Ellen Siegel is Jewish American. She worked as a nurse in Beirut during the massacre in 1982 and testified before the Kahan Commission in Jerusalem. She is a founding member of the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. She lives in Washington, D.C.
For many years I did solidarity work. In 1980 I returned to Beirut for a short period to work with Palestinian women who had established embroidery workshops in order to support themselves and lead as much of a productive life as possible.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 horrified me. American weapons were being used to maim and kill helpless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and refugees. Israeli soldiers were preventing food, water, and much-needed medical supplies from entering West Beirut. The hurt and suffering of those in pain was unattended to; no dignity was even given to the dead.
I arrived in Beirut on September 2, 1982. The ashes were still smoldering. The invasion was over, the PLO fighters and administration had been evacuated, the Israeli forces had pulled back from the city.
I was assigned to a hospital, called “Gaza,” in Sabra camp. The Sabra and Shatila camps of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) lie side by side in West Beirut. They are two of the 12 camps established in Lebanon since 1948 by UNRWA to shelter Palestinians exiled from their homes because of the creation of Israel. Before the 1982 invasion about 90,000 people lived there, a fourth of them poor Lebanese. The houses were mainly one-storey concrete dwellings with corrugated iron roofs. Camp buildings and homes were tightly packed together, separated by numerous narrow alleyways.
The camp inhabitants lived and worked together. A welfare and educational system, municipal councils, and trade unions existed. Committees organized vocational training in such areas as embroidery and carpentry and operated kindergartens. By the time I arrived in Beirut, the camps’ population had shrunk to about 10,000.
The Israeli army had left behind the effects of the U.S. implements of war. Shrapnel, ammunition, rocket casings, and other such armaments, many of them “made in USA,” were everywhere. Because of them, the hospitals were filled with victims of chemical burns, with dehydrated babies, with recovering amputees. Supplies were limited, conditions poor. For example, because the electrical supply was irregular, we sometimes had to hold flashlights to finish an operation.
On September 14, the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel of the Phalange Party, was assassinated. The next day Israeli war planes flew over West Beirut. Machine-gun fire increased as the day went on. On September 16, Israeli planes again flew over the camps; light artillery fire continued, but it was now accompanied by heavy artillery. Thousands of refugees sought security in and around the hospital. They were panic-stricken; they screamed, “Israel! Phalange!” and made a slashing motion across their throats. That evening, I watched from the tenth floor of the hospital as flares were shot into the air, lighting up neighborhoods of the camp. Sounds of machine-gun fire followed each illumination.
On the morning of the 17th, those who had sought refuge at the hospital disappeared and all the patients who could walk fled. By afternoon, all of the Palestinian and other Arab staff members were gone; their administrator had told them that the hospital was no longer safe for them.
The high explosives were coming so close that we had to move the remaining patients to the lower floors. Smoke poured in the windows, windows cracked, doors slammed, equipment reverberated. Everything was shaking. By evening, we heard only the sounds of machine-gun fire. Tending to the very ill was more difficult than usual; to some, the bombardment made the difference between life and death.
That evening a few severely wounded people managed to be brought to the hospital. Among them was a child of 12 who was suffering from shock, a bullet injury in his leg, and an open wound on his hand where a finger had once been; his name was Mounir. Treatment of his leg began immediately to prevent amputation. Later that evening, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was allowed to evacuate a small number of wounded children to a hospital outside of the camp area; Mounir was chosen.
Early the next morning, all the health care workers were told that the “Lebanese Army” was downstairs and that we must assemble at the hospital entrance. The armed militia we found below were in fact not the Lebanese Army but Phalangists. (These were the military wing of the Phalange Party, a nationalist Christian party founded in the 1930’s on the model of European fascist groups.) They allowed us to leave one medical student and one nurse behind in the Intensive Care Unit. They marched the rest of us down the main street of Sabra and Shatila, past dead bodies and hundreds of camp residents guarded by armed militiamen. One woman tried to pass her baby to one of the physicians, but the militiamen stopped her. Sporadic machine-gun fire could still be heard as we marched. Bulldozers, at least one marked with a Hebrew letter, were busy: homes that had stood at the edge of the camp were now rubble. As we walked along, our captors called us names — “dirty people,” “un-Christian” (because we were treating “terrorists who kill Christians”), “Communists,” “Socialists.”
The militiamen lined us up against a bullet-riddled wall just outside the camp. Rifles ready and aimed towards us, they paused, then filed back into the camp.
Other militiamen came and took us to a courtyard on the road to what had been a United Nations building. The courtyard was littered with Israeli products and newspapers. There they questioned us about why we had come and who had sent us. Afterwards, they marched us over to a building occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). From its roof, Israeli soldiers with binoculars were looking down on both Sabra and Shatila. Here the Lebanese turned us over to the Israelis.
Israeli soldiers drove us into West Beirut and dropped us off near the American Embassy. I went in and reported to an embassy official that “something wrong was going on in those camps.” He said the man in charge was out: “Come back later.”
That afternoon, many of the health care workers began searching for our patients. We found that the ICRC had eventually been able to evacuate all of them to other medical facilities around Beirut.
The next day I returned to the American Embassy and gave an accounting of what I had seen.
