so that the murderers could get on with their crimes.  

  

The body of a child victim of the Sabra and Shatila massacre Gaza Hospital, 17 September 1982. 

We were being asked to believe that the powerful Israelis had come into West Beirut precisely in order to get the Palestinians and had somehow forgotten their objective for long enough to let independent military forces sneak in under their noses and slaughter women, children and old men. It did not wash.  

Some of us wanted to work out exactly what we had witnessed. In our anger, it was easy to blame the Israelis for the deaths, but the truth was that the murderers had not been wearing Israeli uniforms. On Monday 20 September, a few of us from the foreign medical team discussed the massacre, and we isolated various facts.  

First, that on the Friday evening after the departure of the Palestinian hospital staff and Azziza Khalidi, a group of young men who were not known to the hospital workers entered Gaza Hospital. They were well-clothed, and unlike the camp folks they were not distressed. At first they tried to talk to the foreigners in Arabic, but then they switched to German when they failed to get across in Arabic. They asked for the whereabouts of the children ‘whose throats were to be slit by the Kata’ebs in the morning’. They spoke pure German – ‘klar deutsch’, according to the German medical workers. Who were they?  

Second, that a little child well-known to some of the foreign medical team was last seen alive between 10 AM and 11 AM in Gaza Hospital on the Friday, and was found dead in the stadium on the Saturday with other children. During our detention in the Israeli headquarters on 18 September, it was made clear to us by an Israeli General that the stadium was under Israeli protection and they had set up some clinic there. This little boy was killed after 11 AM on 17 September, in a place supposedly under Israeli protection.  

Third, most of the area of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps could be seen by the Israelis from their headquarters. So the Israelis had no excuse for ignorance.  

Fourth, all the roads to the camps were controlled by the Israelis. It was they who blocked the camp people from fleeing. It was they who turned them back to the camps to be slaughtered by the murderers there. It was they who were in a position to allow the journalists in after the bloodbath was over.  

Fifth, there were many attempts to give us the impression that the Israelis had actually tried to save us from the 

‘Haddads’. There were at least three instances where they (the Israelis) were obviously talking to the ‘Haddads’ in English to let us hear that they were negotiating our safety. This was a silly little game. Were they trying to impress on us that they had saved us from the Haddads? Then why had they been unable to save the defenceless Palestinians?  

Sixth, we were given the strong impression that the soldiers present on and around Rue Sabra, the main camp road, just before the massacre, were Haddad men with a few Kata’ebs. It was strange that both organisations went out of their way to make themselves noted by us and by journalists and people around the area, but that subsequently they denied their involvement in the killings. This made us doubt that the murderers were exactly who they appeared to be. Different official Israeli government statements have suggested that either the Kata’ebs or Haddad men were responsible. Surely the Israelis must know who did it – one may reasonably expect an army headquarters in the middle of a conflict to be aware of the identity of armed individuals visible less than a kilometre away. The camps were less than a kilometre from the Israelis’ headquarters. 

  

Children of Sabra and Shatila after 1982 massacre. ‘We are not afraid. Let the Israelis come’ 

 On Wednesday 22 September, two of us returned to Sabra and Shatila camp and spoke to the few survivors of the massacre. We learnt that many of the soldiers who did the killings did not speak Arabic and that among them were some black Africans. Who were these African-looking gunmen? Were they mercenaries imported by the Israelis to do this job? From where?  

There were other indications that some of the murderers were not Arabs, and were thus not Lebanese. We found out that when the two doctors and the nurse left the Israeli headquarters on 18 September to return to Gaza Hospital, an Israeli Colonel issued a handwritten pass in Hebrew, and told the three medical personnel that this pass would enable them to enter the camps. They were taken in an Israeli jeep part of the way back to Gaza Hospital, and dropped nearby to continue the journey on foot. One of the doctors pressed for the Hebrew pass to be translated into Arabic as he assumed that the Haddads, being Lebanese, could not read Hebrew. The colonel said that the Hebrew pass was a guarantee of safe passage when shown to the Haddads’, and it was only at the doctor’s insistence that it was subsequently translated into Arabic. Presumably whoever controlled the camps read Hebrew and not Arabic.  

Also during our detention in the courtyard for interrogation, one of the woman medical workers had produced a written document to prove that she was not a PLO sympathiser. The document, written in English and Arabic, said that she was there to help the suffering people of Lebanon. The soldier to whom she showed the document struggled to read the English portion of the document but did not read the Arabic translation.  

Today I still wonder who exactly were those gunmen who overran the camp alleys and killed the camp people. Quite a few of us came to the conclusion that the massacre was directed by the Israelis and whether they used mercenaries or their own army was a secondary issue. The reasons for trying to implicate the Phalangist militias were probably twofold – firstly to perpetuate Muslim-Christian animosity, and secondly to destabilise Lebanon. Those who planned the massacres knew they would have to leave one day. But the Haddads and Kata’ebs were Lebanese, and would always be there. Those who survived the massacres would live in constant fear even after the Israelis withdrew from West Beirut: they would have no peace of mind.  

I hoped that the opposite would happen. I thought the Christian Lebanese would probably resent being made scapegoats by the Israelis in this matter. I hoped that the sacrifice of two thousand four hundred Palestinians and Lebanese from Sabra and Shatila camp (this was the official Red Cross figure announced on 22 September, which was derived from an actual body count) would not go to waste, but contribute to the unity of Palestinians and Lebanese in times to come. 

   

Chapter 7  

From their temporary refuge in the American Embassy, many of my colleagues left I did not want to leave – I could not abandon some of my dearest friends not knowing if they survived or were killed, and if they were dead whether their bodies had been found and buried. And what about the Gaza Hospital staff? They had all disappeared. Were they alive, dead or imprisoned? I could not leave till I found out more about them.  

I knew for sure that if I were Palestinian, I would have been slaughtered like everyone else. But they did not even bother to check my papers. No one could mistake a Chinese for an Arab. They just shoved me along with their machine guns and called me names. To be alive, to have survived, meant that I had a duty to speak up on behalf of those who were dead, whose bodies were buried under the rubble, and who could speak no more; to speak on behalf of those alive and suffering every mortal day, in silence, without voice. Not to lend my voice to those I had grown to love over the past few weeks would be a crime. I was not only a survivor, I was also a witness.  

Those of us who decided not to leave got together and compiled a document detailing the events surrounding the massacres. Most of it came from my diary, with contributions from the rest of the team. To give it authenticity, I put my name to it. It was not pleasant to put my name to a statement against the murderers. It would put me in some danger, but I had to be responsible for what I said, and so I signed it. Dr Paul Morris and Dr Per Miehlumshagen agreed to sign portions of it, which was a great help. They also decided it was time I got some sleep, and put me to bed. I wanted the statement sent out quickly, so that if I ended up dead, the world would at least have my record of what happened, including who I thought was responsible for the massacres. It was our testimony, it was a record of the truth. When a phone call came from London, asking for the statement, I got up and went to one of the charity offices to telex it to my husband Francis in London.  

A dear Christian Lebanese woman typed out the telex for me. It took her forty minutes to send it. She was very upset over what happened to the camp folks. As we watched the returns of the telex emerge from the machine, I felt a great sense of relief, for our witness had gone forth. In it, I instructed Francis to circulate the statement as widely as possible, and warned him that if I did walk across a landmine, it would probably be no accident. I looked out of the window, and saw the whole street full of Israeli troops and their armoured cars and tanks. All their might, I said to myself, could not stop our statement from reaching the rest of the world now. When I left the offices of the charity, I was not anxious and bothered any more. From that moment, it would not matter one bit if I suddenly dropped dead. I had done what I needed to do.  

The next day, I returned to Sabra and Shatila. More dead bodies were recovered from the rubble, and the stench of decaying human flesh filled the air, making me feel very sick. Yet people had come back to live in the camps. As Palestinians, where else could they go? After being uprooted from Palestine, they had been pushed from one Arab state to another, and from south Lebanon to Beirut. Most of them were tired of wandering around. They were all very upset by the massacres, but they knew their forefathers had lost their homes when they ran away from the massacres which took place in Palestine. They wanted to dig in this time in Sabra and Shatila.  

Our return to the camps was a time of much sadness, as we learnt of the terrible things that had happened to our friends and acquaintances. But it was also a time of much rejoicing when we discovered that people we thought were dead had survived.  

The cleaner of Gaza Hospital spotted me, ran up to me and threw her arms around me, relieved I was alive. Suddenly she spotted the crucifix round my neck, froze, and shrank away from me. Two of her kids had their throats slit by socalled Christians, and the symbol of Christianity had become a symbol of death to her. But she pulled herself together, and eventually accepted that the massacre had nothing to do with Christianity. God had not betrayed man: He never had, now or in the past. It was the other way round, man had once more betrayed God. I held her close to my chest, and she cried for a long, long time.  

Gaza Hospital was devastated, and all its medical equipment had been pillaged by the gunmen who had invaded the camps. The fate of the hospital was now uncertain: the Israelis wanted to close down all Palestinian institutions. The Palestine Research Centre in Beirut was closed down. All its archives were taken away by the Israelis. They wanted to declare the Red Crescent Society illegal as well.  

All over Beirut, the Israeli Army set up road blocks and stopped all vehicles, so that passengers could be screened and Palestinians taken away. Sections of roads were sealed off by the Army and house-to-house searches for Palestinians were carried out. Proprietors were ordered to turn in Palestinian tenants. Lebanese who tried to hide Palestinians were beaten up. All property owned by Palestinians was treated as war booty.  

To hold a Palestinian identity card in those days meant that a person could be picked up without any reason. Many had disappeared. So you can imagine how relieved I was when I found a good number of employees of the PRCS alive on the sixth floor of the International Red Cross offices. I was especially glad to see three faces – Um Walid, the woman who was the director of the PRCS in Lebanon; Hadla Ayoubi, the PRCS’s director of public relations, and my dear Azziza Khalidi, the administrator of Gaza Hospital. The International Red Cross had given all of them sanctuary in the Red Cross building to protect them from being picked up or murdered. 

  

Um Walid, PRCS Direction in Lebanon and Vice-President of the executive committee of the PRCS. 

 Their lives were hanging on a thread. Yet all of them remained so dignified and courageous. I cried when I saw them, but Hadla comforted me and asked me to be strong. After two days, they all voluntarily left the protection of the Red Cross to go back to work. It was not easy: they had to negotiate the legal status of the PRCS, the re-opening of Gaza Hospital, and the safety of the staff and patients.  

Hadla Ayoubi was throughout the Israeli invasion the person responsible for co-ordinating the hundred or so foreign medical volunteers. This was a very difficult job as it needed a lot of patience, tact and understanding. The PRCS had suffered blow upon blow during the invasion, and many foreigners simply did not understand this. If Akka Hospital was bombed, and could not function until it was refurbished, there were two ways foreigners would react. Some were prepared to understand and might even help the PRCS staff clean out the rubble. But others would run to the Western press and tell them that coming to Beirut was a waste of time. According to them, the PRCS should not ask for foreign medical volunteers, since there was ‘no work to do’. They did not explain that there were many medical needs to be met, but that the hospitals were demolished. I often felt like inviting them to clear the rubble and clean the floors, since that would help restore the clinics and operating theatres more quickly, and medical work could resume.  

Such people were troublesome, always demanding attention over trivial things, and were a drain on Hadla. Yet she was always kind and understanding. Sometimes she would laugh at me when I got upset with my volunteer colleagues, and remind me that anyone who bothered to come all this way to help the Palestinians must be treated with respect.  

It was also Hadla who went round all the PRCS clinics and hospitals reminding the PRCS staff to observe strictly the ban on weapons in their institutions. No armed persons, be they Lebanese or Palestinians, would he allowed into a clinic or hospital if they insisted on coming in with their guns. They had to leave their weapons outside the hospital even at the height of the Israeli invasion. She explained to me that this was important as the medical institutions of the PRCS were entirely humanitarian, and not hang-outs for fighters. This policy of not allowing arms did not stop the PRCS hospitals and clinics being deliberately bombed.  

Hadla conducts herself with great dignity. An exile from Jericho, she admits that she is a member of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. She is a lady who has given her life to her people through her work for the PRCS. Entirely disciplined, proper and gentle, she is a good person to deal with all the diplomatic aspects of the PRCS, and won the love and admiration of many of us. I often spoke of Hadla to my husband. When he 

finally met Hadla, Francis said: ‘Hadla is a real lady.’  

Gaza Hospital stayed shut, and all the patients were scattered once again in field hospitals. I was at work in one of these temporary hospitals, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. This was a converted shop, and was crowded and stuffy. Patients from Akka and Gaza hospitals who survived the massacres were all laid out in collapsible beds. The future of the patients was uncertain, and soldiers often burst in, and threatened them. Frequently, it was only through the intervention of the officials of the International Red Cross that patients were not arrested. A few days after I started work here, Um Walid and Hadla came round to visit the wounded. It must have been so difficult for them to talk to the patients, yet the two women put up a brave front. They distributed small amounts of cash to each patient, and they tucked the money under the pillows of those who were asleep during their visit. It all went quietly, and it was only when they turned to leave the field hospital that I saw Um Walid crying on the way out, and Hadla putting her arms around her to comfort her.  

The Palestinians who had lost their homes were living in the streets, many of them simply squatting at street corners, outside cafés, department stores, sometimes laying mattresses and blankets out on the pavements. Each day more of them disappeared they had been picked up overnight by the Israeli soldiers. Those were terrible days. I felt a compulsion to walk – walk from one end of Sabra to the other, from one end of Shatila to the other but at the same time I found it very hard to do. The woman with her baby who nearly became mine, the people hiding in Gaza Hospital – I Just could not find any of them.  

Instead, I found more destruction and more decomposed corpses laid out for grieving relatives to identify. I could feel the blood being drained away from the camps: they were now large patches of uneven ground, destroyed homes, where the living roamed listlessly, seeking out the dead. We all assumed that each mound of earth was a mass grave, and if we just followed the stench of decaying corpses, we would usually discover dead bodies. Relatives were not allowed to uncover the mass graves to identify bodies: instead, white lime was sprinkled all over the mass graves by the army to dissolve the last traces of human flesh. Sometimes a bracelet, a necklace, a dress was the only clue to the identity of a body.  

Even after the announcement of the official body count of two thousand four hundred on 22 September, more bodies were found, mixed up with the rubble, in empty garages, in abandoned warehouses. Outside the camps, in Akka Hospital, nurses had been raped and killed, doctors and patients shot dead. As I walked through the camp alleys looking at the shattered homes I wanted to cry aloud, but was too exhausted emotionally even to do that. How could little children come back to live in the room where their relatives were tortured and then killed? If the PRCS could not function legally, who was going to look after the widows and orphans?  

Suddenly, someone small threw his arms around me. It was Mahmoud, a little child who had broken his wrist while trying to help his father rebuild their broken home. He had survived and his wrist had mended, but now his father was dead. Mahmoud cried, but he was glad I was alive because, from his hiding place during the massacre, he had seen the soldiers taking us away. He thought they had killed me.  

Soon I was surrounded by a whole lot of children. Kids without homes, without parents, without futures. But they were the children of Sabra and the children of Shatila. One of them spotted my pocket camera, and wanted a picture taken. Then they all stood together, wanting their pictures taken. They wanted me to show their picture to the people of the world. Even if they were killed and the camps were demolished, the world would know that they were the children of Sabra and Shatila, and were not afraid. As I focused my camera, they all held up their hands and made victory signs, right in front of their destroyed homes, where many had been killed. Dear little friends, you taught me what courage and struggle are about.  

As I walked home that evening to the Mayfair Residence in Hamra, where I had been given an apartment away from the camps, I walked past large Israeli tanks packed with soldiers. In my mind’s eye, I could only see the Palestinian children of the camps with their arms raised defiantly in the victory sign. As long as there were Palestinian children, the Palestinians would keep on going. That evening, I sat down in an exhausted state and wrote a letter to my husband in London: Dearest.  

Physical exhaustion comes on and off, hut I have no fear, no paranoia: our history has taught us otherwise. Would the slaves of yesterday have ever dreamt that one day they would he free and be called human beings? But this is our testimony – that historical trends are such that we will win. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow: maybe not this generation, maybe not even the next generation – but because we are human we will win, one day. Yes, it will take tenacity, discipline, sacrifice, a great price – hut that which rightly belongs to us we will recover some day.  

Darling, we are just two tiny individuals in this tide of historical liberation. Somewhere we may be washed away, forming the error margin – washed aside – but we know where the tide will flow, and nothing can stop it. It may sound rhetorical – hut in the whole history of the oppressed people struggling for justice, nothing will ever sound rhetorical enough.  

I cry like a young soldier would, one ready and prepared for a battle, but fallen even before the battle has begun. However, I laugh, laugh victoriously, for I know that there are millions that would carry on the struggle after me.  

I looked into the face of death and have seen its power and ugliness, hut I have also looked into its eyes, and seen its fear. For our children are coming, and they are not afraid. 

  

Orphans after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in front of the wall where their parents were murdered. 

 

   

Chapter 8  

The inevitable happened: Gaza Hospital reopened on 1 October 1982. The Palestinian staff came back, at great personal risk. Circumstances were very difficult. People were picked up by the Army, and many of them never came back. 

The PRCS was still not allowed to function as a legal body. The Palestinians worked under the auspices of the International Red Cross, which behaved honourably by leaving the running of the hospital to the Palestinians. What made things difficult, however, was the presence of foreigners brought in to support the work of the hospital. Many of them were new, and some of them were unable to appreciate what the Palestinians had been through. This created a fair amount of friction. It was difficult enough for the PRCS to have to work covertly as an organisation. It was even worse for the Palestinian doctors and nurses who had been through so much to be ordered around by foreigners, many of whom were not properly qualified, in their own Gaza Hospital.  

For many days after the news of the massacre broke, Gaza Hospital was visited by taxis from Damascus. These were sent by fighters who had been evacuated to Syria. The driver would call into the hospital with a list of names, and one of the PRCS staff would go with him to look for the people on the list. They were usually the relatives of evacuated fighters, who now wanted to take their families away from the camps in case another massacre took place. More often than not the taxis left the camp empty, heading back to the anxious fighters with the sad news that their loved ones could not he found.  

I could only guess how the Palestinian fighters who had been evacuated must have felt. When they left their families behind, they entrusted them to the powerful Western nations who guaranteed their safety. They left Lebanon after ten weeks of bombardment so that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon would end and Lebanese and Palestinian civilians would be spared. They had done so at the request of various Lebanese and Arab leaders. Tucked away now in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Greece and other countries, no doubt they felt betrayed and wished that they had stayed after all – whatever everyone else wanted. If they had stayed, Israel would have flattened Lebanon; when they left, their families were massacred.  

The morale of the camp people had reached an all-time low. As Dr Morris said to some reporters, ‘The massacre was the last straw.’ In the afternoons and evenings, after work, I would visit the camps, just to talk to people and to listen to them.  

I only knew Leila Shahid after the massacres. She is a Lebanese Palestinian, who at that time was working for the PRCS, and we met when she offered to help the foreign volunteers who had survived the massacres leave Beirut. I did not leave, and we got to know each other better after my colleagues left. She was extremely well-educated, multilingual, passionate and vivacious. I just took to Leila and adored her. She was very important in keeping me going after the massacres: I drew a lot of my strength from her. She would remind me to eat, insist I went to sleep, and try to comfort me when I got too depressed.  

She took me to visit various Palestinians who had survived the massacres, and we recorded their statements. I knew that such documentation was a vital although grim part of Palestinian history. Leila loves her people, and this affected me deeply. It was the way she would spend hours listening to survivors, even little children, that was so touching. She often cried when she heard the terrible things that happened to them. ‘You know, the massacre is not only the mere killing of my people,’ she told me. It is the destruction of our entire society. Our family unit was destroyed through the evacuation. The infrastructures which enabled our people to survive were also destroyed by the war – factories, workshops, training institutes, commercial companies. It took so much to build all these structures so that we Palestinians could live like everyone else. Now with them destroyed, many of us will be forced to return to living like refugees, depending on foreign aid. What are the survivors going to do to live?’ My understanding of the Palestinians was scanty, and Leila patiently explained to me how the Palestinians were suffering not only in Lebanon, but also in the Israeli-occupied territories.  

Leila, Hadla, Azziza, Um Walid and many other officials of the PRCS struck me as being very special women. They were not only capable and dedicated, but outstandingly human – always patient and approachable to people who needed their time. It was very interesting to see them work. They would be in their offices, with the door open, and people would just come in and take a seat around them. Each person would bring up their problems in turn to be ‘solved’, and took as long as he or she wanted. It was this ability to switch from person to person without being ruffled that amazed me, since some of the problems were indeed shocking.  

On the evening of the day the hospital reopened, my friend Leila and I found ourselves in a little shop in Shatila camp, with Mouna’s grandmother. Mouna was an elevenyear-old boy, the last massacre victim treated in Gaza Hospital before we were taken away by the murderers. He was the one who lay buried at the bottom of a pile of dead bodies pretending to be dead. Twenty-seven members of his family were killed. His wounds responded slowly to treatment, but his grandmother’s wounds did not.  

The seventy-year-old matriarch had walked twenty kilometres from south Lebanon to Shatila camp to visit her children and grandchildren. When she arrived, she found all of them dead, except her old husband and little Mouna.  

Her oldest son, Abu Zuhair, was a Tel al-Zaatar fighter. A Palestinian refugee camp, Tel al-Zaatar was attacked and blockaded for six months in 1976 before a ceasefire was agreed on, to allow the camp civilians to be evacuated. But during the evacuation, three thousand Palestinians were murdered. There was very little international publicity about the Tel al-Zaatar massacre. Bulldozers came and flattened the camp and the bodies. White lime was sprinkled over the dead bodies, the flesh dissolved – and Tel al-Zaatar camp disappeared from the face of the earth.  

Abu Zuhair escaped that massacre, and made his way over the mountains to Shatila camp. Mouna’s grandmother, a Hadji, whose head was veiled with a large white Palestinian scarf, spoke with tears in her eyes, and Leila and I listened: ‘Why did you die, Abu Zuhair? How could you come to me from across the mountains, all the way from Tel al-Zaatar with a Kalashnikov in your hand, only to be slaughtered like a sheep in Shatila camp? What is there left to say?  

  

Youssef Hassan Mohammed 

‘Our doves are still here. Our carnations give fragrance. The sparrows sing their usual songs. Yet Abu Zuhair is nowhere to be found.  

‘Beirut, you took all I have. You took my last spark in 

life. My heart lies dead on your street.  

‘Abu Zuhair, the tall, young tree, was cruelly snapped off from his roots on your soil. May the blood of whoever murdered you mingle with yours. May his mother suffer the same agony. 

‘Who dug your grave, Abu Zuhair? Who brought this disaster unto us? What can I say in your memory?  ‘My heart is full of reproach towards this unfeeling world. Not even a hundred ships, nor two hundred stallions, would be enough to carry the load of pain in my heart.  ‘What can I say? “Mother,” you tell me, “go visit our graves and pray for those they engulf.”  

‘I go to the grave and tenderly embrace its stones. I implore it to make space so you can breathe. I tell it, “Please let your stones warmly embrace the bodies of my loved ones within, take care of them, I have entrusted them to you.”  

‘I mourn your youth and mourn for all the young girls who never knew a moment of happiness or contentment: they went to meet life so hopeful and eager, and ended up being trampled and torn by its ferocity.  

Oh God, I can’t go on. He was the handsomest of men and the strongest of youths. He used to pave the way for others, to facilitate their path.  

‘Your young body mingled with the earth too soon, your eyes filled with the sand.  ‘What else can I give to my country? My heart is full of agony and reproach to life.  

‘How I envy those of you who were there when my loved ones died. Did they die thirsty? Or were you merciful enough to give them a drink?  

‘I implore every passing bird to carry my anxiety and love to you, then to come back with news of my loved ones.  

‘My child, your body is strewn with bullets. Who sent you to me, crow of ill-omen? Why do you inflict disasters on me all at once? Spare them a bit, oh God. God – wait at least a year, then Thy will be done.  

‘I implore you, bearers of the coffins, move slowly. Do not hurry. Let me see my loved ones once more.  

‘I go to the graves and roam listlessly around. I call Abu Zuhair, then I call Um Walid (his sister). My calls remain unanswered. They are not there. They followed Um Zuhair (Abu Zuhair’s wife) and the young ones. They all left one night by moonlight – all my loved ones.  

‘My child, you are near me no more. Mountains of distance are between us.  

‘Nabil (Abu Zuhair’s nephew) calls his mother. “Mother,” he says, “to whom have you left me?”  

‘Zahra answers, “I have left you in the care of your uncles. They should tell you of me and take you to my grave so my eyes can look at you and my heart reach out to you.” But Abu Zuhair has gone and he can’t carry out Zahra’s will.  

  

Hadji, the wife of Youseff Hassan Mohammaed, ‘They all left one night by moonlight – all my loved ones.’ 

‘Zuhair (Abu Zuhair’s son) asks his father, “To whom have you entrusted me?”  

‘“Your grandfather will come for you. You are the 

continuation of his life.”  

‘But life, what life is left to us? Our hearts have died. Our tears have dried, for all the young men and women who died.  ‘Where can I turn to? Where are my children?  ‘My child, may God show you the holy path, and may my love and care be a lantern to accompany you along the way.  ‘Almighty God, give me patience. Young men, please stay away: you renew my wounds and I am so weary. What can I say?’  

The words of Hadji, the wife of Youssef Hassan Mohammed, reduced my Palestinian friend Leila to tears. She told me roughly what had been said. (I had my tape recording translated into English back in London.) Many Westerners thought life in the Middle East was less precious, and that one should not apply Western standards of life and death to the Palestinians. I hate people who say that, for they are both ignorant and racist. For anyone to say that Palestinians are immune to pain is evil. Each time I read the translation of Hadji’s lament for her children and grandchildren, I cry, but I can never pretend that I can even feel a fraction of her pain. 

That night, I left Shatila camp and got very depressed. Leila was leaving for London the following day, and out of desperation I wrote an open letter, a letter of appeal to the conscience of the world. The British press might refuse to print it, but at least I would have written it. What else could I do for the camp people?  

Open Letter 1 October 1982.  

My name is Dr Swee Chai Ang (Mrs Khoo). I am a woman Orthopaedic Surgeon, a member of the British Medical Association, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of London, and permanently residing in Great Britain. I left London on 15 August, 1982, in response to a Beirut appeal for an orthopaedic surgeon.  

I am writing to you from West Beirut, from Gaza Hospital, the hospital for Sabra and Shatila camp. I am one of the members of the foreign medical team which worked right through the massacre of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people in the camps which took place between the 15-18 September, 1982.  

I treated some of the victims, witnessed the shelling and bulldozing of the camp houses. These houses were the homes of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese people.  

Those who have died have already died, and none of us can bring them back to life again. I am now appealing to you on behalf of those who have survived the massacre – mostly women and young children.  

Most of their homes have been bombed, shelled, bulldozed and looted. There is no electricity for them, and a scarcity of safe water supply. Yet thousands have returned to live in these heaps of rubble because they otherwise will have nowhere to go to.  

The Lebanese winter is coming, and thousands will have no roofs over their heads.  

Then there is the problem of livelihood. With most of the male population aged between 15 to 60 years old either shot, arrested or asked to leave, the breadwinners for many families are gone.  

I have seen many women from these camps soliciting in the streets to get some income to feed their little children. This, in the local culture, is the worst form of humiliation for these women – especially when their husbands’ bodies are still rotting in the rubble.  

While peace returns to Beirut, nightclubs, cinemas, brothels and entertainment parks re-open. High finance and banking return. Yet 250,000 people are living in utter misery and insecurity.  

They have no rights, no work permits and live in ruin and rubble. Then these ruins and rubble are officially declared illegal and many are asked to quit their partially destroyed homes at short notice – not knowing where to go from here.  

As one who originates from the Third World, I have seen much poverty and suffering. But this is the worst I have ever seen so far.  

They need every help and support you can give. Many of them are emotionally prepared to starve or die of cold – but they have asked me to beg you to recognise them as human beings – like yourselves – and they wish to be accorded a human status.  

If you have any room in your hearts for these people, please contact them – through me – at the Gaza Hospital. Thank you.  

Dr Swee Chai Ang, MBBS, MSc, FRCS  

Orthopaedic Surgeon  

Gaza Hospital, Sabra and Shatila camp, West Beirut  

There was no response at all to my letter, though Francis did manage to get the New Statesman in London to print it. The British press was not interested in printing the letter as it had ‘no news value’. Neither my foreign-sounding name, nor the sufferings of the survivors in the camps, a mere two weeks after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, were of any news value. Back in Beirut, we plodded on.  

The massacre and its aftermath had left me feeling very ill. I was running a temperature, and slept badly. It was only little by little that I managed to make my way about the camps – and the strain of discovering new horrors made every walk an ordeal.  

Floor by floor, Gaza Hospital began to function. But Gaza Hospital was not only a hospital. The upper floors were occupied by the homeless camp families who had nowhere to go. Nor were all in-patients necessarily those who needed inpatient medical treatment. Many of them were kept in a hospital bed because they had no home or relatives. In the old days a hospital used to be a hospice as well, and Gaza was certainly performing both roles when it reopened, but the British administrators of Gaza Hospital did not like it at all.  

One day, a colleague came up to me, and said in a sarcastic tone, ‘Can you go and discharge some of the squatters? This is a hospital, and we are not here to provide charity for squatters.’  

This made me furious. He had dared to call the 

Palestinians squatters, in their own Gaza Hospital.  ‘Why don’t you go and discharge them yourself?’ I said. ‘You’ve been put in here and have the honour of being in charge – you do the work! Personally, I think all of them have good reasons to be here. Take old Professor Arnaouti. He is seventy-two. I know in the UK you can treat someone with bronchitis as an out-patient. But patients in the UK have homes to be treated in. Arnaouti’s home and family are in Jerusalem. Of course, if you can arrange for him to go back to Jerusalem for treatment, you go ahead. But till you can do that, don’t you dare ask me to discharge him, you ignorant, patronising bastard!’  

My colleague was stunned at the viciousness of my tongue, and word went round among the expatriate crowd that I was a bloody-minded so-and-so. Indeed I was. The Palestinians could take abuse quietly when they had to, but there was no reason why I should. The expatriate administrators learnt I could be just as abusive as any British male when provoked. From then on they left me alone.  

There was no peace within the camp. The trauma of the massacre remained fresh in the minds of everyone and they were now constantly harassed by the Army. Homes were searched, furniture smashed up and people were taken away to military detention centres. People were desperate. Nightly, large tanks drove through the narrow camp streets at high speed.  

One evening I saw one of these tanks suddenly stop in front of a partially damaged camp home, and without warning, fire a rocket at it, reducing it instantly to a heap of rubble. I walked on. The Shatila end of the main road of the camp was flooded. Over-zealous bulldozers had been tearing away at the homes all day, and had ripped apart the main water and sewage pipes of the camp. The drinking water was polluted by sewage effluent, and the place was just a big mess.  

Turning into a camp alley, I walked towards the sports stadium. I had not found the strength to visit this area before. At sunset, it looked hideous. People had been killed here, people were buried here: I seemed to hear their voices echoing mournfully in the wasteland. This place had been pounded incessantly by Israeli aeroplanes during the siege. During the massacre, it was occupied by the Israelis, and the camp people told me that trucks of men, women and children were taken to the stadium by the Israelis, and many had ‘disappeared’.  

The body of a little child I had once treated had been found in the stadium on 18 September, the day of the massacre. With other little children, he had been blown up by a hand grenade thrown into their midst. All around the stadium I could see clothes, mostly women’s clothes. Angry survivors told me large numbers of women had been forced en masse to undress, and were raped by the soldiers before they were killed. They said soldiers of the Israeli Army watched all this taking place, but did nothing to stop it. Indeed, it was the Israelis who had brought this group of soldiers to the stadium.  

A Lebanese Christian who survived the massacre led me to his partially destroyed home, and gave me his testimony on tape. He lived near the stadium, and from his hiding place, saw what went on. He was furious that human beings were capable of doing this to others. He ended by shouting into the tape-recorder, ‘No more! Even a seventy-year-old woman was brutally raped and killed.’ He was shaking with anger, and his wife came out to calm him down.  

Leaving the two of them in the ruins of their home, I hurried towards the hospital, in case I was needed.  

Back in the emergency room at Gaza Hospital there was a young man anxiously waiting to see me. He had brought his wife. He thought she was severely disturbed. Indeed she was, and she had hardly slept for a month after seeing the massacre. She ate little, cried most of the time and broke into screams at night. I knew she needed a psychiatrist, but there was none around. I drew out a large syringe full of valium, and injected it into one of the veins of her arm. Turning to her husband, I said, ‘That will make sure she sleeps for two hours. She might be less disturbed when she wakes up. Here are some tranquillisers. You should encourage her to take them until she manages to come to grips with herself. She is not mad. Anyone who saw what happened would behave in the same way.’ He lifted her up in his arms and made his way back to the camps. There were just too many cases like that.  

That night I heard the Arabic radio announce that Lebanon would be prepared to keep fifty thousand 

Palestinians: they would be deported to the Beka’a valley. But there were nearly half a million Palestinians in Lebanon. Where were the rest supposed to go? My thoughts were interrupted by the first thunderstorm I had seen in Lebanon – the rains were on their way. The bitter Lebanese winter was due in a few weeks. Where would the Palestinians spend this winter?  

While the thunder rumbled in the distance, we heard the sound of a motor vehicle pulling up just next to the hospital. It was an armoured car, followed by a military jeep. A man in military uniform, presumably the officer, came out. In loud Arabic he asked for a doctor. Six of his men had fallen off the rooftop of one of the camp houses while arresting Palestinians. I asked him if he was Lebanese. He said he was, and that he was from Ba’albek. 

I shuddered at the very mention of Ba’albek. During the massacre, the wounded had told me that the soldiers who broke into their homes were not Israelis but gunmen with a Ba’albek accent. Were these the same lot, then? These soldiers could have taken part in the camp massacre, and then have stayed behind to do house-to-house arrests. On top of that they now had the audacity to come into a Palestinian hospital and ask for treatment. I got angry.  

It was time to get even, I said to myself. Then in a loud voice I told them there was no doctor around. It was easy to get them to believe me, as they assumed I was a little Asian nurse.  

Then I felt someone gently tugging at my white coat: it was Azziza, the hospital administrator. She wanted to talk to me in private. ‘Please, Swee,’ she said, ‘you have to treat these people. I know what you are thinking. But believe me, my family have suffered so much – and I ask you to do this, for our sake. We were forced to leave Jerusalem, then the siege, then the massacre – all these wounds are still sore, but we cannot deny anyone medical care. We are the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and our principles compel us to give medical care to all alike, even our enemies.’  

I looked into the face of this beautiful Lebanese Palestinian girl, sad and heavy with all the sufferings she had been through, yet so gentle. My mind went back nine years to the oath I took upon graduation in Singapore: to treat patients irrespective of race, colour or creed. Yes, it was part of the Hippocratic oath all doctors pledge to honour. We were all idealistic medical students then. Azziza had reminded me of the very fundamentals of medical ethics. So I ambled back to Casualty, apologised to the officer from Ba’albek, said that the misunderstanding arose through my very poor Arabic and started treating his soldiers. Their injuries were fortunately minor, but all the same, they were grateful for the medical attention.  

It was about 3 AM when we finished cleaning, stitching and dressing the wounds. They were given tetanus toxoid and prophylactic antibiotics. Towards the end, we became quite chatty, and I even started advising the officer that his boys were really working far too long hours. He told me they were very poorly paid, and worked long hours away from their families in Ba’albek. Perhaps the accident would be a good excuse, he said, for him to send some of them home for a short spell.  

By the time the armoured cars pulled away from Gaza Hospital, the soldiers were showing me photographs of their families, and inviting me to visit their villages in Ba’albek, which they claimed was the most beautiful place in Lebanon. Surely incidents like this must contribute towards helping people understand each other.  

All the patients were still awake. They had seen the two armoured cars, and when I went up to the surgical floors they asked what they wanted with the hospital. They offered me cups and cups of Arabic tea. I was truly fond of my patients, and it made me happy to be with them. But that night I was also very sad, because I had just heard that my contract with the volunteer agency was not being renewed. I was being advised by my Lebanese sponsors to leave the country.  

They said there was ‘no demand for an orthopaedic surgeon’, but I did not think the laws of supply and demand came into it for a minute. I was running the Orthopaedic Department of Gaza Hospital and was the only doctor in the camps with an English Surgical Fellowship. There was a nightmarishly long list of war cripples waiting for surgery to straighten them out. I looked at my patients: those with infected, unknitted fractures awaiting operations, those with large raw wounds awaiting debridement and skin grafting or flap coverage; those with shrapnel and bullets needing removal; the women with fractured hips needing prosthetic hip replacements.  

I knew that poor Abu Ali, the Palestinian theatre superintendent, had been risking his life crossing the military checkpoints over the past few days to get hold of better orthopaedic surgical instruments to equip the theatre for major reconstructive surgery. Any adult male Palestinian between the ages of fourteen and sixty could be arrested at any of the checkpoints as a suspected terrorist’, and join the ranks of the ‘disappeared’. Abu Ali had told me that the theatre would be ready for major orthopaedic surgery by the end of the next week, and then we could really get working on the old war injuries, some of which were five months old. Now I was told that my employer wanted me out by then. I did not even want to tell the hospital staff and my patients this piece of bad news. They had suffered enough, and I would only upset everyone further if I brought out this nonsense of no demand for an orthopaedic surgeon.  

I could guess the real reason for my dismissal easily enough It certainly had nothing to do with the PRCS. My expatriate colleagues had no doubt complained that I had been rude and vicious to them, and that I had put them at risk by being openly anti-Israeli. They had probably refused to work with me.  

Meanwhile everyone was happy, and I tried to be happy too. The women made tea, the children sat around, the radio played Arabic music and we all talked and laughed. For the time being, we managed not to think of the ugliness of the real world. At 4 AM in Gaza Hospital, we were happy.  

The next morning Dr Amir, the Lebanese doctor, did all the operating. I looked through the glass window of the operating theatre and watched the enthusiastic young doctor at work, and felt really proud of him. Downstairs in the Casualty Department, a Palestinian doctor treated all the fractures and sutured the wounds; and did the morning ward round and instructed the nurses. Perhaps my sponsors had a point. Perhaps it was time to go. I asked my Lebanese and Palestinian colleagues for the day off to visit south Lebanon, and they were delighted to let me go. 

   

Chapter 9  

This was my first trip to south Lebanon. I left the camps together with Ellen Siegel, who was someone I had become very close to during and after the massacres. She was American and Jewish and came to work as a friend of the Palestinian and Lebanese people. She said, ‘Gifts of shrapnel are not all that we in the United States can send to the people in Lebanon.’ And she volunteered her skills as a nurse to the people in Lebanon. As a Jew, she was particularly concerned about the Palestinians, a people she said had been badly hurt by her own people.  

Ellen was extremely lively and vivacious. She wore large, tinted glasses, through which one could just about see her green eyes and long eyelashes. Her hair was dark with large soft curls. She spoke slowly, with a deep American accent, and with her tall slender build, Ellen looked like a white middle-class American woman out of the movies. Everything about Ellen was beautiful; her movements were graceful, her conversation was soft and feminine. And she was one of the most courageous women I have ever met. She had to fight all her life against anti-Arab racism amongst Americans, and she had to put up with attacks by other American Jews against her because of her stand against Israel and her support for the Palestinians. 

Fascinated by Ellen, I asked her how old she was. She told me she was forty. ‘I can’t believe that, Ellen,’ I said. ‘You look in your late twenties.’  

‘Oh,’ she answered, ‘it must be because I’ve spent all my life working for the Palestinians: I forgot to grow old. You are only starting, Swee. It is a long, long struggle. One day, you will also become forty, and you will not feel forty at all, because there is so much to do, and you feel as though you 

have just started.’  

(Ellen was absolutely right. When I was forty I had spent six years of my life supporting the Palestinians. I did feel and do feel that I have only begun.)  

After leaving the camp we went to Kola, the flyover near the Arabic University. Next to this flyover was an unofficial station where one could take a ‘service’ taxicab to the south. These were Mercedes cars which took up to five passengers to common destinations. The fare was then split five ways, making it cheap enough for people to travel. There were no buses or trains in Beirut. The very rich had their own private cars and either used them or went around in taxis – the rest of us walked or took the ‘service’.  

Saida and Sour were cities in south Lebanon: the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre.  

‘Saida! Saida!’ shouted one lot of service drivers, while the others, determined not to be outdone, shouted, ‘Sour! Sour!’ even louder. The place sounded like a fish market placed right in the middle of a busy junction.  

Our service driver, after twenty minutes of touting, got his five passengers. In the back seat were Ellen, myself and another woman – we did not ask if she was Lebanese or Palestinian, as most Palestinians did not want to admit they were Palestinians at that time. She was middle-aged, wore a scarf round her hair, and was well covered with clothes and subcutaneous adipose tissue. She was jovial, friendly and cuddly. Travelling with her was a wire cage containing two noisily clucking white hens. In the front seat were two men, who started chatting to the driver as soon as they got in, as though they were old friends. They talked about everything under the sun, from their families to international and local politics, about Ayatollah Khomeini, the future of Lebanon, Mrs Thatcher of Britain, the Palestinians, and so on and so forth. What a case of verbal diarrhoea, I thought to myself.  

The traffic on the Saida road was terrible. We crawled along in a long queue of cars in a dense traffic jam. The reason for the traffic jam? Bloody checkpoints. First, we were stopped like everyone else at the checkpoint of the ‘official’ Lebanese Army, where we all produced our papers and the boot of the car was opened and searched. Then we were stopped at the checkpoint of the Kata’ebs – the Lebanese Christian militia who were blamed by the Israelis for the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Then we were stopped at the checkpoint of the Haddads – Lebanese Christians who worked for the Israelis. They were mainly from south Lebanon, and were better known as the South Lebanese Army. Then we were stopped at the checkpoint of the Israeli Army; and yet another checkpoint of the Israeli Army; and so on, and so on.  

Our driver cursed and swore at each checkpoint. No, that is not strictly true. As he approached a checkpoint, he would draw up by the soldiers with their M 16 rifles and their tanks, and greet them in Arabic: ‘God be with you.’  

After we were through the checkpoint, he would start cursing and swearing: ‘Bastards, sons of whores!’ and let out a whole string of Arabic swear words beyond the decency of translation.  

The traffic jam gave us the chance to absorb the view on both sides of the road. On one side we passed a devastated landscape: army barracks, large tanks and armoured trucks, whole villages bombed out of existence, large bulldozers with Hebrew letters on them, the same type we saw on 18 September tearing down camp houses and burying bodies under rubble in Shatila camp.  

On the other side of the road was a long stretch of sandy beach flanking the sea. There were people fishing and even sunbathing in certain areas! Lebanon was certainly a place of surprises.  

The ‘service’ taxicab brought us to the city of Saida, and for another three Lebanese lira the driver took us to the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh, just on the outskirts of the city. Ain al-Helweh – ‘beautiful eyes’ or 

‘view’, in Arabic – was the home of seventy thousand Palestinians before the Israeli invasion. As Ellen and I walked into the camp, what greeted our eyes was a big area of scorched earth, with small bits of brickwork standing no higher than three or four feet: no trees, no houses, no shops, not even partly bombed-out buildings. At one end of the camp was a row of recently-erected, corrugated-zinc huts. Within them were a few Palestinian families who were returning to the camp.  

We said ‘Hello’ to the children. They had the same smiles as the children of Sabra and Shatila. I knew these kids would write the next chapter of Palestinian history for, just like the kids further north, they were not afraid.  

The other camps near Saida were just as destitute, with very active bulldozers clearing away rubble, and Palestinian families watching the last bits of their homes being carted away.  

It was getting late, and we would soon have to head north for Beirut. In Saida, we managed to visit two places of interest. The first was the citadel, a fort built into the Mediterranean Sea during the time of the Crusaders. It was next to the harbour, which was still busy with people hurrying to and fro. Apart from Israeli gunboats, there were no boats in the harbour. The citadel was now occupied by Israeli and Haddad soldiers. Groups of women and children were gathered round them. Women were asking for missing relatives, and the children looked like orphans seeking father figures’, wanting to touch their guns and helmets. It was perfectly possible that some of the children had been made orphans by these very soldiers. 

With freshly-painted road signs in Hebrew, and Israeli and Haddad checkpoints and soldiers in command at various junctions, it was clear that the south was under occupation, and would remain so for quite a long time.  

The other place Ellen and I visited was Saida Mosque. This was the first time in six years I had been in a mosque, the last time being in the National Mosque in Malaysia. Saida Mosque was much smaller than Malaysia’s National Mosque, but equally beautiful. Its tranquil atmosphere, symmetrical mosaics and perfect geometry reflected a different world – the heavenly world of God. Islamic culture might be beautiful and perfect and heavenly, but all around me was the real world Muslims lived in, a world of impoverishment, of suffering, of war – a world of hell.  

After visiting Saida Mosque, it really was time for us to go north again. Ellen and I were both exhausted by the time we reached Beirut, and we decided to go back to the Mayfair Residence in Hamra instead of Sabra camp, as neither of us had slept or washed for a few days. 

   

Chapter 10  

It was a real pleasure to step into the apartment. Mayfair Residence was a fancy apartment block, with individual selfcontained studio flats. Each apartment was complete with a large bed-cum-living room, bathroom, kitchenette, and a small balcony overlooking fashionable Hamra. From this balcony, I once managed to photograph two large tanks sealing off the entire street, and a truckload of soldiers entering houses to arrest people. Most of those arrested were Palestinian males between fourteen and sixty years old, but a fair number of Lebanese were also taken away.  

One day there was a commotion in the reception of one of the blocks of flats. Ben Alofs, a volunteer from the Netherlands whom we called ‘Big Ben’, had grabbed the proprietor of the flats by the throat, shouting, ‘You bastard, you collaborator!’ and was shaking him up as if he was a kid. Ben was always soft-spoken and gentle, and once trained as a priest. It was something to see him so angry. The reason was plain – the proprietor had voluntarily betrayed a Palestinian family living in the flats to the Army. Despite the proprietor’s collaboration, the flats were searched just the same.  

Palestinians and their Lebanese friends were hunted down like foxes. Those fortunate enough to survive detention who were subsequently released bore horrible torture marks; some of them were crippled by the beatings. But they were luckier than those who simply disappeared without trace.  

My flatmate in the Mayfair Residence was a young and pretty American nurse from New Jersey. We nicknamed her ‘Mary Elizabeth Taylor’ because of her good looks and the number of admirers she had. Mary was not only good- looking, but also kind and ridiculously generous. She arrived with the rest of the American women around the time I came to Beirut, with huge bags full of food, medicines, washing powder, batteries and other essentials which she then proceeded to share with anyone who needed them. Like the rest of the American medical volunteers, Mary came to help the people in Lebanon, and to take a personal stand against 

America’s war aid policy in Lebanon. She told me, ‘If our government hadn’t sent those bombs, Lebanon would not be in this state.’  

Although Mary wanted to work with us in the Palestinian refugee camps, she was directed by the British nursing administrators to work full-time in the American University Hospital. There was strong anti-American sentiment among the British section of the volunteers, some of whom blindly put all the blame for Lebanon’s disaster on all Americans. The American nurses and doctors who volunteered their services to the war victims of Lebanon became the targets for attacks by some British volunteers, who made no distinction between aggressive American foreign policy, and the American citizens who came all the way here to take a stand on the side of those hurt by their government.  

‘Since you Americans caused all this trouble,’ they told Mary, ‘you might as well stay clear of everyone else and just stick to the American University Hospital.’  

She beat the system by putting in a full forty-hour week in the American University Hospital, and then working an extra thirty hours in the operating theatres of Gaza Hospital, helping Abu Ali set up the theatres and sorting out the surgical instruments.  

My husband Francis and I have the following simple theory: generous people have Group O blood. Mary fitted our theory: she had Group O blood. She was also ‘Rhesus Negative’. Her blood group meant that she could give blood to anybody. Unfortunately, no one was recommended to donate blood more than once in three months. Mary lied, and I found out to my horror that she sometimes gave blood twice a day. When I objected, she would just reply, ‘Don’t worry, Swee. My great-grandparents came from Ireland. We are all strong work-horses. Look, I am really strong – a work-horse.’  

That was typical of Mary: I just cannot put into words how much happiness Mary brought to all of us by her generosity and her sunny disposition.  

When Ellen Siegel and I got back from Saida that night, Mary was already back, and she had washed and bleached my overalls. She had also cooked us some dinner. ‘Look, it is really no good being so late,’ Mary said. ‘The chips have all gone oily and soggy!’  

As we sat down to eat Mary’s oily, soggy chips, there was a phone call for Miss Ellen Siegel. It was about testifying before the Kahan Commission of the Israelis.  

Ellen was the only one who was hot and bothered about testifying to the Kahan Commission. I dismissed it as one of those ‘Israeli things’ and had not given it a second thought. I knew that there had been a large demonstration in Tel Aviv, where four hundred thousand Israeli citizens protested against the invasion of Lebanon and the massacre in the refugee camps. A significant number of Israeli soldiers had been put in prison for refusing to serve in Lebanon. I also knew about the formation of the Commission of Inquiry by the Israelis, but commissions of inquiry were being set up all over the world, five of them to my knowledge.  

I had seen more than enough of the death and destruction Israel had brought to people in Lebanon. ‘They have no right to set up anything,’ I told Ellen when she had finished speaking on the phone.  

But Ellen was very serious about the whole thing. ‘We must all go to Jerusalem,’ she told me, and testify before Israel. We must let Israel know of her responsibility in this whole business. She showed me her own testimony, which she had just written, and planned to give it to a journalist friend who was going to Jerusalem to cover the hearings as evidence to be considered by the Kahan Commission.  ‘Would you come with me, Swee?’ she asked. ‘It would be wonderful if you came too, because you are like a newborn babe in this whole business. You are not biased through prior knowledge of all the rights and wrongs in the Middle East. Your evidence would be important for the Commission. Just as we should try to track down Nazi war criminals, we must also help throw light on what happened in Sabra and Shatila. If you are prepared to come along, then perhaps the others like Paul. Louise and Ben might come too.’ Ellen was ever so persuasive, but I asked for some time to think it over.  

That night, I lay awake in bed and did some soul- searching. I had to be careful not to confuse the warmongering and aggressive state of Israel – whose invasion of Lebanon had made a hundred thousand people homeless and destitute – and the four hundred thousand Israelis who demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding an end to the war. The Kahan Commission did not just happen, it was formed under pressure. There had been so many massacres of Palestinians since the formation of Israel – Deir Yassin to Tel al-Zaatar, Jordan to Lebanon, southern Lebanon to Beirut. This was the first time such an investigation had been set up by Israel.  

I thought about the plight of the people in the camps who survived the invasion and the massacre and were now living in utter misery; and about those whose bodies were buried under rubble and in mass graves. I thought about how desperately I tried to get the truth about the massacres out, and how so many Western news reporters did not want to hear. Because I was from the Third World, a coloured woman – they would not even give me an interview. I thought about how the Briton in charge of our volunteer team had tried to block my telex statement about the massacre. He – and others – made it clear they thought that health workers should do their work and keep quiet: to speak out the way I did was to go outside my ‘proper’ role. Furthermore, it was wrong for me to say anything anti-Israeli.  

I thought about how they had wanted to shut me up. I had told them it would have been better if the massacre had not happened, because then I would not have to say anything against the murderers! For the first time, I realised a little of how the Palestinian victims must have felt. They have been wounded again and again, and denied the voice to state their case.  

I made my mind up. Israeli politics might well be terribly complicated and sophisticated; the Kahan Commission might well have its own motives. In the final analysis, these things did not matter at all, just so long as testifying gave me a chance to put the case of the camp folks in front of anyone who cared to listen.  

Early next morning, I told Ellen of my decision to come along with her. She was delighted. We then went to see three other members of the foreign team – Dr Paul Morris, Louise Norman, and ‘Big Ben’, the Dutch nurse. Ellen spoke to all of them in much the same way she spoke to me, and they agreed to come as well. Louise Norman was the Swedish nurse who was left behind in the intensive care unit of Gaza Hospital after twenty of us were ordered out on the morning of 18 September. We wrote down all our particulars and gave them to Ellen to be sent to the Commission via her journalist friend.  After two days, the Kahan Commission got in touch with Ellen. They sent her a telex via the International Red Cross saying they had received her testimony, and the names of the doctors and nurses in Gaza Hospital who wished to testify, and had instructed the Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli Defence Force to locate us, and bring us safely before the Commission.  

I was quietly amused: I could not wait until the people who had wanted to stop me telexing my statement heard about this!  

At Gaza Hospital the next day, I came clean with the Palestine Red Crescent Society. I told Azziza my contract was not going to be renewed. More importantly, I told her of our decision to testify in Israel. My days with Gaza Hospital were now numbered, but I asked Azziza not to tell the patients about this because I could not cope with saying goodbye to them. I went on my usual ward round, stopping from time to time to take photographs of my patients.  

The little boy with typhoid dysentery was much better now. A few days before, he had been suffering from melaena – bleeding from the intestines. He needed multiple blood transfusions, but there was a severe shortage of blood. The Palestinian male nurse looking after him came up to me one evening and told me that the hospital blood bank had run out. When that happened what we did was go to the Multinational Peacekeeping Forces and ask for donors.  

So off we went to the French barracks to ask the officer in charge if there were any volunteers from among his men who had O positive blood. Unfortunately, all his men had given blood to another hospital the day before, and so they could not help. Then he suddenly thought of the Italians – they were just along the road and might be able to do something. He instructed one of his soldiers to drive us to the Italian barracks, and taught me the Italian for: ‘We need O positive blood.’  

Down at the Italian barracks, I had some difficulty getting across to the officer. I soon found out that he was apprehensive about sending his men into a Palestinian refugee camp, even if it was just to donate blood. At the back of his mind he was probably scared that his soldiers’ blood might help wounded terrorists. After a lot of persuasion, he finally agreed. Three Italian soldiers with O positive blood, escorted by three armoured cars, finally arrived at Gaza Hospital at five in the morning. I was once again reminded of how the world saw Palestinians as terrorists. Perhaps this was the first time the Italian boys had ever visited a Palestinian refugee camp.  

At Gaza Hospital, I decided to take the Italian soldiers upstairs to see our little patient, who by now was really ill. The soldiers were embarrassed, having expected to see a wounded terrorist. They gave blood and left. For many days after that, they returned to the hospital to visit their patient, and brought him flowers and all sorts of little gifts. One of them became a close family friend. He even posed for a photo with the boy and his father, and I was the proud photographer.  I then went up to old Professor Arnaouti’s bed. He was the ‘squatter’ from Jerusalem my British colleague had wanted me to evict. Arnaouti had been made homeless twice: once when he was made to leave Jerusalem; the second time when his Beirut home was destroyed by Israeli bombers. We called him Socrates, as he was one of the wisest persons we had met. He was multilingual, and politically well-informed. He was now an old man, and had no wish to go anywhere – except back to his birthplace, but he feared that he would die in exile in one of the PRCS hospitals in Beirut. He spoke perfect English with an Oxford accent. I wanted to say goodbye to the old Professor, but decided against it. I just wished him luck silently, and hoped that he would be able to see his beloved Jerusalem before he died.  

Then there were the boys Milad, Mouna, Essau. There were the girls in the next cubicle, Leila, Fat’mah and their sisters; and the men and women who were wounded and expecting their operations next week. It was absolutely awful even to think of leaving them.  

I had in my hand an appeal letter I had drafted to send to the President of Lebanon. It was signed by more than twenty foreign medical workers, all very concerned about the plight of people made destitute by the war and those arrested without reason. But the letter was never sent, as we realised that it would jeopardise the PRCS, since most of the signatories worked with them. This was no time to be provocative. 

   

Chapter 11  

Muslims hold a day of mourning forty days after someone has died, and 26 October was the fortieth day after the Beirut massacre. Ellen had suggested that we, the foreign medical workers, should assemble outside Gaza Hospital, and go down together to lay a wreath at the mass graves. We invited the press to cover this event, hoping it would draw attention to the camps. The wreath was bought and the press did turn up, but the procession was called off. The Lebanese Government was under heavy pressure from the Israelis to close down the PRCS. A procession which drew attention to the camps and the massacre would only provoke a reaction and provide a pretext to close down the PRCS. The procession was off, and we had to apologise to the press. A few of us slowly walked down to the mass graves to pay our respects.  

The camp folks had already preceded us to the graves, and on the large pile of earth there were little clusters of flowers and a few black banners. Much of Shatila had already been bulldozed flat, like a football field – without the grass, of course. I spoke to a group of young widows. One of them told me they had seen a white dove rising at dawn from the mass graves, and that, she told me, was a sign that the souls of their beloved children and husbands had found peace. Incidentally, it was my birthday – a very sad birthday morning. Though the sky was clear blue, and the sun was warm and splendid, this did nothing to lessen the pain in our hearts. And not being able to publicly commemorate and mourn the dead made our sorrow heavier.  

Ellen and I got back to the hospital just in time to halt arrangements for a farewell party. The hospital wanted to buy sweets and cakes.  

‘No need for all that – there is no farewell. We are just taking a trip to Jerusalem, and you’ll be waiting here for us, and we’ll come back to you,’ we told our friends in the PRCS.  By this time, a small crowd had gathered outside Gaza Hospital. The camp people had heard that doctors and nurses from Gaza Hospital were going to Jerusalem to testify on their behalf. They were thrilled, and many of them started to talk about Jerusalem and about Palestine. ‘Doctora, say hello to Akka, to Haifa,’ they said, ‘and kiss Jerusalem for us. May 

God protect you!’  

In the course of history many groups have laid claim to Jerusalem. King David seized her from the original inhabitants, and then the Romans captured and sacked her, then came the Muslims and the Ottomans, the British and the Zionists. Many could lay claim to Jerusalem on religious grounds, or as part of an Empire.  

But to these camp Palestinians, Jerusalem was very simply their home. They longed to be in Jerusalem to welcome us when we arrived: in exile they could not extend their Arab hospitality to us. Perhaps one day, they would be back in their parents’ house, waiting to welcome their friends from abroad.  

Ellen had packed her bags. We were ready to leave. We said goodbye to the hospital staff: to Hadla, Um Walid and Azziza, the three women who held Gaza Hospital together under the most difficult times, and to all the others who had struggled and had stayed strong despite every pressure, physical and psychological. When Azziza said goodbye, and had gone from view, my eyes dimmed with tears and I felt faint. ‘Swee, you mustn’t fall to bits,’ whispered a voice in my ear. ‘You won’t be able to do anything for these people if you fall to bits like this.’ It was dear Ellen. I pulled myself together, and we left for the Hamra apartment.  

When we returned to Hamra, the first thing I heard was a British doctor gleefully announcing that I was booked on a flight to London on 30 October. My expatriate colleagues must have been really glad to get rid of me!  

For the next two days, away from Sabra and Shatila camps, I had a taste of Beirut at peace. One afternoon I was walking towards the flat of Ama’s mother in Hamra when a man rushed towards me. With my inadequate Arabic I grasped that he wanted me to go with him. Whenever someone asked me to follow him or her, it was always to visit some very ill patient, and so I immediately assumed he had a sick relative. But when he started pulling on my arm, and offering me one, two, three, four and finally five hundred lira, and started to talk about one hour, half an hour and so forth I realised he had mistaken me for a prostitute. This transaction came to an abrupt halt when I showed him my doctor’s identity card. He vanished into the side streets, highly embarrassed.  

Ama ran up to me. He had been watching all this from a distance, and was getting worried. Anyway, I assured him that 

I was a ‘big’ girl, and everything had worked out okay in the end. Retook me up to his mother’s fiat and broke the story to her. This was my first introduction into the social and seedy side of Beirut.  

Ama was Misha’s friend, and Misha was a friend of Paul’s, and that was how we came to know each other. But Ama’s mother had become both my friend and mentor. Like most Palestinian mothers in Beirut, she was extremely worried about her two teenage sons. They were both over fourteen, and in Beirut, Palestinian males between fourteen and sixty were vulnerable to arrest and interrogation. And so there was no peace for Ama’s mother. Her husband had fortunately fled in good time. During the Israeli occupation of West Beirut, her block of flats was searched a few times, but her boys managed to hide during these raids. Owning a posh flat in the expensive end of Hamra district did not spare them from harassment.  

Ama’s mother was a goldmine of Palestinian history for me. I eagerly devoured everything she told me about Palestine. We would spend hours going through the newspaper coverage of the recent events, and my questions to her were endless. Ama’s father was a first-class Palestinian intellectual and political thinker, and it was my misfortune to have missed him. Ama’s mother was mind-blowing enough. An aristocratic Syrian of Palestinian origin, fair and wellspoken, she never stopped embroidering, even when she was analysing the various international peace plans for me, and making projections of the Palestinians’ future. Like the Palestinian women in the camps, she was embroidering on to a large piece of cloth a picture of the Palestine she recalled from her childhood.  

‘First the Palestinians in Jordan were put in tents, many years ago,’ she said. ‘Then a wall appeared around each tent. Quietly a roof was put up. A green plant appeared. Then more green plants. Then the sound of chickens, sheep… and in no time the camp became a village, with schools, shops and so on.’ She paused for a while, and then went on: ‘We make mistakes from time to time, and each time a mistake is made, our people pay dearly. Perhaps it will take a generation or two for the Palestinians to transform camps to villages, but once more that will happen.’  

‘Who is a Palestinian?’ she asked. ‘We are all over the place. Israel cannot wipe us out; no one can. Each generation is stronger than the previous one. We learn – really learn. Learn from mistakes, learn from strength. The aim is to win, not too soon, not too late, but just in time.’ 

Ama’s mother had packed boxes and boxes of hooks ready to be shipped to Syria, where they would be safe from the Israelis. For her, these books were more important than gold and jewellery. ‘They are the written records of the 

Palestinian struggle,’ she said. I really treasure those moments with Ama’s mother, and her flat became a second home to me.  

My third home was the office of the World Students’ Christian Federation (WSCF). Francis, my husband, was a staunch supporter of Singapore’s Student Christian Movement (SCM), a branch of the WSCF. The Singapore SCM was under constant threat of closure by the Singapore Government. It had always supported the fight for the rights of the oppressed. Compared to many wealthy European organisations, the WSCF office in Beirut was much humbler, poorer, had less facilities, but its doors were open to an outcast like me. Yusef Hajjar, who ran the office, would make Arabic coffee, and he and his colleague Jacqueline would listen to all my noisy complaints patiently, even though they might not believe everything I said. I helped myself to their typewriters and their photocopier, churning out open letters and statements about the Palestinians.  

It was in their office that I met Janet Stevens, an American journalist who some years later was killed in a bomb attack on the American Embassy in Beirut. Janet was always described posthumously as ‘a beautiful American’ by the Middle Eastern press. I remembered reading her reports on the invasion: as a journalist, her writing was uncompromising, and I respected her. She was a real and fearless friend of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. Times were very difficult then, and Yusef’s office was probably watched as well.  

It reminded me very much of Singapore’s SCM office, where Francis and I spent many hours typing and photocopying statements and literature of oppressed groups. Yusef always used to say, ‘When the chips are down, and the going gets tough, the Christians will be the only ones left to continue the struggle.’  

And I used to reply sarcastically, ‘A few Christians, you mean.’  

On 28 October 1982, two days after we left Gaza Hospital, Ellen Siegel was asked to get in touch with the Israeli Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Isaac Leor. He asked us to make our own way to Ba’abda in East Beirut, where he was stationed. We were scheduled to appear before the Kahan Commission on 1 November. It was time for me to inform my sponsors of my intentions. 

   

Chapter 12  

The head of the organisation which sponsored me on my visit to Lebanon was a wealthy Lebanese Christian, who was married to an American woman. I usually felt too unimportant to take up his time, but he had asked to see me after hearing that I wanted to testify before the Israelis. I sat outside his office waiting while he was having a meeting with some diplomats. After a while, a couple of important-looking men walked out of his office, and when they were well and truly gone, his secretary told me I might go in to speak to him.  

Seated in his air-conditioned office with its posh furnishings, he was looking away from me when I entered the room. He swung round on his swivel chair, motioned me to be seated, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘Why do you constantly give me trouble?’ he asked me glumly.  

‘What trouble?’ I asked.  

‘Well,’ he said, ‘first there was your telex. That was bad enough. Then you managed to get yourself quoted in all the Middle East’s magazines and newspapers. For the sake of your own safety, I suggested that you should leave, and you took it to mean we wanted to get rid of you, which was not our intention. Now I hear you want to go to Israel. I hope you realise that Israel and Lebanon are still at war, and your going to Israel to participate in such a commission of inquiry is not without its political implications.’  

Looking back now, I realise he was absolutely correct in what he said. But I was stubborn, and refused to listen to his reasons. Instead, I argued doggedly that I should go. We reached deadlock, and his tone became more threatening. He reminded me of my contract with the British charity which had sent me. I was not an independent agent who was free to generate publicity against advice. My British organisation might want to take legal action against me for breach of contract. It was only then I understood that he must be under a lot of pressure from outside, and I must have been a real headache for him.  

To absolve him from responsibility, I offered to resign. Then I could go down to Jerusalem as a free individual who was not attached to his organisation. This he accepted, but he warned me that it would be impossible for me to work in Lebanon again if I did that, since I needed to belong to a Lebanese organisation to continue my work with the 

Palestinians. He tried to persuade me that it would make more sense if I shut my mouth and was a proper surgeon’ for the Palestinians. Furthermore, he reminded me that I was only a refugee and stateless; if I incurred too much unfavourable publicity, the British might even not let me go back to Britain, and then I would be in real trouble. But it was no use, I had made up my mind to go, and that was it.  

As for the argument that charity workers had to remain neutral – I was not even interested. I remembered the poem by Pastor Niemöller which Francis once read to me. It was about not speaking up. The Nazis came for the Communists, the Jews, the trade unionists and the disabled – and no one spoke out. When the Nazis came for the others, there was no one left to speak out for them, since everyone else was killed.  

I had to say something while I was alive and still had a voice. Ben and Louise, who were both sponsored by the same organisation, were made to withdraw their requests to testify. In the end there were only Ellen, Paul Morris and myself. Paul and Ellen did not work for the same organisation as I did, and were therefore not subjected to the same pressure.  

Back in Mayfair Residence, I wrote to my sponsor, firstly to give him my official resignation, and secondly to tell him I had to lend my voice to the people of Sabra and Shatila and if that meant I had to pay the price of leaving Lebanon and jeopardising my own future plans, then it was just too bad. I also thanked the organisation for being a good host, for the truth was that they had been very good to the volunteers. I was sorry I had to upset them by acting against their advice.  

That evening some British and European medical volunteers came to see me at the Mayfair. I do not know if they were acting under instructions, or came out of paranoia, but anyway they accused me of risking their safety by testifying in Jerusalem. ‘Do you realise that by speaking up like this, all of us will get tarred by the same brush because of you?’ one of them asked.  

‘You’re endangering everyone’s life,’ said another, ‘and the good work we’re all doing here. If you go on being openly anti-Israeli and this whole place gets blown up by a five- hundred kilo bomb, you’re the one who’s responsible for it.’  

The blackmail and the pressure from my own teammates was especially difficult to cope with. In the end, Mary intervened. She moved me down a floor to the apartment of her friend Jill Drew. Then she stuck a large notice on the door of our apartment, which said: ‘Dr Swee has checked out of the 

Mayfair. She is no longer here.’  

While I remained in Beirut, I was half hiding from my own colleagues, and Jill looked after me.  

Was I really jeopardising the safety of the entire team, as some alleged? I had to do some more deep soul-searching. I had already resigned. I had officially left the Mayfair. I was doing this out of my own conviction and my desire to speak up for the camp folks, to lend them my voice. 

Those of my European colleagues who protested the loudest had not visited the camps one single time. I recalled what my friend Leila said – the one who took me to see Hadji, the wife of Youssef Hassan Mohammed, in Shatila camp. ‘Swee,’ she had said, ‘I am really sorry to say this to you, but some of your expatriate colleagues think this is a big picnic, and meanwhile our people are suffering and dying.’  

It was well known in Beirut that some British volunteers had been insensitive enough to hold a disco party just as the news of the massacre broke. I was deeply offended by their behaviour. Jill, Mary, Charlotte and the other American nurses had played a crucial role in reassuring me that I was correct. I could not understand why the British volunteers hated me for going, while the American volunteers supported me.  

In the end I decided that if one Palestinian from Sabra and 

Shatila objected to me going, I would call the whole thing off.  To cheer me up, Jill Drew did something very cheeky. While the rest of us got ready to listen in on the other phone, she rang Isaac Leor’s number. At the other end, an Israeli soldier picked up the phone. Jill put on an Arabic accent and asked for Isaac.  

When the soldier said Isaac was not in, she said, ‘Please ask him to call Jamila. He knows my number. We have a date, and I’m waiting for him.’  

Jamila was a popular Arabic name for girls, meaning 

‘beautiful’. We all burst out laughing at the vision of a red- faced and highly-embarrassed Isaac Leor receiving the message. It was terribly wicked, but it did a lot to calm me down.  

That night we had dinner at Jill Drew’s place, and sang Christian songs. We sang, ‘When I needed a neighbour, were you there?… When I was hungry and thirsty, were you there?’ We read the story of the good Samaritan again, and reminded ourselves of the need to renew our Christian commitment. I also quietly asked for God’s forgiveness if I was making the wrong choice in deciding to testify, if I was being headstrong and refused to listen to advice. It was difficult to know what to do sometimes.