Alternative Views - The Occupation of Lebanon (1982-87)

Ilan Ziv: But it is in the refugee camps that one begins to understand the full implications of Israeli invasion. Israel would like to make a distinction between the PLO and the Palestinian people. Their practices in treatment of civilians show that they understand the PLO to enjoy popular support. Thus, by declaring war against the PLO, Israel in actuality was declaring war against the Palestinian population, and by making the aim of the war The obliteration of the PLO, Israel was in effect uprooting over 500,000 people. But the most vivid reminder of occupation is the fate of the prisoners. The numbers are staggering. Israel admits to holding up to 7,000 prisoners, only few of them caught in combat. Every man above 16 years old was taken in the first sweep. Israel does not recognize them as prisoners of war. It claims that the Geneva Convention does not apply in their case. None of them was ever charged, nor the family ever notified. The invasion was only the first step in what is beginning to emerge as a long occupation, modeled after 15 years of controlling the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Border police replaces combat soldiers in dealing with the population. A tight system of passes controls the movement of the entire population. House arrests continue. Houses of suspected terrorists are being blown up. We visited in Tyre the site of a house just recently blown up and talked to the soldier guarding the bulldozer at work.

Speaker 2: We take a close look at the Palestinian situation in Lebanon in 1982, right now on Alternative Views.

Ben Alofs: We have with us today Ilan Zeev, who's an Israeli independent filmmaker.

Speaker 2: who's going to talk to us about the events in Lebanon, the Israelis and the Palestinians. Ilan was in Lebanon in mid-June and mid-July and has observed firsthand what's going on there. He also took some footage which we're going to show you, some raw footage of the actual events there. So welcome to Alternative Views.

Ilan Ziv: First of all, why did you go to Lebanon in mid-June?

Speaker 2: What was your assignment and what did you see?

Ben Alofs: I was a—

Ilan Ziv: I was working for CNN, and as a matter of fact, I was hired with my equipment by an Israeli company who provide production services to foreign networks.

Speaker 2: And you were free to go anywhere you wanted to? The information coming back from the TV networks in the United States were all censored by the Israelis.

Ilan Ziv: First of all, I was not a journalist. I was working as a cameraman. I mean, I was basically under a journalist. Nobody can go free, which means Basically, there are 2 systems of controlling or supervising the information. One of them, there is the IDF spokesman, which is—

Speaker 2: IDF?

Ilan Ziv: Israeli Defense Forces spokesman. And the Israeli Army spokesperson has to accompany every car of journalists as an escort officer. The second thing is that the material that is being shot has to be censored for military censorship. The first time I was there, it seems that the censorship really was trying to restrict itself to military per se. The second time I was there, since I had dealing with the censorship independently, it seems that because of sort of the bad media that Israel got abroad, there was much more cautiousness and consciousness about trying also to interfere a bit more than just strictly, you know, military activities, number of vehicles, identification of units, etc. So basically the 2 structures are really Totally independent, which means you have to go with an escort officer, otherwise you cannot cross the border. And he's totally independent of the censorship. So it's basically sort of a— he's just really supervising what you're doing there. Also, he has— I mean, the official line that he is supposed to protect you and guide you in terms of— since it is a combat zone. But he's also supervising and reporting back what he sees, sort of what's your point of view, which angle you're really pushing, etc., etc.

Ben Alofs: Right.

Ilan Ziv: Also, he has guidelines of what not to show you. For instance, you're not allowed to go to 2 refugee camps, which have been damaged very badly. I mean, one of them, Ein Hilweh, has been totally leveled. So, for instance, you're not allowed to go there. As a matter of fact, in my time, my second time, there was a— he was a print journalist, I forgot, an American one. And the military escort officer that— I mean, he succeeded somehow to lure him into the vicinity of the camp to take a slide or 2.

Speaker 4: Right.

Ilan Ziv: And this escort officer was going to face trial when I left. I mean, a military trial. So that is the form of— I mean, that is sort of the direct control in terms of supervising your movement. It's not that bad.

Speaker 4: It's—

Ilan Ziv: you see, I mean, Israel is a very complex society, and if you want to— if you know how to work within this complexity, it's— I mean, everything is negotiable, which means it's not— I mean, it sounds very frightening from the outset, but—

Ben Alofs: But it's not.

Ilan Ziv: I mean, every escort officer is an individual, and he's doing his reserve duty, and he might have political views, and some of his political views might also coincide a little bit with you, although you're not going to talk about it, but he's going to be very lenient about what you're going to see and whatnot. So it really is sort of a negotiated deal every day, depending on who you have, what are you going to—

Ben Alofs: where are you going to go, and what are you trying to do, etc., etc.

Speaker 2: I assume, as an Israeli, you understood this system and were able to work within it. More effectively, say, than maybe an American or someone from outside.

Ilan Ziv: Yeah, that's true. I mean, because these— I mean, Israel is really almost an antithesis of the monolith. I mean, it's a very complex structure and very individualistic in terms of, I mean, people, and specifically the escort officers, who are really reserve soldiers, which means they're civilians that were called for 40 days, for 50 days for this war to do a duty, and their soldiering duty is to be an escort officer. So as far as you're concerned, he might be a peace now, you know, who just put the uniform as part of the law and— And was sent there as part of his duty.

Ben Alofs: Yeah.

Ilan Ziv: So there are ways how to go about it.

Ben Alofs: I mean, you just—

Ilan Ziv: if you approach it right. And I mean, there are big nos, these 2 refugee camps, which nobody will take you. I mean, there's several big nos that you don't approach. But outside of that, there's— I mean, there's some kind of room for maneuvering.

Speaker 2: Did you see other examples of censorship, for instance, where there are some Did they censor the footage that you took of—

Ilan Ziv: My footage was not censored, and I showed them everything. Again, depending on who is the censor. I mean, you have to go down really to the individual, because the censor is a reserve soldier also, most of the time. So it depends what he think and how he interprets the law, because the law can be interpreted in many, many ways. Again, there are big nos. For instance, when you come to the censor, he will tell you, we're not going to— okay, everything related to the army, which is identifying unit size of forces, etc., that's The second one, which can be interpreted more politically, is, for instance, he will tell you that we're not going to pass what they call horror pictures, which is either Israeli dead—

Speaker 5: Atrocities.

Ilan Ziv: Atrocities, dead children, civilians, mutilated, wounded, you know, multiple amputations, stuff like that.

Speaker 2: Did you observe a lot of atrocities on both sides, say?

Ilan Ziv: Was there a lot of bloodshed?

Pauline Cutting: No.

Speaker 2: A lot of civilian casualties?

Ilan Ziv: Yeah. You see, it's so hard to understand— I mean, the whole— I mean, if we go to talk about the civilian casualty, obviously the numbers being provided by Israel are extremely low and unrealistic. Also, there were some floating numbers on the other side, which in my opinion also were unrealistic and totally exaggerated. A, I'm not really interested in this number game because I think it's really meaningless. I mean, if 3,000 people died and not 10, it doesn't make a big difference to me. I mean, to some people apparently it does. But so I was never really interested. It seemed— I mean, we went to 2 hospitals. You see, the problem is it's a distinction between the Lebanese society and the Palestinian society, which means that the Lebanese population, in my opinion, was really sort of a sideshow of that war. And therefore, from the beginning, there were attempts immediately at the end of the war to try to alleviate, to a certain degree, the suffering. If cities were damaged, they were not damaged because they were Lebanese, they were damaged because they were cities.

Ben Alofs: Right.

Ilan Ziv: Fighting with the Palestinians. The society that sort of took the brunt of the Israeli might was the Palestinian society, and there really is a war, almost a war of annihilation. So, for instance, the numbers which are totally ambiguous and nobody knows, because it's a total dispossession, is how many Palestinians died, noncombatants and combatants. For instance, the entire camp of Ein Hilweh was leveled. I mean, it used to— as a habitat for about 25,000 people. None of them is back.

Ben Alofs: None of them?

Ilan Ziv: In the camp. So here is 25,000 refugees wandering, you know, squatting in abandoned buildings, and it's impossible to relocate because people fled to the mountains, people fled to villages, people fled squatting in abandoned buildings in town. The second thing is the amount of casualties since the camp was leveled. You don't know who fled and who died.

Ben Alofs: Mm-hmm.

Ilan Ziv: I mean, there isn't really any organized surveying. So as far as the Lebanese society, there is some kind of a A possibility for quasi-objective ability to determine how many people died. And the figures are relatively low, and I'm putting relative because it depends, you know, from which point of view you're coming. But the Palestinian population, everybody will tell you, including doctors in the Lebanese hospitals, that it is impossible.

Ben Alofs: I talked—

Ilan Ziv: we interviewed the Canadian and Norwegian doctors that has been detained by Israel, and now they were in the States.

Ben Alofs: Yeah.

Ilan Ziv: testifying before Congress. So the Canadian doctor testified that when he came to Anjilo at the end of the war, he saw about 400 corpses on the perimeter of the camp. And this is without even entering the camp.

Speaker 2: Hmm.

Ilan Ziv: Now, again, you can challenge this testimony or you can accept it. Obviously, I mean, I don't know if it's exactly 400 or what, but there's no way to really assess objectively how many people died and how many people fled, because these are really massive Also, every man in the Palestinian camp above the age of 16 was taken into Israel as a suspected terrorist.

Speaker 2: Did you observe any brutality there?

Speaker 4: No.

Speaker 2: I've read a lot of reports that a lot of— No, no, no.

Ilan Ziv: It's impossible to observe brutality. It's very hard. I mean, it's easy— I guess it gets easier the longer you stay. I mean, since I was in a limited period of time, I didn't— I mean, I got some allusion to it by soldiers who were talking, oh, if you had been here last night. But then you say, oh, shut up.

Speaker 2: No, I don't want to talk about it.

Ilan Ziv: But people really— I cannot testify and say I saw, etc. I mean, in my own eyes, I saw one person being taken prisoner. But I mean, the Canadian doctors are a much better testimony because they came from inside the process, and they were detained for 3 or 4 days in a big school inside. So they were really a much better testimony for those allegations of brutality.

Speaker 2: And they testified, and I saw this on their congressional testimony, which is on television here, that they saw many hundreds, even thousands of people being arrested, being beaten, being tortured, and being put in camps and even taken to Israel.

Ilan Ziv: One thing that you are being attacked constantly by the Palestinian population that you come in contact is that they keep asking, where is the man? When are we going to get the man back? And it's— this is like the major trauma of this war, because basically what they've done, in the first sweep they came and they arrested everybody above the age of 16. And then they passed them in front of a hooded man, which is the local informer. And the local— whatever the local informer was saying, this is he, this is he, this is he, they were just marking them with X and shipping them inside Israel. So now, this hooded man, I mean, in many cases, there's also a possibility of finishing personal grudges and personal quarrels.

Speaker 2: Right, get his enemies drug away.

Ilan Ziv: So by now, Israel, I think, admits something in the neighborhood of 7,500, 7,500 men that are being arrested. Again, there's no way to verify if this figure is accurate or there's 10,000 people, because, I mean, the only relying that you— I mean, no journalist can either photograph or talk to prisoners. So the only figure that you're relying is, again, on the Israeli official statistics that they're holding about 7,500 men. I will doubt that this is accurate. I probably will doubt that it's higher than that.

Ben Alofs: Mm-hmm.

Ilan Ziv: Again, not only that, I mean, charges haven't been brought and probably will never be brought, because it's impossible. I mean, it's going to take them years to Process these cases and to even try to get a pseudo-legality involved in it. Our families were never notified. So basically, there were families at loss. Where's the man who— because they thought it's in Israel, or he's in Sidon, or he's in Abatea in the concentration camp. I mean, there's really no— so again, in between the men being taken away, in between the refugees fleeing from the destroyed camp, in between, it's impossible to assess.

Speaker 2: So it really is a destruction of the Ilan, could you tell us now something about the film footage that you took? We want to show our audience some of the film that you took that you've given us a copy of. Can you describe just the context of when it was taken and what it covers?

Ilan Ziv: This is the footage that was taken for the second time that I was there, which means the last 2 weeks. Which means mid-July. Mid-July. And, I mean, from the beginning of July, too. And it's footage that basically includes It's mostly sort of a report about the situation of the civilian population, mainly the Palestinian population, which includes, you know, interviews and visuals on location. It includes interviews with the Canadian and Norwegian doctors and commentary sort of tying it all together.

Speaker 2: Okay, fine.

Ilan Ziv: It's almost 8 weeks since Israel's blitzkrieg invasion of Lebanon began, and 3 weeks since their efforts to wipe out the PLO bogged down around Beirut. Here, at the furthest Israeli position around Beirut Airport, a political solution to the conflict seems as far away as ever. Yet in the south, in the major city of Tyre and Sidon, And the villages surrounding in between them, life is coming back to normal, or at least that is what the Israelis are eager to show the visitor. The burned cars and shattered remains of war that once littered the streets of Sidon have been stacked in a huge graveyard, a testimony to the intensity of the fighting. Food shops are opening, and business resumes among the ruins. Though both Tyre and Sidon were heavily damaged in the war, they were only a sideshow to the main thrust of the Israeli invasion, whose purpose was the uprooting of the PLO and the destruction of its military and political bases. The destruction of Lebanese cities is startling, but it is in the refugee camps that one begins I'm here to understand the full implications of Israeli invasion. Israel would like to make a distinction between the PLO and the Palestinian people. Their practices in treatment of civilians show that they understand the PLO to enjoy popular support. Thus, by declaring war against the PLO, Israel in actuality was declaring war against the Palestinian population, and by making the aim of the war The obliteration of the PLO. Israel was, in effect, uprooting over 500,000 people. In Damour, a ghost town once inhabited by refugees from Tel Zatar and a PLO stronghold, the walls are littered with political graffiti and posters. Among the ruins, we could find the remnants of a population that once lived here. Old family photos or a picture of the son who joined the ranks of the PLO.

Ben Alofs: We're in Damour now, a city just south of Beirut. Full of terrorists. City used to be peopled by Christians. The terrorists came 7 years ago during the war, kicked all the Christians out.

Ilan Ziv: A lot of the damage you see around here is from that war.

Ben Alofs: Some of it's from this war.

Pauline Cutting: Now the Christians are starting to come back.

Ilan Ziv: What are you doing here?

Pauline Cutting: What am I doing here?

Ilan Ziv: What have you been doing here? What have I been doing here?

Ben Alofs: We've been checking for bunkers, for ammo dumps.

Ilan Ziv: Finding a lot of arms, a lot of explosives. Right near here there's a big ammo dump. What do you think is going to— what's the future of all of that?

Speaker 2: The future? I hope—

Ben Alofs: now I think there's possibilities for a very good future.

Ilan Ziv: Before, I never thought there would be a very good future for Lebanon.

Pauline Cutting: Now, once the Palestinians are pushed out, we can get the Syrians to leave, I think the Lebanese can take care of themselves.

Speaker 2: I hope.

Ilan Ziv: It is this ability to classify entire population, its health services, educational facilities, labor organizations, craft and civil services, as terrorists, which is at the core of the devastation of the Palestinian population in Lebanon. Dr. Steiner, a Norwegian doctor, and Mr. Mühle, a Norwegian social worker in the refugee camp of An Hilweh, Have survived the Israeli attack on that camp.

Ben Alofs: It was Sunday night, the 6th. We went to sleep in the 3rd floor, and then suddenly the hospital was hit by 3 or 4 grenades. And of course, we ran down, and we took a decision. We decided to bring all the patients to the first floor. During this night, the bombing continued, and it was more intensive. So later, we decided also to transfer all the patients down to the shelter in the big hospital, which were under construction. During the time we spent in In this hospital, the Israelis dropped also leaflets over the area. I suppose it was Tuesday, the 8th of June. On these leaflets, you could read that the whole area was going to be bombed, so all the people were asked to go out. But it was some strange thing. At the same time they bombed this area— excuse me, at the same time they dropped these leaflets, they also bombed this area. So the situation was very confused for the people, and we could either not read on the leaflets how to go away and evacuate the area and where to go.

Speaker 5: So it was— So it was—

Ben Alofs: No problem for us to decide to just stay where we was at that time. Later on, on Wednesday, still the bombing went on, and we decided to try to send out some people to talk with the Israeli officers. who were around in the area. And Steinar Berge, he was one of the persons which we sent. So maybe he can talk a little bit about this. I asked them, why, why are you here? Can't you go with us to the, to the hospital, for instance, so that we can get the surrender or go down to the sea with you?

Speaker 5: Because the civilians are very afraid to go.

Ben Alofs: And then they said that they didn't dare to go because they said they had not full control of the Saida city or the Ein el-Hilweh camp. But when we were driving just in the outskirts of Ein el-Hilweh and through a little part of Saida, we didn't see any Palestinian or Lebanese fighter at all.

Pauline Cutting: But anyhow, this Israeli officer said that he was going to go and check.

Speaker 5: And he didn't go?

Ben Alofs: officer, he— I told him that our hospital under construction was on the road between the refugee camp Ein el-Helweh and Mieh Mieh. And he said, oh, yeah, I know these snake holes. So then I got to understand what one could expect of these people. I also, some days ago, had heard Israeli radio in English, and they used only the word Terrorists on the Palestinians, terrorist bases on the camps. So, in this way, naming the whole population and all their— even if it was only used for fighters, I mean, if you start naming an army for terrorists, all of them, then you dehumanize them, and then you can treat them like animals. And that's what they probably wanted. At least they also do the propaganda war.

Ilan Ziv: And you're saying that the Israeli military We could not film in Ein Khilweh, once a refugee camp of over 25,000 people. Nobody can. Dr. Christian Janu, a Canadian doctor who worked with the Red Crescent and has been detained by the Israelis, was an eyewitness to the situation of the camp at the end of the battle.

Speaker 5: I was going along the perimeter of the camp, the 2 main thoroughfares which form The north and eastern perimeter of the camp. And just in the periphery of the camp, I was able to count about 300 dead bodies. Also, in the emergency reception area of the hospital, where a shell had landed, there were about another 40 or 50 dead, people who had taken refuge there. I had another 20 or so dead amongst my patients. Later on, I saw 2 other cadavers in the Red Crescent Hospital that we had evacuated several days previously, another 20, 25 in the private hospital when I went to see the other Red Crescent personnel there. That's a total of about 400 dead, slightly over 400, and that's just in a very small, limited area, a few blocks of the camp and the city. That 400 is supposed to be— was about 3/4 of the total. Official death toll for the entire south, as given by Israeli authorities. I didn't even enter the center of the camp, so I couldn't see all the wounded and dead that were that were there. The scene of the camp from the periphery of it was one of complete desolation. There was utter total destruction in certain areas. The topography of the terrain. The terrain even had been changed. You no longer knew where buildings had stood and where the roads had been. It had all been transformed into pockmarked terrain, large blackened craters filled with rubble, broken slabs of concrete, twisted iron bars, broken trees, the carcasses of cars and automobiles, and a scene Something that is just indescribable. It looked as though there had not been a single dwelling that had been left intact in the entire area. And the bombing and shelling of the camp went on for at least another week, so that when we drove past the camp at a distance— afterwards, when we were taken prisoner, we drove past it along the main thoroughfare. At a distance, it appeared as though not a single building was left standing, that by that time it had been completely razed.

Pauline Cutting: And you were there?

Ilan Ziv: Marianne Møller, a Norwegian social worker in the camp, was an eyewitness as well.

Pauline Cutting: I also went into the camp Ein el-Helwa, 19th of June. In the beginning of the camp, looks like the high house then, in the beginning of the camp, was damaged, not completely destroyed. But behind it, it— the camp was completely flat. And I could smell that dead body was under the ground and so on.

Speaker 4: It was nothing.

Pauline Cutting: It was just rain. And one girl who worked with us in rehabilitation center, she got the possibility to go into the camp some days before me.

Speaker 4: Oh, wow.

Pauline Cutting: And she told that it was dead body everywhere, all over the street. She also told that 2 shelters just near our hospital, with 500, 200 women and child, they both collapsed. When I was in the camp, I didn't see anybody. I didn't see any dead body. They had cleaned it, but I smelled it.

Speaker 4: And you smelled it?

Ilan Ziv: In Saidah, we found some of the camp dwellers squatting in abandoned buildings and half-built shops.

Speaker 4: These people are Palestinians. These are Palestinians from Ain al-Hilwa camp. They have been taking refuge in this hospital shelter in Sidon for a month, after they were forced out of their own camp. They didn't get water, food or electricity for Three days, and don't know where they would go next.

Pauline Cutting: من فين بيجين كل ماي؟ يا يا أطعموا عن الصبح.

Ilan Ziv: طيب مفيش كهرباء عشان هذا.

Speaker 4: لا لا ولا في ماي ولا في شيء.

Ilan Ziv: بس الصبح كان ماي وبرح كان ماي.

Speaker 4: The mothers wonder where their sons, who have been taken by the Israeli forces, are. And when they will come back. They say that they would not let another Tel al-Zatar massacre happen again, nor bring back another 1948 conspiracy. They kicked us out of our camp and then took our sons away from us, one mother says. Another adds, "Why wouldn't they take the real fascist terrorists away with no answer in return?" Go, Israel!

Pauline Cutting: Go, Israel!

Speaker 4: No, no.

Ilan Ziv: Israel is proud of its relief efforts to the Lebanese population. Yet the IDF spokesperson that is attached to the governor of Tyre confided privately to me that there is a consistent policy of not helping the Palestinian population. It was indeed in the old section of Sidon Mainly inhabited by Palestinians and poor Muslims, that we saw the first relief attempts, a food distribution donated by a rich Lebanese, Mr. Hariri. El Bas refugee camp on the outskirts of Tyre is the only refugee camp that one can visit, maybe because of its location on the main road, which makes it hard to conceal. Do you have water and electricity in the camp?

Speaker 5: Water.

Ilan Ziv: And electricity?

Ben Alofs: Electricity, we haven't. We think that till the end of the war, Till 6 months, we will stay without electricity.

Speaker 2: We think that.

Ben Alofs: And what about water? Water, at the first days, we get water from the barrels from the road here. You can see it. Till now, we get from it.

Ilan Ziv: And do you get any help from organizations?

Ben Alofs: Surely, surely, I speak to you that till now we haven't anything from any source. In this camp, we haven't anything, until a barrel for water yesterday they bring it, the UNRWA bring it. We haven't anything. We get food. We pay money, and I have till now from my payroll. I have one hundred one hundred pound till now, and the owner didn't till now give us our payroll. But the town there saw. They get everything. Here we haven't anything. And if one person say that we we gave us, I'll speak instead before you that they didn't give us anything till now.

Pauline Cutting: Anything.

Ben Alofs: We are now self-service.

Speaker 4: We want Palestine back. All Arab regimes are. All Arab kings and presidents want to abort our struggle. God will someday punish them for all the massacres committed against us, because their shameful acts are acts of sin and evil. Be aware, don't take advantage of us civilians, because we are determined to get back Palestine.

Ben Alofs: We are the people of Palestine.

Speaker 4: They took everything. They took the freedom fighters. They took the people. And they kill children every day. They took my husband, who's an UNRWA employee. He is very sick and lays unconscious in Israeli prisons. We told them that we want to send him some medicine, but they didn't let us. When they take people, they undress them and make them put on guerrilla clothes.

Speaker 2: They took your husband?

Speaker 4: They come into our houses and make us take our clothes off. They come in at late night or early morning and wake us up. They threw leaflets asking us to surrender. Then they gave us IDs to be able to go around. But then they took the IDs back. There is nothing else to say. You are filming now, but any reporter or photographer who comes here is being taken away with his hands tied behind Now we don't have a house, food, water, or electricity. We live under this tree, as you can see.

Ilan Ziv: The invasion was only the first step in what is beginning to emerge as a long occupation, modeled after 15 years of controlling the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Border police replaces combat soldiers in dealing with the population. A tight system of passes control the movement of the entire population. House arrests continue. Houses of suspected terrorists are being blown up. We visited in Tyre the site of a house just recently blown up and talked to the soldier guarding the bulldozer at work. So what's your name?

Speaker 2: Avi.

Ilan Ziv: Avi, what are you doing here? We came to clean this place.

Ben Alofs: It was a place who belongs to a terrorist from the PLO, and they found him. And that's what you see here. They just blow up the house, and we clean the place.

Ilan Ziv: On the right side, there is some office.

Ben Alofs: offices, who belongs to United Nations, and it have been closed because they blow up all the house.

Ilan Ziv: So we have to clean that they will be back here.

Ben Alofs: They wanted to come back.

Ilan Ziv: That terrorist woman, she came here and she asked also for her clothes. We're trying to find the clothes, what you see here. But the most vivid reminder of occupation is the fate of the prisoners. The numbers are staggering. Israel admits to holding up to 7,000 prisoners, only few of them caught in combat. Every man above 16 years old was taken in the first sweep. Israel does not recognize them as prisoners of war. It claims that the Geneva Convention does not apply in their case. None of them was ever charged, nor the family ever notified. The implication of defining them as terrorists without any legal process is yet to be fully revealed. Few eyewitness accounts of European and Canadian doctors that were detained provide only a glimpse.

Pauline Cutting: Thank you.

Ben Alofs: After they captured us, they lined us up through a wall. And then they put some signs on our skirts, on the back. Then we had to walk in a row to a court or a convent school.

Speaker 5: Yes.

Ben Alofs: Not that far from the place we were arrested. And when we came to this convent school, which consisted of 2 schoolyards, one big schoolyard and one smaller, there we had to sit down on our knee. This happened in the small schoolyard in this school.

Pauline Cutting: Why?

Ben Alofs: Then they tied us up on the back behind. What happened then was that they took me into a bigger courtyard or schoolyard. Inside this schoolyard, I saw about 500 or 600 prisoners.

Speaker 5: The scene in the schoolyard, however, was, was much more savage. Here we were being kept bound under a hot sun. It was 95 degrees. We were given 3 cups of water a day and a loaf of bread to divide amongst 5 prisoners twice a day. The prisoners would be calling out for more water. They would be insulted. As they called out more, they would be struck, either simple punching or kicking. Some were struck by a A wooden stick, a broken leg off of a chair or table, a piece of plastic tubing or hose. One fellow had a modern version of a cat-o'-nine-tails. This was a bunch of strings or ropes with nuts and bolts tied to the end of each string.

Ben Alofs: The thing that surprised me in here was that the concepts the soldiers used was that everybody in this schoolyard were were terrorists. That's, that's what they said all the time. I also want to mention another case. I remember that the old man, about 60 years, he was desperate, maybe because of the hot weather and that he was in lack of water. Once he tried to kick an Israeli soldier With his leg, and the result of it was that 4 or 5 soldiers started to beat him in front of all the prisoners. This beating went on for about 10 minutes, and the old man, he was all the time lying on the ground.

Speaker 5: During that interrogation, I was taken out to Mm-hmm.

Ben Alofs: Look on one dead man. My interrogator had been working as a doctor before, but not— that was not the job he had now, and he was—

Speaker 5: he had another job that was not his military job, but he had been a doctor before.

Ben Alofs: And, um, well, he wanted to see if I was a doctor, I think, and he took me out there, and I said, okay, this man, he's just dead. And just beside that dead body was a car, a van, with an open back door, and in there was lying 5 or 6 other dead bodies. And on the day before, I examined one dead body, one dead man in the middle of the crowd.

Speaker 5: Not all of the guards were involved. In the beatings, some of the guards tried to be considerate towards the prisoners. They came over and undid our hands as they were tied behind our backs and retied them in front more loosely. It's much more comfortable when you have to sit there for 2 or 3 days in that sort of position. They tried to bring us extra water or food, and they tried to stop their fellow soldiers from beating the prisoners.

Ilan Ziv: Wow.

Speaker 5: On several occasions, actual arguments Amongst the soldiers, between those doing the beating and those trying to stop the beatings.

Ben Alofs: I want also to mention that all the officers who were in this schoolyard, they knew what happened and they saw what happened, but they didn't do anything to stop all this beating. And also, the Colonel Arnold Moser, who said that he was The commander in this area was in this schoolyard, and he stood 2 meters beside me. And he had to see what happened. But he did not either do anything to stop all this violence that was going on.

Ilan Ziv: Dr. Steiner, Mr. Müller, and Dr. Janu has been unconditionally released after strong protests From the Canadian and Norwegian governments. Although the Israeli government made vague accusations of terrorist connections, no charges were ever brought against them. Just as helpless as the men inside the camps are the families left without breadwinners. Every day we found the women in front of the interrogation center, on Saida's dusty street corners, Waiting endlessly for their men to be released. No one can say where these women live or where they're going to. No one has bothered to tell them when and if their loved ones are going to be released. We found them as if in a silent vigil among the ruins, refugees without names. Dr. Hamoud Hospital in Sidon.

Ben Alofs: He was with all of his family in his home, in the old city of Sidon. It is near the shore and near the Makrasset School. ومين يتعور من أهل البس أنت؟ من أهل البس أنا. He was the only injured from his family. The rest were okay, no problem. ومن جاء لك المستشفى؟ جاء من مستشفى مسلم. We have here inside the Scouts organization. They brought him to this hospital. It is a small Sudanese scout organization, students.

Speaker 2: They brought him here.

Ilan Ziv: So he was wounded from shelling?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Ben Alofs: From the bombardment from the airplanes? And his home from the shore, from the ships. This young girl lost all of her family. She is alone now here. But I just asked her, she still have relatives in Tayyar again. Her grandma comes and visits her every couple of days. She is from the staff here from Monday. This is now about from the seventh, June seventh. Now we have June July seventh.

Speaker 5: Yes, one month she's here.

Ben Alofs: But she is much better now. We are looking to discharge her. But We don't know yet where. That's why she is kept here. This is a big problem now in this social work. We have a lot of patients who do not know where to send them.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Ben Alofs: They have their home or their families lost. And until now, no right organization came to us and asked for this. Kind of work.

Ilan Ziv: Bashir Gemayel, strongman of the right-wing Christian militia backed by Israel, has declared that in order to achieve peace and stability in Lebanon, not only the PLO, but the entire Palestinian population has to be expelled. They don't want us in Palestine. Now they expel us from Lebanon, the teacher in El-Bash said to me. Where should we go? To the sea?

Speaker 4: To the sea.

Ilan Ziv: يا روح واللي بحزن شال التودي عينه ويعين هلي دميه عجليات الجيل تلجينا See, once you start pursuing a logic, it's endless. I mean, which means once you start pursuing that all the PLO is terror— I mean, what the PLO is terrorism, which means everybody who supports the PLO, whether it's his mother or his sister, is also by implication terrorist as well. Then you basically start to dehumanize an entire population, and you're calling every expression of that society, terrorism. And that allows the soldier to treat an entire group of human beings, you know, as basically somebody outside of any recognized Geneva Convention legality, etc.

Ben Alofs: Because he's—

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what the United States did in Vietnam over and over again, like My Lai, for instance. Civilians, anyone is the target because they're the enemy.

Ilan Ziv: The experience of America in Vietnam is relatively accurate because it's the same problem, which means how do you fight the Viet Cong, okay, who enjoys support in the villages? You have to destroy I mean, there's no other way. I mean, when you're talking to uproot and destroy, you have to destroy the population. So therefore, it's not by mistake or by some cruelty of the PLO to place its combatants inside the civilian population. The entire camps have been devastated. Because, I mean, they were fighting— soldiers told me they were fighting kids of 12 years old with RPG bazookas. So when you deal on that level of a war, I mean, it's inherent, the destruction of a population.

Speaker 5: What then is the What role of the international community?

Ilan Ziv: was the motivation of Begin and Sharon, the defense minister, for pursuing this movement into Lebanon?

Speaker 2: It seems like it goes against political realism.

Ilan Ziv: Right. You see, your political realism and their political realism is not the same thing, which means, you see, there is the hubris, the famous Greek hubris of the victorious powerful. I mean, this hubris was even shown in this war, which is not— it was not enough, you know, to destroy half of Lebanon. They had to encircle Beirut By encircling Beirut, they're digging their own grave, because they got themselves— I mean, Israel could have stopped 10 miles south of Beirut and say, okay, we want the PLO, okay, we want the PLO out. And then millions of things could happen in terms of the Lebanese society, the friction between the Lebanese and the PLO. The Lebanese society would start pushing the PLO to start leaving, because we are destroying, you're destroying. There's so many things that could happen. But the hubris of Mr. Sharon was to encircle Beirut in Genghis Khan type of—

Speaker 2: Right.

Ilan Ziv: Operation and dictate his condition to the vanquished. And of course, that just helped to solidify the ranks in Beirut and the whole image of an Arab capital besieged and destroyed slowly, day by day, by an Israeli army. I mean, just to show, within 2 weeks, I mean, so many mistakes, even within their own thinking. So I think the problem is that Israel still, or at least the leading circle, and some— I mean, the majority of the Israeli society still They still think that the Palestinians' problem can be resolved militarily.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Ilan Ziv: And until historically they're not going to see that that's not going to happen, unfortunately, I'm afraid that we're going to watch massacre after massacre. See, because Israel is living under the— I mean, Israel is living within this contradiction that there is no compromise with Palestinian nationalism, because once— see, the problem is not once you give them the finger, they will eat the whole hand. The notion is that once you give them the finger, You legitimize their rights. Once you legitimize their rights, in some way or another, in their mind, illegitimize your rights, because we came and we took the land, and everybody will tell you that. We came and we settled this land. This land was not empty. People realized it back in the '20s. There were Palestinian people. So by recognizing the Palestinian rights to any piece of land, okay, in their mind, is recognizing that they had rights to begin with.

Pauline Cutting: Hmm.

Ilan Ziv: Which means then the fear is that 100 years from now, There will be some circles talking about Tel Aviv and Jaffa and Tiberias.

Pauline Cutting: Mm-hmm.

Ilan Ziv: And there's going to be a dissolution of that state from the inside, not necessarily militarily. So Israel is caught within this enormous conflict, the way they see it, which means on one hand, you're being pushed constantly into this military road, which is dead and suicidal, and everybody knows it. On the other hand, you see that if you open up, you'll get dissolution from inside, because who can control the social processes that will happen after that it's going to be a Palestinian state? Who will control the movement of population? Who will control the assimilation that will happen to the Israeli society within the larger Middle East continent? And I think their fear, okay, is the losing of their identity either. So they're getting cornered and cornered in this military solution, which is this desperate— I mean, they will go up to Ankara to smash PLO. They will go up to— I mean, it's this act of despair because they feel that by opening up You know, they will sort of unleash something that they don't have any control, and nobody will have any control. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the Palestinian people will militarily conquer Israel. It's the fear that there's going to be an immensity of social processes happening in that region, peaceful social processes, that eventually will dissolve that state from the inside. That's— I think that's the crux of their thinking. That's their logic. That's the crux of their thinking, which, in my opinion, Is the— in the underwriting logic that we don't compromise. I mean, there are so many pathetic examples of— I mean, a Palestinian who lost their land inside Israel, in the occupied territories, will never get it back, no matter— even if it's 1 acre, even if it's half an acre, even if it's a fence or a piece of stone. I mean, the thing goes to utmost examples of surrealism. I mean, there are 2 miserable villages that were evacuated in '48, Ikram and Bir Eid, 2 Christian villages, that even begging in Nobody in the opposition promised them to go back to the village.

Ben Alofs: Nobody.

Ilan Ziv: No government was successful politically to say, okay, we are going back. Because once you recognize one village go back to the land, the way they think, we'll have to recognize everybody goes back to the land. And then these— all these frightening hordes of refugees living around us that we don't know what to do with. So it's a very traumatized and sick psychology of a society which is almost in an inner siege, much more than—

Speaker 2: Yes. But if you follow that thinking to the logical conclusion, you get to the point we were talking about earlier, that the logical implication of this policy of Begin and Sharon is the extermination of the Palestinian people.

Ilan Ziv: And this is the danger. This is the danger which people in the United States do not understand. Israel sells a lot of media to the United States and a lot of talks about security, legitimate needs for security, terrorism, etc., etc. There is a war of annihilation going on.

Speaker 2: But it's an impossible war because there's so many Palestinians both within Israel and without that it's not a viable military strategy.

Ilan Ziv: No, it's not. But I think I would not be surprised, and I don't think we should discount the possibility of that happening, whether it's going to be depopulating the West Bank, whether it's going to be depopulating South Lebanon. I mean, there is an attempt to finish With the problem by finishing with the people outside of gas chamber and concentration camp, almost everything else is going to be attempted.

Pauline Cutting: يا روح يا روح والنبحزين عجليات الجيش.

Ben Alofs: A little boy was 13 years old at the same time, and he had come running to the hospital where many civilians were sheltering. And he told us that he was at home with his family of about 10 persons, and suddenly gunshots One man burst into the house, and they shot all the family members down. They were all killed. And he was wounded. And he was under this pile of bodies for a few hours. I saw one particular building of 8 stories high. And in this shelter, about 200 people were sheltering. And this building was hit by this vacuum bomb. Just sort of disappeared into the ground. And in one blow, 200 people were just killed, and they were all civilians sheltering there. There were people lying there with the most horrifying war wounds. I mean, they were using phosphor all over the place.

Speaker 2: Napalm, too?

Ben Alofs: And I don't know— I don't know for sure napalm, but phosphorus, phosphorus. Phosphorus, for sure. I've seen people coming in smoking all over, and we didn't have the specialist chemicals to put out the phosphor. And the only way to stop it burning is to try to scrape it off the tissues. Oh, my gosh, that's terrible. And sometimes it used to burn right into the Deep into the muscle, and I remember when at the end of October, long after the massacre, the autumn rain started and the the camps were flooding, and people workers tried to find out what caused the flooding. They they found a new cluster of five six bodies in the in the in the sewer. People just disappeared, and there was one Israeli journalist, Amnon. Kapeliuk, who investigated the massacre, and he— his estimate is between 1,500 and 4,000 people. And the American journalist Jonathan Randall managed to interview one of the Lebanese Forces militiamen who was involved in the massacre, and he asked him, how many people have been killed, do you think? And his answer was—

Ilan Ziv: How many?

Ben Alofs: Well, you will only find out once they start building a subway in Beirut.

Speaker 2: Oh, my God. In 1987, English doctor Pauline Cutting and Dutch nurse Ben Alofs were trying to run a hospital in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, which was under siege by the Amal militia. We'll hear their story right now on Alternative Views.

Ben Alofs: On June 6th, 1982, Israel, in an attempt to resolve its conflict with the PLO, invaded southern Lebanon. As Israel attacked, the PLO fought back.

Ilan Ziv: The main thrust of the Israeli invasion Whose purpose was the uprooting of the PLO and the destruction of its military and political bases. The destruction of Lebanese cities is startling, but it is in the refugee camps that one begins to understand the full implications of Israeli invasion. Israel would like to make a distinction between the PLO and the Palestinian people. Their practices in treatment of civilians show that they understand the PLO to enjoy popular support. Thus, by declaring war against the PLO, Israel in actuality was declaring war against the Palestinian population. And by making the aim of the war the obliteration of the PLO, Israel was in effect uprooting over 500,000 people.

Ben Alofs: In the south, the areas of Sidon and Tyre were the hardest hit. The Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of these towns were even more heavily bombed and shelled.

Ilan Ziv: In Damour, a ghost town once inhabited by refugees from Tel Zadar and a PLO stronghold, the walls are littered with political graffiti and posters. Among the ruins, we could find the remnants of a population that once lived here.

Ben Alofs: The water and sewage systems are broken, and water supplies are contaminated. The government hospitals of both Sidon and Tyre were severely damaged and are no longer functioning. Most of the schools were destroyed, and those which remain standing are being used for emergency housing. In all of the cities in the south, there is a severe housing shortage. We're, uh, in Damour now.

Speaker 2: A city just south of Beirut, full of terrorists.

Ben Alofs: The city used to be peopled by Christians. The terrorists came 7 years ago during the war, kicked all the Christians out.

Ilan Ziv: We visited in Tyre the site of a house just recently blown up and talked to the soldier guarding the bulldozer at work. Ali, what are you doing here? We came to clean this place. It was a place who belongs to terrorists from the That terrorist woman, she came here and she asked also for her clothes, because we're trying to find the clothes, what you see here. It is this ability to classify entire population, its health services, educational facilities, labor organizations, craft and civil services, as terrorists, which is at the core of the devastation of Some days ago, I had heard Israeli radio in English, and they used only the word terrorist on the Palestinians, terrorist bases on the camps.

Ben Alofs: So, in this way of naming the whole population and all their— even if it was only used for fighters, I mean, if you start naming an army for terrorists, then you are naming the whole population for terrorists. I was in Beirut. Terrorist, all of them. Then you dehumanize them, and then you can treat them like animals. And that's what they probably wanted.

Ilan Ziv: Dr. Steiner, a Norwegian doctor, and Mr. Müller, a Norwegian social worker in the refugee camp of Ein Hilweh, have survived the Israeli attack on that camp. Dr. Christian Janu, a Canadian doctor who worked with the Red Crescent and has been detained by the Israelis, With an eyewitness to the situation of the camp at the end of the battle.

Speaker 5: I was going along the perimeter of the camp, the 2 main thoroughfares which form the, the north and eastern perimeter of the camp. And just in the periphery of the camp, I was I was able to count about 300 dead bodies. Also, in the emergency reception area of the hospital where a shell had landed, there were about another 40 or 50 dead, people who had taken refuge there. I had another 20 or so dead amongst my patients. Later on, I saw 2 other cadavers in the Red Crescent Hospital that we had evacuated several days previously, another 20, 25 in the private hospital when I went to see the other Red Yes. —Crescent personnel there. That's a total of about 400 dead, slightly over 400. And that's just in a very small, limited area, a few blocks of the camp and the city. That 400 is supposed to be— well, it's about 3/4 of the total official death toll for the entire south, as given by Israeli authorities. I didn't even enter the center of the camp. So I could You couldn't see all the wounded and dead that were there. The scene of the camp, from the periphery of it, was one of complete desolation. There was utter and total destruction in certain areas. The topography of the terrain even had been changed. You no longer knew where buildings had stood and where the roads had been. It had all been transformed into pockmarked terrain, large Large blackened craters filled with rubble, broken slabs of concrete, twisted iron bars, broken trees, the carcasses of cars and automobiles, and a scene that is just indescribable. It looked as though there had not been a single dwelling that had been left intact in the entire area.

Pauline Cutting: Right.

Speaker 5: And the bombing and shelling of the camp went on for at least another week, so that when we drove past the camp at a distance— afterwards, when we were taken prisoner, we drove past it along the main thoroughfare. At a distance, it appeared as though not a single building was left standing, that by that time it had been completely razed.

Ilan Ziv: Um, how high out do I go? Come on up. I'll take my fingers off. In those thighs. All very well now. Young girl, 18, 19, lost a leg. Happened again. The odds are against us. We have no blood to give her. She bleeds again. We've got nothing to give her.

Speaker 5: Smashed out a man from a gunshot wound.

Ilan Ziv: Shot wound. Just sort of running around the street trying to get away from it all.

Ben Alofs: This man is going to die if he doesn't get blood, and there is no blood.

Ilan Ziv: There's no blood. We used about four units this morning. Some of some of the the virus we're going to give his blood this morning. The problem is about 100 units, and that population will just be.

Ben Alofs: He's got an arm though, Mike. Yep.

Speaker 2: Yeah, as many units as we can get.

Ilan Ziv: She died about an hour ago.

Ben Alofs: More people died during the last 24 hours.

Ilan Ziv: The last 2 days have been mostly rifle fire, grenades, mortar fire.

Ben Alofs: Rockets.

Ilan Ziv: Rockets, mortars, and small artillery, not heavy artillery. So it's been a very rapidly moving battle. I mean, you could literally watch it last night. So every hour or so, another 15, 20 meters. It's just happened time and time again. We've had people who have been, you know, where a block of flats has been hit, and it's been the same old story. Oh, a terrorist block of flats. We have handfuls— we've had handfuls of old people, kids brought in, and the next thing we hear on the radio is a block of flats full of terrorists has just been hit, which is a load of bullshit.

Speaker 2: Right now on Alternative Views, we're going to listen and see some people who have had extensive firsthand experience in Lebanon and with the Palestinians. They not only have incredible stories to tell, but they've undergone some just horrible experiences. Dr. Pauline Cutting is from England, and she was in some of the Palestinian camps, particularly at Burj al-Barajneh, from November of '85 through April of '87. Remember the horrible things that were going on there when they were being attacked by the Amal militia and there was terrible starvation. And well, she was there during this time, and she was actually being promoted, recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize, I understand. And with us also is Ben Allos, who's from the Netherlands. And he has been in the same area that we're talking about even longer, from 1975 up through 1987. He was there during the civil war, during the Israeli invasions, during the Sabra and Shatila massacres, or just barely missed them, and also during the Tripoli Wars, when there was war between 2 different PLO groups, pro-Assyrian and pro-Arafat. Well, you— I wish we had 5 or 6 hours instead of just the short time we have, but you've seen such horrible things and you've undergone terrible deprivation yourself, and so now you're going around the country and Telling people about your experiences, I guess.

Ben Alofs: Yes, we are. I think it's a— it's an important thing to do because, well, as you just said, we have a story to tell and we have our side of the story to tell. One of the things that we have seen in Lebanon is that there aren't almost any foreign journalists left to see what is going on actually there. And I remember, for instance, working in the south of Lebanon last year, and I saw the Israeli army busy with these punitive expeditions against local Shiite villages in the south of Lebanon, or raiding Palestinian refugee camps while, while I was working there. And if you experience these, these kind of things And you see later on in the newspapers that Israeli aircraft has raided, quote-unquote, terrorist bases. It's something completely different if you are there and working, living in that kind of situation. And I've seen it from a completely different perspective. And I think there is a really pressing need to tell our side of the story, because I think really, as a matter of fact, the truth here is a little bit distorted. The truth about Palestinians, the truth about Lebanon, and maybe the truth about the whole Middle East. But we would like to talk about our own direct experiences and to tell you about that.

Speaker 2: Well, now, you were in the area of Lebanon You were there starting in '75 and there in the civil war of '75. What were you doing there? What was that like?

Ben Alofs: Well, to put things straight, my first time in Lebanon was in 1975, and I came there as a university student. I was studying anthropology at that time, and I had a broad interest in the Middle East, and I was also interested in what were Palestinian refugees, because until that time I didn't know them very well, only through pictures made by UNRWA, the UN relief agency. And I knew some basic facts, but I didn't know very much. So we had this summer working holiday in one of the Palestinian refugee camps in East Beirut at that time, which was This camp was called Tel Azata. And about 40 Dutch students and high school students went there. And for me, it was like a whole new world opening up. During the day, we worked on roads inside the camp. We were cleaning up. We were even digging shelters, because this civil war was looming. And in the afternoons and in the evenings, we used to talk with the families who were receiving us with very much hospitality. And there we got firsthand stories of their personal experiences that they had had ever since 1948. There were many old people. Who really had lived through this whole process of expulsion from what was Palestine before '48. And they told us a lot of stories of how life was while they were still living inside Palestine. Most of these people, they were villagers, peasants, either living in the small villages in the inland, or they were people from the coastal cities like Acre and Haifa, Jaffa. Anyway, this was— it was a very enlightening experience. We also went down to South Lebanon and looked around there. And when I came home a year after, this whole camp didn't exist anymore, because during the civil war it was besieged for several months, and finally it had to surrender, and many people died in that. And it was such an impressive experience that I quit my university studies and went into a nursing— nurses' training college. And I returned back in 1982, and from that time on, I've been mostly working in Lebanon as a nurse in Palestinian refugee camps. And you're still working there?

Speaker 2: Pauline, you also were attracted to this area. How come you showed up in Lebanon?

Pauline Cutting: I think it was more by coincidence than, than Ben. I was working in a British government hospital, and in England I'm making a career in emergency room medicine. So I trained as a general surgeon and then was going on to gain some experience in burns and reconstructive surgery. And as I came to the end of that contract, I was thinking possibly of going abroad to see how other people run their health services and see how other countries have their healthcare services. So, I saw an advert in the British Medical Journal for volunteers to go and work in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Yes. And I learned they were making an appeal because of the crisis of the so-called camp wars between the Amal militia and the Palestinians. And I learned of the great need for surgeons with trauma experience. So I thought that that might be useful, so both for me and for them. So that's how I became involved.

Speaker 2: I've been wanting to ask this for some time. I see the term camps and hear it used a lot. And yet when you see pictures of it, they look— I mean, when you think of a camp, you think of tents and people running around drawing water from a well, and it's all very temporary. But you look at the pictures and it looks like towns. I mean, they're—

Ben Alofs: Yes, that's true.

Speaker 2: So is that just a term that they're using? Are they using to try to give themselves a feeling that they're still in a temporary status and that one day they can go home to their homeland?

Pauline Cutting: I think it's both, yes. They were tents for many years.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Pauline Cutting: Because these refugee camps in the Lebanon were established soon after the war in 1948 when so many of them fled, and they were established as tent camps at that time, and they were supposed to be temporary. The United Nations Relief Agency agency was set up as a temporary body to look after them. But because they were never allowed to return, so after— I think it was about 10 years later that they were allowed to build these small homes, which are now really like shantytowns. But they're in the same places as the original tent camps. But because they became—

Ben Alofs: Mm-hmm.

Pauline Cutting: It's now 40 years, so they're more permanent. I think what you say is also true, that they don't regard themselves as having settled in the Lebanon. They regard themselves as Palestinian and would like to return to their homes.

Speaker 2: Now, Ben, you were there during the Israeli invasion. What was that like, and where were you?

Ben Alofs: Well, I came— I arrived in Beirut during the second part of the siege of West Beirut. When the Israeli army was besieging it, trying to force the PLO and Lebanese groups who were fighting together with the PLO defending the city into surrendering, well, the defenders of West Beirut managed to really put up a very good fight. It was really like fighting against overwhelming odds, because the Israelis, they were master in the air. They had very, very heavy artillery. And they had the most advanced technological ammunition that you can imagine, and delivered by the United States. I mean—

Speaker 2: Yes.

Ben Alofs: Who had heard about vacuum bombs, concussion bombs. These were all new weapons that were, for the first time, tested out in a real-life situation. And I've seen the results of it. It was truly horrifying. If bombs are made to kill more and more people, well, then they really managed to make some very terrible weapons, terrible new weapons.

Speaker 2: Well, some of those are against the Geneva Pact, aren't they?

Ben Alofs: That's correct. I mean, there are—

Speaker 2: Cluster bombs and the phosphorus bombs and all.

Ben Alofs: Yes. The cluster bombs, they were horrific, because they killed so many people, not during the war, but also after the war. And these are very small devices which are thrown out by A mother bomb, which throws out about 450 of these small cluster bombs, and they spread over an area the size of a soccer field, a football field. And anyone alive, living person in that area will be killed. And the horrible thing was that even after the war, when everything was finished, even long after the massacre in Srebrenica, Sabra and Shatila, still every day we saw children being brought in without limbs or dead, who had found cluster bombs, and they were curious, picking it up, and it was exploding in their face, because so many of this ammunition did not explode at the time, but only later.

Speaker 2: And most of this was made in the United States?

Ben Alofs: It was, yes. Because the Israelis did not have the technological know-how to make it. It was delivered by the United States.

Speaker 4: American-made cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs, and anti-personnel mines have all been used in Lebanon. Regardless of the claimed targets, numerous civilian casualties have been caused by their use. This is the casing from one type of cluster bomb used in Lebanon. As it falls to the ground, it releases hundreds of tennis-ball-sized bomblets, which scatter in the air and explode on impact. The area is full of unexploded bombs. This poster in Tyre warns residents not to touch anything that looks suspicious. This is a bomb.

Ben Alofs: This is cluster— now, we have seen, we have seen 4 kinds of cluster bombs. You know, this type—

Ilan Ziv: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Alofs: 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is anti-tank.

Ilan Ziv: And those 3 are anti-personnel.

Ben Alofs: And they were thrown on civilian targets in Burj al-Barajneh, on Takayyani areas, and on this area, too. So they were used against civilians. I can give you one other example of a so-called vacuum bomb, which does not cause an explosion, but a so-called implosion. It causes a vacuum in which everything collapses. And I saw one particular building of 8 stories high, and in this shelter about 200 people were sheltering. And this is— This building was hit by this vacuum bomb, and it just sort of disappeared into the ground. And in one blow, 200 people were just killed, and they were all civilians sheltering there. It was such a horrific way to use— to go against a densely populated city.

Speaker 2: I understand that— The Israelis hardly made any difference for them, whether civilian targets or regular—

Ben Alofs: They were able to make differences, because their planes, which had very sophisticated computers, they were able even to pinpoint one building. But at other times, for instance, on the 12th of August, 1982, it was one of the last days during the siege, they used delayed Deliberately to bomb systematically, like a sort of tapestry, the whole western sector of the city from the south until the north, the whole day for 12 hours. And I think on that day, one particular day, 400 people died. Of course, they were very careful not to bomb the American University of Beirut, not to to make the US government angry, but it was just, just a way to blackmail or to force the PLO to surrender. And shortly afterwards, finally, an agreement was reached, broken by Philip Habib, the envoy of President Reagan, under which the Palestinian fighters were to go from Beirut. And at the same time, the US government solemnly pledged in writing that it would guarantee the protection and security of the Palestinian civilians who remained behind in the camp.

Speaker 2: Now, you were working in hospitals, so you were seeing the results of all these things and the people that were coming in. There must have been horrible experiences and And terrible difficulties that you worked under without— probably without enough blood, without lights and water.

Ben Alofs: I mean, it was like a siege. They cut off the electricity, they cut off water supplies, they tried to cut off the food.

Speaker 2: Who? The Israelis?

Ben Alofs: Yes, the Israelis, together with their Lebanese allies in East Beirut, the right-wing Christian militias. And of course, we had to work in the Very difficult circumstances because you need water in in a hospital to be able to to keep things clean, to wash patients. There were not not enough drugs. There were not enough there was not enough gauze. It was very difficult to work at night because at night the generator had to be put off because there was not enough. And so we had to work with candles and flashlights. And there were people lying there with the most horrifying war wounds. I mean, they were using phosphorus all over the place.

Speaker 2: Napalm, yeah.

Ben Alofs: And I don't know— I don't know for sure napalm, but I've seen phosphorus.

Speaker 4: Phosphorus incendiary bombs were used in both Tyre and Beirut. These explode and spray a flaming chemical that burns the skin and cannot be easily extinguished. This 15-year-old girl was critically burned by a phosphorus bomb.

Ben Alofs: A 12-year-old girl burned by a phosphorus bomb. I've seen people coming in smoking all over, and we didn't have the specialist chemicals To put out the phosphor. And the only way to stop it burning is to try to scrape it off the tissues. Oh, my gosh. That's terrible. And sometimes it used to burn right into the— deep into the muscle. And some people couldn't be saved. And, of course, Burn patients, they take a long time dying, and the environment was, of course, very difficult. It was not clean, so people developed infections very, very quick. It was the first time that I saw maggots creeping around in the In war wounds. I had heard these things from, well, the Second World War, but it was the first time I saw it. It was the first time I worked there as a nurse in war conditions, but it's an experience never to forget.

Speaker 2: What percentage of the people you treated were civilian and what—

Ben Alofs: Most of them. Because the fighters, the people who were defending, most of them, they were firmly entrenched in deep trenches. And these were men who took their measures to protect themselves. But many of the civilians, they were camping out in parks, public parks, in hotels. They were camping out in areas— In the open. that were not safe at all. And this bombing of apartment buildings, it was just meant to put some moral blackmail on the PLO, using the population as a means to force the PLO into surrendering.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Ben Alofs: And I think even though many Palestinians wanted to fight on, because the Israelis did not to make progress. In spite of that, PLO leader Arafat decided to go, because it was really just too much.

Speaker 2: Were the people allowed to move out or to flee if they could, or were they forced to stay in this area?

Ben Alofs: Well, during the first weeks The Israelis used to drop leaflets from airplanes telling people to move out because they were going to attack the city, and they made it clear that it was going to be a very nasty experience. And a number of people moved out, but many people, they refused to leave because they considered it to be It was their town, and they didn't want to leave it. So 600,000 people still remained in this area, and it came under fire almost every day.

Speaker 2: Tell us your story about Sabra and Shatila.

Ben Alofs: Well, as I just said, the Palestinian fighters left with a solemn pledge. Made by Philip Habib on behalf of the U.S. government that the remaining Palestinian civilians would not be harmed. And it was after the war when we started going back to the camps, and all the people who were sheltering in the northern part of West Beirut, they returned back to the camps, which had been frontline area. And the camps, they are in the southern part of the city, in the southern suburbs. And it was amazing to see how people were trying to pick up their lives again in the middle of the rubble. And we were trying to fix the hospitals again in those camps. And all of a sudden, there— well, there was this bomb explosion in the headquarters of the Phalanges Party, which is a right-wing Christian party in East Beirut. Right. Explosion, the Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel was killed. And when we heard the news over the radio at that time, I was working in Acre Hospital on the southern edge of Shatila, and I still saw this expression of fear on the, on the faces of the Palestinian nurses that I worked with, because they, they knew that someone Some kind of revenge would be taken for this assassination. And it turned out that the Israelis knew very well in what state of mind the Christian militias were. So they made use of it, and violating the agreement that had been reached by Philip Habib, they invaded West Beirut.

Speaker 2: Was it, in fact, a Palestinian— Was it in fact a Palestinian who had assassinated Yigal Allon?

Ben Alofs: No, no.

Speaker 2: It was not?

Ben Alofs: Later they came up with a Lebanese man. His name was Chartouni, and he was a member of the Syrian Socialist National Party. But it was not— But not Palestinian. It was not a Palestinian. He was Lebanese. But of course, he could have been working for the— maybe for the Syrians, maybe for the for the Israelis, because there were lots of people who had a reason to get rid of Bashir Gemayel, because he was a very inhuman man himself.

Speaker 2: Very much hated. Yeah, he was. But they took that as an excuse to go in after the disaster.

Ben Alofs: Yes. Well, the Israelis went in saying that they wanted to restore law and order, while in effect it was very, very quiet in West Beirut. It was just a pretext to move in and to destroy the camps, to get the camps under complete control. And, well, we were working in Gaza Hostel during the massacre, not really knowing— Gaza Hostel is inside Sabra camp. And we were not really knowing at the time what was going on. We only heard unconfirmed reports. Right. Rumors. And the only real testimony that we had heard was from a little boy who was 13 years old at the same time. And he had come running to the hospital where many civilians were sheltering. And he told us that he was at home with his family of about 10 persons, and suddenly gunmen burst into the house, and they shot all the family members down. They were all And he was wounded, and he was under this pile of bodies for a few hours, managed to—

Speaker 2: Work his way out from there.

Ben Alofs: Work his way out. And then he ran to the hospital crying and told what had happened. But only on the last day, on the Saturday morning, when the Lebanese Forces militia, the Christian militia, came to the hospital and actually took us prisoner— we were 22 foreign medical volunteers, doctors and nurses, and they took us prisoner. And we were surrounded by them holding M16 rifles. And we saw them very brutally rounding up people with rifle butts and kicking with their boots. And we first thought they were Israelis, because they were wearing Israeli helmets and Israeli uniforms. Mm-hmm. When we looked a little bit closer, we saw their insignia, which is a Lebanese cedar, but in a stylized way. And then we knew that they were Lebanese forces. And these people, they were absolutely mad. You couldn't talk with them. They had rounded up one big group of hundreds of people in the main street of the camp. And we were passing through this group. And we were— We saw women trying desperately to give their babies to a number of the nurses and the doctors, because they knew what was going to happen. And we couldn't do anything. It was just sheer frustration that we felt. And then we saw the first dead bodies in the street, of 2 old men who were older than 80 years and had holes in their heads. And they had not been killed very— They were shot. long before. And then we were met by a new group of militiamen who were talking French to us. And French is a language they speak very much in East Beirut. And these people, they called us terrorists, communists.

Pauline Cutting: You?

Ben Alofs: Yes, because apparently if you are in a Palestinian camp, you are automatically a terrorist. It was ridiculous. We were Foreign health workers and doctors from various countries in Europe, even from the United States. And they called us terrorists and communists, and they asked us, are you Christians? And of course we said yes, because we knew what the answer had to be.

Speaker 2: I'll be a Christian.

Ben Alofs: So, but it didn't help anything, and they started shouting to us, you Christians, you are no Christians. Christians at all, because good Christians do not work in the Palestinian hospital. And, you know, the, the fact that we were working in this hospital was just enough. And there was one Palestinian nurse with us. He was a young boy of 18 years old, and they picked him out and they took his ID card. And then— and in Lebanon, the Lebanese have green ID cards and the Palestinians blue ID cards. And they saw that he was— Green. Palestinian, and they just took him behind a wall and shot and killed him. And they told us to go. And we saw them in the southern part of Shatila. We saw them using bulldozers, leveling the small houses and moving big mounds of earth. And we saw that one of them carried Hebrew markings. So we saw the Israeli army outside. They were controlling everything. They were viewing— they had their military headquarters on the edge of the camp. They could look into the camp. They really could see what was going on. And they had things under control. OK, these Christian militias, they are— they were a dangerous, unruly bunch, but they had some kind of control over them. And the Israelis were just knowing what they were doing.

Ilan Ziv: And—

Ben Alofs: And that's why it's so terrible what happened, because they deliberately did it.

Speaker 4: Film it. Take pictures of how they slaughter our people. Cover it right. Inside, still 4 dead bodies remain. They buried us alive and betrayed us as well. The woman goes in anger. Stop taking pictures. Hussein, Yasser, Yasser and Hussein, four brothers all buried. Together. These are martyrs. Why do you number them? Where are you now? I'm a stranger alone. I have nobody. Fear God, you traitors! You Arab regimes have betrayed us like you always did. My husband is dead. We have 9 children. Since Friday, he's missing. My husband is dead. I can't find him anywhere. It's the Arab regimes and governments. They caused it all. Where am I gonna go? You don't even understand my Arabic.

Ben Alofs: Oh, بدي أروح أنا وين وين ما بدي فم علي عربي بدي حقيقة ما بدي فم علي ما بدي فم عربي الله يسعدك يا حبيبي يا مدلي.

Speaker 4: The Red Cross employee. Points at other bodies.

Pauline Cutting: You speak English? Yeah.

Speaker 4: Why are the numbers? It's better than not to cover them. So what's his number? Why don't I uncover them? We'll know the number from your description. Was he here? He was just passing on Friday with 4 other people. The other 4 were found dead, but he never showed up, and we could never find him. He's 45 years old, and he has 9 children. Is he fat? No, he's thin. He's a little bit fatter than you. What's his name? Adnan Bikr. He had brown pants, like that body over there. It's too small. That's a baby. Tied up. A boy. By tomorrow, some people will come to identify him. There's another brown pants over there, that one over there. But I can't go look. I have high blood pressure, and I might faint. I just want to take a look on their pants. Why don't you do it later? No, I want to do it now. I'm not afraid now, and nothing will happen to me. Goddamn you, Arabs! God help me! It's a tragedy. 9 children. 9 children. Why was he killed? 4 youth killed. Why? Go and see. Smash them all, all the Arab regimes. I'm sorry.

Pauline Cutting: يا روح والنبحز الشال التودي عينه يا عين هلي دمع عجليات الجيل يا ألواني نريد تتنعنا يلغي ألواني هنا يربحك بحتي أيماني عجل سجي مروح الله يا هلا يا يهاني This is a picture drawn by a child in Shatila camp, and it portrays their impression of their lives— people on stretchers, people carrying wounded, the houses bombed and on fire. And anybody who knows Shatila knows that this is very accurate, because the mosque, the top of the mosque Was knocked off in the fighting, and you see it lying on the ground.

Ben Alofs: Okay, there was this investigation afterwards, but even though one of the main responsible people, Minister Sharon and General Aitan and General Amos Yaron, was punished at the time, they are now respectable men. And these these people who who made war crimes, Minister. Sharon, he is now Israel's minister of trade and industry. And this General Amos Sharon, who was commanding the troops in the Beirut area, he is now Israel's military attaché in Washington.

Speaker 2: How many people were killed? Have they determined like that, were massacred?

Ben Alofs: Well, it was very difficult to establish how many people exactly were killed. The Kahan report, mentioned 732 people. But these, these were the people who were collected by the Lebanese Civil Defense, the International Red Cross, who were found on the ground. But the Lebanese government forbade the opening up of the mass graves that had been made by the Lebanese Forces militia themselves. And they also did not take into account all those people who were seen Carried away on trucks to unknown destinations and who never showed up anymore. I've been looking myself for several friends that I knew and that I saw in this group for months, but I never saw them again. And I remember when, at the end of October, long after the massacre, the autumn rain started and the camps were flooding, and people— workers tried to find out what caused the flooding, they found a new cluster of 5, 6 bodies in the sewer. People just disappeared. And there was one Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliuk, who investigated the massacre, and he— his estimate is between 1,500 and 4,000 people. And the American journalist Jonathan Randall managed to interview one of the Lebanese Forces militiamen who was involved in the massacre, and he asked him, how many people have been killed, do you think? And his answer was, well, you will only find out once they start building a subway in Beirut.

Speaker 2: Oh my God.

Ilan Ziv: Israel is proud of its relief efforts to the Lebanese population. Yet the IDF spokesperson that is attached to the governor of Tyre confided privately to me that there is a concern It's a consistent policy of not helping the Palestinian population.

Speaker 4: In the Ain el-Hilweh camp outside Sidon, Israeli forces used bulldozers to demolish the few buildings that survived the 4 days of bombardment. Now Ain el-Hilweh, which housed about 60,000 refugees before the war, is totally demolished. Yet more than 10,000 people have returned to live there. Literally camping out in the ruins.

Ilan Ziv: In Saidah, we found some of the camp dwellers squatting in abandoned buildings and half-built shops.

Speaker 4: These people are Palestinians from Ain al-Hilwa camp. They have been taking refuge in this hospital shelter in Saidah for a month, after they were forced out of their own camp. اليوم لا نزار اليوم.

Pauline Cutting: هذه النزار بعبرها من عبر تخونجينا هنا. فهم.

Speaker 4: سلمنا يعني لنا. سلمنا هون. إسا إسا أنتوا وعبر. They didn't get water, food, or electricity for three days, and don't know where they would go next. As of two months after its initial invasion. Israel had indicated its opposition to rebuilding the refugee camps. Although some refugees were permitted to return to their camps, they were not allowed to rebuild their homes. After 2 months, relief agencies were finally permitted to set up tents. The USAID director estimates 80,000 to 100,000 people are without shelter in the south. Israeli authorities have not restored water or sewage systems to the camps. Relief organizations were not allowed to distribute food in the camps, so the refugees were forced to walk or ride by taxi the several kilometers to the town in order to receive food.

Ilan Ziv: Bashir Jumail, Strongman of the right-wing Christian militia backed by Israel has declared that in order to achieve peace and stability in Lebanon, not only the PLO, but the entire Palestinian population has to be expelled. They don't want us in Palestine. Now they expel us from Lebanon, the teacher in Elbas said to me. Where should we go? To the sea?

Speaker 2: Join us next time when Nurse Ben Alofs and Dr. Pauline Cutting Recall living under a siege, trying to run a hospital with daily shellings, sniping and running out of food and water. In another Palestinian camp, Burj al-Barajneh. It's an incredible story.

Pauline Cutting: Well, it was a real medieval-type siege where all means of normal People living are cut off. So, the electricity was cut off from the camp early on. So, the only electricity supply we had was the generator for the hospital. And, of course, we had a limited fuel supply, so we had to start rationing quite early on. No food supplies were allowed into the camp. No medical supplies were allowed into the camp. No— nobody was allowed to move in and out. For about 2 and a half, 3 months, there was a very heavy military assault on Many people had begun eating cats and dogs because they didn't have anything else. And in the end, it was hundreds of people, including ourselves.

Ben Alofs: There was not only daily shelling of mortars and tanks. There was only— there was also sniping.

Pauline Cutting: Yeah. I think it's—

Ben Alofs: Just anything that was moving in the— inside those small alleys in the camp. And it didn't matter if it was a child or an adult. Whether they were men, whether they were women or children, anything that was alive and moving in those alleys was a target.

Pauline Cutting: It was about 4 girls between the age of, I think, 8 and 13, and they came to the hospital and they said, we think we know a way out. We're going to sneak out over the, over the sandhills, and we're going to go out and bring some medicines in. And they did this twice. And the third time they did it, they were seen and shot at. And they ran into the camp, and they weren't wounded, but they were very badly frightened. And I thought, well, that's really enough, you know, they've done enough, and they've been badly frightened, they really shouldn't go again. But no, the next day they'd got over it, and they came back to the hospital, and they said, we're going out again.

Ben Alofs: A Shiite spiritual leader gave They've issued a so-called fatwa, a dispensation, religious dispensation, to people that they could, if necessary, eat the flesh of animals, and if really needed, also to eat the flesh of humans.

Speaker 2: You'll know what it's like to undergo a brutal siege after you hear 2 people who Who experienced such a tragedy in Lebanon, right now on Alternative Views.

Pauline Cutting: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Before we have our interview with the 2 people who underwent the siege of Bourj al-Brajneh in Lebanon, let's look at what the Palestinians have had to undergo since 1975. It was then, that year, that the Lebanese Civil War was going on. And in the fall of 1975, the siege and massacre of the people in the Palestinian camp of Tel Azatir occurred, a horror which was revisited on the Palestinian camp of Ain al-Hilweh in 1982 after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June of that year.

Ilan Ziv: We could not film in Ain Hilweh. Once a refugee camp of over 25,000 people. Nobody can. Dr. Christian Janu, a Canadian doctor who worked with the Red Crescent and has been detained by the Israelis, was an eyewitness to the situation of the camp at the end of the battle.

Speaker 5: I was going along the perimeter of the camp, the 2 main thoroughfares. which form the north and eastern perimeter of the camp. And just in the periphery of the camp, I was able to count about 300 dead bodies. Also, in the emergency reception area of the hospital, where a shell had landed, there were about another 40 or 50 dead, people who had taken refuge there. I had a chance to talk to a number of the doctors who were there. I counted another 20 or so dead amongst my patients. Later on, I saw 2 other cadavers in the Red Crescent Hospital that we had evacuated several days previously, another 20, 25 in the private hospital when I went to see the other Red Crescent personnel there. That's a total of about 400 dead, slightly over 400. And that's just in a very small, limited area, a few blocks of the camp and the city. That 400 is— It was supposed to be— well, it was about 3/4 of the total official death toll for the entire south, as given by Israeli authorities. I didn't even enter the center of the camp, so I couldn't see all the wounded and dead that were there. The scene of the camp, from the periphery of it, was one of complete desolation. There was utter and total destruction. What was the reaction of the camp? The topography of the terrain even had been changed. You no longer knew where buildings had stood and where the roads had been. It had all been transformed into pockmarked terrain, large blackened craters filled with rubble, broken slabs of concrete, twisted iron bars, broken trees, the carcasses of cars and automobiles. And you were there. And a scene that is just indescribable. It looked as though there had not been a single dwelling that had been left intact in the entire area. And the bombing and shelling of the camp went on for at least another week.

Speaker 4: These people are Palestinians from Ain al-Hilwa camp. They have been taking refuge in this They have been living in this hospital shelter in Sidon for a month, after they were forced out of their own camp. They didn't get water, food, or electricity for 3 days, and don't know where they would go next. The mothers wonder where their sons, who have been taken by the Israeli forces, are, and when they will come back. They say that they would not let another Tel al-Zatar massacre happen again.

Speaker 2: But it did happen again in September of 1982. Sabra and Shatila, 2 Palestinian camps in East Beirut, were attacked by the Israeli ally, the Christian Phalangists. Thousands were massacred. Then, in late 1982, Syrian, Libyan, and Right. Dissident Palestinian troops fought pro-PLO, or pro-Arafat troops, for control of the area. And this occurred at Tripoli in Lebanon. In early summer of 1985, the Amal militia started attacking Palestinian camps. Then the Amal militia started the siege of Burj al-Barajneh, starting in October of And it was in Burj al-Barajneh, where our 2 guests, English doctor Pauline Cutting and Dutch nurse Ben Alofs, underwent the terrible siege. Are these camps that we're talking about, Burj al-Barajneh and Sabra and Shatila, are they all pretty much in the same general area?

Ben Alofs: Yes.

Speaker 2: Are they in the same general area or close by each other?

Pauline Cutting: They're close by each other. They're about a mile apart. This is the camp of Bourj al-Barajneh in the foreground. In the middle, you see the southern suburbs of West Beirut, which is the Shiite neighborhood. And in the background, on the hills, you see the suburbs of East Beirut. Sabra and Shatila are together, and Bourj al-Barajneh is about a mile away from Sabra and Shatila. This slide was taken in September 1986, before this most recent siege. You can see that the camp has already been damaged by recent— by previous rounds of fighting. And the building, the large building on the top of the hill, is the Haifa Hospital, where I worked. It's Haifa Hospital, Palestine Red Crescent Society Hospital.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Pauline Cutting: Which, as you may know, the Palestine Red Crescent Society runs a sort of national health service where they treat the patients without charging them. So anybody who comes to the door, either Palestinian or Lebanese, or occasionally— I treated a Syrian soldier who came to the hospital— anybody who comes in is treated. Before I went, the Haifa Hospital was a rehabilitation unit for handicapped people, mostly people with spinal injuries and paralyzed. But the reason that the Palestine Red Crescent Society made this appeal was because during the first round of the camp wars between the Amal militia and the Palestinians, Shatila and Bourj al-Barajneh were attacked and surrounded.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Pauline Cutting: This was in May, June 1985, and at that time there were no emergency hospital facilities inside the camps. All the Palestinian Red Crescent Society facilities were outside, and the wounded were not allowed to be transferred out of the camp.

Speaker 2: Who wouldn't allow them?

Pauline Cutting: The Amal militia.

Ilan Ziv: I see.

Pauline Cutting: So many, many people died without any access to medical or surgical aid. In fact, some of the nurses that I worked with in the hospital told me stories later about how they put bandages on the patients and then put them in a big room and prayed for them, because they could— didn't have the facilities to do anything else. After the end of this siege in April 1987, you can see that the hospital was not immune from attack, and the 2 top floors of the hospital, in fact, were completely destroyed. This is the hospital from the other side. The lower floors were partly protected by this wall you see here, which had been partly built after the hospital had been attacked in the summer. But we were still completely unable to use the upper floors. The emergency facilities were built in the basement, and we were able to look after patients both in the basement and on the ground floor.

Speaker 2: Can you tell us who the Amal militia are and how they fit into this Can you explain the complex political situation, why they were fighting there, doing this to the Palestinians?

Pauline Cutting: They are a Shiite Muslim militia, and why they attacked the camps, it's difficult to explain. But Lebanon has been— is a country which has been at civil war for about 12 years, and it is breaking up into Armed cantons. And those Palestinian refugee camps which were attacked this time during these last 2 years are those Palestinian refugee camps which fall within the area of the Amal Shiite armed canton, because other Palestinian refugee camps which are around in Lebanon were not involved in this same round of fighting.

Speaker 2: Is that because the Palestinians there are stronger Militarily than they were in the area where you were, so they can defend them against the Amal militia?

Pauline Cutting: No, it's that they're not within that area. For example, there's a small Palestinian Christian camp, Mar Elias, in West Beirut, which is in a Druze area, and that wasn't involved in this fighting. And there are Palestinian refugee camps in the north and in the Bekaa and in Ain al-Hilweh inside But, but they're not surrounded by the Shiite Amal militia, so they weren't involved in this fighting.

Speaker 2: Is there an Israeli connection to the Amal militia?

Pauline Cutting: It is said. I don't know exactly. Probably in the south, but people spoke of it. And also people spoke on the radio. It was discussed, the reasons also that Amal are Syria's close allies in the Lebanon, and before this particular round of fighting, people told me, and it was discussed on the radio, that the Syrians gave some heavy arms and some tanks to the Amal militia and tacitly supported them in this, because they have an ongoing battle between half a Well, this goes back then, is connected.

Speaker 2: Maybe we should talk for a second about your experiences in Tripoli, where the Syrian-backed PLO people were fighting to kick out Arafat. Can you give us some background on that? Then maybe we can understand the situation.

Ben Alofs: Yeah, well, it was after, after 1982, really. There was an incident in Tripoli, The inside conflict that broke out, it was initially about local commanders that had not behaved well, but it was bigger than that. It was just a conflict— what way to follow. Some of the radical factions were pro-Syrian. They wanted to go on with military struggle. But PLO leader Arafat thought that After 1982, the time had come, and the Palestinians had won enough support to work for a political solution, because anybody knew that the Palestinians were not able to defeat such a regional superpower as Israel. So they were going to work hard for a political solution. And, of course, that's It can be very tricky. And that's why there were these conflicts between the mainstream PLO of Yasser Arafat and the other pro-Syrian faction. But more than that, the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, he is— even though he might say that we are the first defenders of the Palestinian cause, I think he is only thinking in terms of his own narrow interests. Right. And he wants to negotiate with Israel, I think, because he would like to have his Golan Heights that are still occupied by Israel. He would like to have them back. And so he needs some cards to play out. And that's why Hafez al-Assad wants to play the Palestinian card, and he wants to control the PLO. That's why also now, at this very moment, he is trying very much to please the United States.

Speaker 2: So it looks like the Amal militia were more a tool or aligned with Syria then, rather than Israel, although Israel would be pleased with what has happened, I'm sure.

Ben Alofs: Israel itself had its own reasons for being very glad with this development. Well, the original scheme of 1982, setting up a Christian state in Lebanon, and taking large portions of the south of Lebanon, including the water sources of the Litani, which were of extreme vital importance for the Israeli agriculture. This whole scheme did not work out well for the Israelis, but they tried to— they were trying to make some underhand deals with local Shiite leaders in the south, among whom was Daoud He was the Shiite leader from Tyre in the deep south, so as to create a sort of big buffer which could guarantee the borders of northern Israel.

Speaker 2: Okay, well, let's get back to the Amal attack. They actually attacked the camps where you were working?

Pauline Cutting: Yes.

Speaker 2: Militarily?

Ben Alofs: Yes.

Speaker 2: What kind of equipment? I mean, they— is it mainly small arms, or they have—

Pauline Cutting: Did they attack with— well, I didn't ever see it, but I saw the results of it. No, they, they also had tanks.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay. They had some decent artillery.

Pauline Cutting: Yes, they had tanks around the camp.

Ben Alofs: The Amal militia outside were using T-54 tanks, and especially the, the houses on the fringes of the camp, they were badly damaged and sometimes Completely destroyed by tank fire. Many, many people in the camp lived in simple houses of breeze blocks, and on top of that, corrugated iron roofs as a cover. And of course, this gives no protection whatsoever against bombs. So, people— many people stayed in shelters like this. There were about 15 over the whole camp. But there were not enough for all the people. So many people stayed at home, especially when these homes were having 2 floors, which meant that there was some more protection, especially if these floors were made of concrete.

Pauline Cutting: One day, a tank bomb came in through the wall of the hospital, and the hospital was regularly In fact, the 2 top floors of the hospital were completely destroyed. The superstructure collapsed, and much of that was with tank shelling. So the camp was surrounded by heavy arms.

Speaker 2: And this was actually a siege. They wouldn't let people out, is that right?

Pauline Cutting: Yes, there were— I mean, there were a series of attacks on Bourj al-Barajneh and Shatila camps. And eventually it spilled over, this last round, into the south also, to the camp of Rashidiyah in the south around the Tyre area, because that also comes into the area of the Amal Canton. But yes, there was a brief fight that I was working in, in the summer of 1986, which lasted for about 5 weeks, but then again they attacked. Bourj al-Barajneh camp beginning in— at the end of October 1986. And that again was a siege, and it lasted until April 1987, which was 5 and a half months, nearly 6 months.

Speaker 2: Was that the one where we read about such horrible conditions and people were considering cannibalism? What was it like? And you were in this too, you were going through this also?

Pauline Cutting: Yes.

Speaker 2: What was it like?

Pauline Cutting: Um, well, it was A real medieval-type siege, where all means of normal living are cut off. So the electricity was cut off from the camp early on, so the only electricity supply we had was the generator for the hospital. And of course, we had a limited fuel supply, so we had to start rationing quite early on. No food supplies were allowed into the camp. No medical supplies were allowed into the camp. No, nobody was allowed to move in and out. It, in the first week or so, there was some movement in and out, but then it really tightened and nothing and nobody was allowed in and out. So for about 2 and a half, 3 months, there was a very heavy military assault on the camp, including the hospital. As I say, the superstructure collapsed.

Ben Alofs: Most of the people They were staying in shelters like these, and they were having absolutely inadequate facilities. There was no running water in there. There was no electricity in there. People were crowded together. They were living there for 6 months almost, and they were not able to wash properly. So you can imagine that during that siege, a lot of A lot of skin disease and things like head lice existed. And we already ran out of medicine for these skin diseases and head lice after 1.5 months. And it was just an impossible battle to— against all these kind of diseases. The normal water supply, which was pumped into the camp by the Lebanese, the Beirut Water The water supply to the company was cut off at the beginning of the siege, and the only source of water that was left were a number of taps that had been led into the camp by the defenders. And there were about 10 taps who were functioning. And every day— and it became a routine duty— every day, the women of the camp, which during this The women of the siege really played a vital and very enormous part. They used to go and— with jerry cans and other things to collect water and bring it home.

Pauline Cutting: This also shows there were a limited number of places, so they had to queue sometimes for quite a long time.

Ben Alofs: To go to these taps and to fetch the water was very dangerous, because every day there was shelling and sniping, and people They risked their lives being outside. And at this spot, I took a picture just after a woman had been killed by a mortar shell that exploded there.

Speaker 2: And who was defending it?

Pauline Cutting: The camp.

Speaker 2: The people inside, or were there special Palestinian militia people?

Pauline Cutting: The Palestinian men inside the camp. During that—

Ben Alofs: Families.

Pauline Cutting: Yes. During that very first attack, The camps had been defended mainly by schoolboys, the 14- to 17-year-olds, who gathered what they could and used them.

Ben Alofs: And by women.

Pauline Cutting: And by women, yes. The women fought in that first fight, and they gathered what unexploded shells they could and sent them back. But they lost a lot of ground. And after that, the men, many of whom had left in 1982, they came Oh, they infiltrated and then came back. Some of them came back, but they are the men of the families of the camp. And most of the men in the camp were, in normal times, I knew them as plumbers, as carpenters, as teachers, as nurses, doctors, shopkeepers, who have work. But, and some, some had gone out with the fighters, but some, some had stayed, and some came back during this time because they saw that their families were being attacked. And that they're— Ben talked about the guarantee of security for the civilians by the Americans at that time. Well, again, now they saw their families being attacked in the camps, and there wasn't anybody providing any security. So they thought they better provide it And where did they get the weapons?

Speaker 2: They were left over from the previous—

Pauline Cutting: No, they brought in. They brought in.

Speaker 2: They had some, yeah.

Ben Alofs: They managed to bring in a little bit. Well, not heavy arms. The heaviest arms they have is a number of rocket-propelled anti-tank, these B-7 rocket launchers that shoot rocket-propelled grenades. When this first round of the camp was started in May '85, there were no weapons at all in the camp. And people used to use these kind of catapults to lob stones and even to lob Pepsi cans, which they had stuffed with explosives that they had taken from unexploded mortar shells, together with some—

Speaker 2: Molotov cocktails.

Ben Alofs: With some shrapnel, and they would make a sort of improvised fuse and shoot this back to the enemy. And they would even use stones to throw at the other side.

Pauline Cutting: Because they were defending a fixed point and they weren't trying to capture anything, that, of course, is easier to do than Than if you're rushing out trying to capture something you don't— it's not so costly.

Speaker 2: So the attacks, I guess they weren't able to capture. Were they trying to just wipe out the population? Was it genocide in a way that they were after?

Pauline Cutting: Well, we began to think so in the end, yes, we did, because after about 3 months of quite heavy military assault, then we realized that there was also a war of attrition going on because no food was allowed in, no medical supplies were allowed in. The electricity had been cut off, and that cut off the water supply to the houses, so water had to be collected from taps in the street. The hospital was being heavily bombed, and I believe that there was an attempt to inactivate the hospital in this way.

Ben Alofs: Strategic target.

Pauline Cutting: Because it's a very— how can I say, a prominent building. It's on the top of the hill and it stands up above everything else, and you don't mistake it for anything else. So, but as I say, after about 3 and a half months, we realized also that food supplies and medical supplies were running out. We saw in the hospital first the— we started rationing food, and we began to see amongst the population, particularly the children, the problems of malnutrition, skin infections which wouldn't clear up with medical care. We saw mouth ulcers, children with diarrhea and vomiting and these sorts of problems, and wounds which wouldn't heal. And then people came to us who we realized were not eating, and not eating any fresh food certainly, and eating very little. We realized that people were supplementing their diet with grass and weeds. A family were admitted to the hospital one evening who were all vomiting because they'd been gathering weeds because they had nothing else, and they, they ate some poisonous weeds. And then we were still trying to preserve small amount of food in the hospital to feed to the wounded and to the workers, and we We were all eating about one small meal a day, but many people in the camp had run out of food. Some people came to the hospital at mealtimes begging for leftovers, and of course there weren't any leftovers, because there wasn't really enough to go around. And then some people came to the hospital to ask us if the eating of cats and dogs would do them any harm. And of course medically it doesn't, and in some areas of the world people eat them as Their normal diet. But we and, and the Palestinians have a big psychological block to eating these things. But we told them no, that medically it wouldn't do them any harm. And I discussed this with the other doctors. I was working with 6 other Palestinian doctors, and they too had had people coming to them with such questions. And we realized that many people had begun eating cats and dogs because they didn't have anything else. And in the end, it was hundreds of people, including ourselves.

Speaker 2: What's the total population of the total area that we're talking about here that's under attack and affected?

Pauline Cutting: The camp is about 400 meters by 500 meters, and it houses now 9,000 people, although it used to house—

Ben Alofs: Maybe a little bit more now.

Pauline Cutting: Maybe a few more have come back now after this last fighting. But during the siege, it was 9,000 people. It used to house about 30 30,000. But during these last few years, because of the difficult situation, about 20,000, in fact, have left the camps, and they've moved into other Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon not involved in this particular round of fighting, or they've moved out— some have gone to other countries, but few— or they've moved out into the city. But even that's not safe, and Palestinians have also been taken out of their houses.

Speaker 4: Right.

Speaker 2: What was it like operating a hospital you could almost hardly operate, could you?

Pauline Cutting: No, it was very difficult. I spoke about one of the difficulties was the fuel supply. And so often we— when we were very low on fuel, we could only run the generator for emergencies. So much of the time the hospital was dark and cold and And there was no heating. And because the top floors were bombed, the water tank was damaged, and water had come pouring down through the hospital and dripping on everything. It had to be swept out every day until they could cut off the supply and re-divert it. But it meant that everything was wet and moldy in the hospital. This is the emergency room. I worked with 6 other Palestinian doctors, 2 surgeons, 3 GPs, and an obstetrician. And he turned out to be very useful, because there were about 70 babies born during this 6 months, and he had to perform about 8 cesarean sections. This— the 2 doctors on the left are 2 of my Palestinian colleagues. And this is a man who has minor shrapnel injuries. This is another girl who has minor shrapnel injuries. The equipment in the whole hospital was fairly basic. And certainly it's not a hospital as you would think of here, or hospitals certainly like a hospital that I was used to working in in Europe. This is a view along the emergency room. One of the nurses is just cleaning up after a patient has been taken to the operating theater. But it gives you an idea of what it's like. You see the windows on the right here were blown out, but because of the wall outside, And because of the wall outside protecting the room, it was a fairly safe place to work in. When I'd worked in the summer and the hospital was attacked, we— at one point, we'd had to shelter in the corridor and just run into the emergency room if somebody was injured, and then run out again. This is one of the wards on the side of the hospital which was not protected by this wall, and the windows to be blocked up with sandbags to keep it safe inside. And in fact, into this room one day a tank bomb came in through the wall. This is the operating theater. It was converted in this one small room in the basement. It was equipped really only to do one operation at one time. But during this time, we faced several difficulties. Because the camp was surrounded and the electricity was cut off, we had to rely on the hospital generator for electricity. But, of course, we had a limited fuel supply. And at one time, we were so short of fuel that we couldn't— we didn't have enough time to operate on patients one after the other. So, in fact, we had to, at one point, crowd 2 patients into this small room.

Speaker 4: And—

Pauline Cutting: Bring in a table from outside, a desk lamp, and operate in 2 teams next to each other, bumping into each other. You— I think you can see on the back wall of the operating theatre, although this slide was taken quite early on in the fighting, that already there's some green mould growing. All the rooms were damp, and eventually mould grew uncontrollably in most of the rooms. This little boy He was injured by shrapnel in the brain. The 2 doctors you see sitting with him are the Palestinian surgeons I worked with. But none of us had ever done any neurosurgery before. We're not specialists. But we were not given permission to transfer this boy out of the camp to a neurosurgery specialty. So we operated on him ourselves and did several subsequent similar operations.

Ben Alofs: And—

Pauline Cutting: And he, in fact, did very well, and we discharged him home before the end of the fighting. This is another boy that was injured by shrapnel. We— on one particular day, a bomb landed in a house where children were playing, and about 15 of them were injured in one go. And you saw that our emergency room was really very small, and for a short while it was chaos until we managed to triage them and sort them out.

Speaker 2: Well, you probably ran out of medicines and—

Pauline Cutting: We did, yes.

Ben Alofs: —things like that.

Pauline Cutting: We had to reuse bandages, wash them and re-sterilize them. We eventually ran out of penicillin, and then we saw gas gangrene, which is— should be a disease of old wartime, but we saw it on one occasion when we'd run out of penicillin. This is the laboratory. As you can see, It has almost no sophisticated equipment. It had— the people were also living in here. The laboratory staff were living in here. We, in the operating theater— operating staff, we lived in the anteroom of the operating theater. This is the blood storage fridge on the right, but in fact we weren't able to run it because of the shortage of fuel for most of the time. So in fact, we had to take blood and give it fresh. But for any of you that know, in fact, that's the best quality blood you can possibly give for trauma patients. So ironically, it saved lives by us having to give it very fresh. These are the wards with some of the patients. This is the front hall of the hospital. Because it's a relatively Because it was a relatively large building and many of the houses were very flimsy, people who lived in vulnerable places came to shelter in the hospital, and many people lived here for months.

Ben Alofs: I was living and working with Susie Whiten, a Scottish nurse, in the lower part of the camp. It was relatively far from the hospital. Sorry, on top of the hill. Speaking to a TV. And it was very important to have at this place some kind of first aid station in order to stabilize patients, because in this area, which was quite close to important defense lines, and in this area, too, many civilian people were living, there was sometimes heavy shelling And a lot of shooting. And in the foreground you see a sort of central square. And all the people who got injured in this area passed through here. And if any one of them was badly wounded, for instance, having an artery burst because of a bullet or because of shrapnel, we could stabilize this patient first in our clinic and then bring him up on a stretcher to the hospital. And the streets in the camp, they were very narrow. They are about half a meter, hardly enough to let a stretcher through. And I still recall how difficult it was to get people up to the hospital, especially when there was shelling going on. This was the rule. This is the room where we worked. You see Susie here together with some Palestinian volunteers.

Ilan Ziv: These were—

Ben Alofs: this was just after a mortar shell injured a number of family members. The shell exploded near a house and shrapnel came inside and wounded the mother and a daughter. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. You can see the sandbags here. We put sandbags in front of the window to prevent shrapnel from coming in, but the walls were not very thick, so it was sometimes very risky to be there. But we didn't have any choice. We slept and worked there for 6 months.

Speaker 2: And at some point there was talk about cannibalism, right? Or thinking about it?

Ben Alofs: That was only later, but people never really ate human flesh. But there was— it was around the 13th of February that a Shiite spiritual leader gave— issued a so-called fatwa, a dispensation, religious dispensation, to people that they could We would, if necessary, eat the flesh of animals, and if really needed, also to eat the flesh of humans. But the situation happily did not evolve like that, that we had to start eating human flesh.

Speaker 4: I see.

Ben Alofs: But at that time, around the 13th of February, the crisis was I mean, we had been under siege for 4 months already, and there was absolutely no perspective whatsoever for a solution. Ceasefires came and ceasefires went, and agreements came, agreements went. There was this big Islamic conference in Kuwait on the 27th of January, and all the people had put all their We put all our hopes on that. And it just went by, and nothing happened. So we were really all thinking that we are either going to die here, or we have to surrender, or we first have to eat each other, because that was the prospect. I mean, we were in a real Middle Ages siege.

Ilan Ziv: Hmm.

Ben Alofs: And in this kind of situation, really, you see Some of the best things coming out in people.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Ben Alofs: And really, I have so much admiration for the resilience and for the ability to improvise of these people. It's just enormous. For instance, we had a lot of difficulties with fuel. And already at the end of December last year, the supplies were running out. And there was one man in the camp who used to work at a gas station outside the camp. It was in the no-man's land at the side of the Amal militia. And this man knew where the underground tanks were. So he made this map, and they started digging a tunnel 15 meters underground. And they just dug under the feet of the Amal militiamen and eventually reached— after a few weeks— reached the tanks. And they were able to get the tanks out of the camp. They used tanks which turned out to be completely filled, and they emptied the tanks and managed to let the hospital generator run for 40 more days. And there are lots of other examples of how—

Pauline Cutting: I remember one evening we were in the hospital, and a man came in who'd been shot through the chest.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Pauline Cutting: When he told his story, he was very, very upset and inconsolable, because he and a few other young men had tried to sneak out of the camp to pick up some food. They'd made an arrangement with some people outside by walkie-talkie to hide some food, and they tried to sneak out to bring in some food. But when— as The first one left the camp. He discovered that it was an ambush, and, and so there was a lot of shooting, and the first one who went out was shot. And he called back to the others, don't come out, this— don't come out, it's an ambush. He said, I'm wounded, go back. But another one ran out to try and get him in, and he was also shot. And they told that he spoke for a couple of minutes, and then they didn't hear him again. And then he was shot. anything else from him. And then this third one also ran out to try and bring in the wounded man, but it was hopeless, and he was shot through the chest. And he managed to run back into the camp, and then they, they had to, had to give up. But—

Speaker 2: What about the sewage and refuse? That must have broken down too. What were they going to do with all that?

Pauline Cutting: Yes, the garbage was a huge problem. It's It's normally collected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, but it's— it was a huge problem. It collected in enormous piles that eventually were shoulder height and tens of meters long, and it was winter and wet. I think we were lucky it wasn't hot, it wasn't the summer, so there were no flies, but there were rats. Lots of rats. There were hundreds of rats in the streets.

Speaker 2: People eating the rats?

Pauline Cutting: A child was seen eating a rat, yes.

Ben Alofs: Some people did, but not many.

Pauline Cutting: In the reverse, there were so many rats that one old woman had a stroke and was bedridden, and she was unable to be rescued during some heavy fighting. And when she was finally rescued and brought to the hospital, the rats had come and eaten half her foot. So it was very, uh, very big problem.

Speaker 2: What about the children? How did they survive in something like this?

Pauline Cutting: In some ways, they, they survived very well. They adapt only too readily. Um, many were wounded, in fact. And this young boy lost both his legs, as did his brother and his father, in the same I was surprised. Children don't make a fuss about nothing. They're actually very brave. I remember one small girl, 10-year-old girl, who was playing in the entrance of the hospital with her young brother, and a bomb landed and it amputated her foot, and it wounded her young brother in the leg. So I had to operate on her and then do her dressing, and I'm quite sure it hurt, but because her little little brother was so upset by having seen her leg, whenever I did her dressing, she didn't ever cry. She only smiled because she knew that her little brother would cry if she did. And later we saw again children—

Ben Alofs: They're all haunted.

Pauline Cutting: It makes them also so very old before their time. Some children, when they knew that the hospital was out of medicines, of They were 4 girls? Some sort. They came to the hospital and they said to us— it was about 4 girls between the age of, I think, 8 and 13. And they came to the hospital and they said, we think we know a way out. We're going to sneak out over the, over the sandhills, and we're going to go out and bring some medicines in. So they went out and they went to a clinic which was in this small Palestinian Christian camp I mentioned, which Which wasn't involved in the fighting. And they, they picked up some medicines there, and they came in sneaking over the sandhills and through the cemetery and into the camp. And they did this twice, and the, the third time they did it, they were seen and shot at. And they, they ran into the camp, and they weren't wounded, but they were very badly frightened. And I thought, well, that's really enough, you know.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Pauline Cutting: And they've been badly frightened, they really shouldn't go again. But no, the next day they got over it and they came back to the hospital and they said, we're going out again. And they did it again.

Speaker 2: And they survived?

Pauline Cutting: Yes, they did.

Ben Alofs: This gives an impression of the no man's land. This was taken through a hole, and there you see the street, which in normal times was a busy shopping street. The other side of the street, you see the Amal positions. Even before that, there was a young girl, when there was this siege, in the time that even the women were not allowed to go out. There was this young girl, 10 years old, who just walked through the no-man's land, and it was really Through the firing lines. Through the firing lines, with a few stacks of bread and other things to eat. And she brought it to her mother, and then she went back the same way. And it was so dangerous. I mean, it was a no-man's land, a deadly no-man's land under sniper fire, because there was not only daily shelling of mortars and tanks, there was only— there was also Yeah, I think it's just anything that was moving in the— inside those small alleys in the camp. And it didn't matter whether they were men, whether they were women or children. Anything that was alive and moving in those alleys was a target. And many people were shot and killed by snipers.

Pauline Cutting: I think it has— it must have a lasting effect on the children. Seeing this, growing up in this atmosphere of violence. They couldn't go to school for 2 years. Many of them had to spend months living in shelters, which are essentially underground basement rooms with no lighting or sanitation or running water. And one little boy, a 2-and-a-half-year-old, who was a friend of Susie, the British nurse who worked with us in the camp. This 2-and-a-half-year-old said to Susie one day when she was going out to do a dressing, Susie, you can't go that road, there's a sniper there. And he's 2 and a half years old. So this, this must, must have an effect on the children. As I say, in some ways they adapt only too readily, but, but over 2 years they've been subjected to bombing, Seeing their family members wounded and killed, if not themselves wounded and killed, seeing blood in the streets and knowing about war, not being able to go to school or play properly, being subjected to disease, malnutrition, and starvation. So that's not a normal childhood.

Speaker 2: If you talk about victims of terrorism, Well, the siege was eventually lifted, and then what happened when they did lift the siege?

Pauline Cutting: Well, the— yes, it was lifted in part originally. I think we eventually sent out messages as to what was happening, and I think the world was scandalized. And eventually, in the middle of February, February, it was announced that there would be a lifting of the siege and that the women would be allowed to go out and bring in food. But we soon discovered that it was only a partial lifting of the siege, and the women were only allowed out through one exit from the camp. And it started a whole new phase in this war, which they called the war on the women. And during a 6-week period, because of the pressure of the constant need for food, obviously Obviously the whole camp was recovering from starvation. The women went out and came in again across this piece of no man's land, and we soon realized that they weren't to be allowed to go free. And during this time, the women were at first abused and beaten, but then after a couple of days, they were starting to be shot. And while they were coming in carrying their shopping. Many things were prohibited to be brought in— fuel, batteries, candles, sometimes cigarettes, sometimes coffee, medicines. All medicines that were found were confiscated.

Ben Alofs: This old lady used to go out to see if the militiamen would shoot or not. And if they would not shoot, then the other women would come out, as well, and cross the no-man's land.

Pauline Cutting: And they shot the women. And during a 6-week period, 18 women were killed and more than 50 were wounded while they were bringing in shopping across this, this no-man's land. On the bottom left-hand corner, you can see a woman here who was shot. And so we felt also extremely bitter about this, because this was not a true lifting of the siege. And it was very— we felt bitter at the brutality. But eventually, after 6 weeks of this, the Syrian army came and deployed actually around the camp. And then that stopped the fighting. That stopped it.

Speaker 2: What about— has it been reconstructed? Is the area now—

Ben Alofs: Well, officially, the siege was lifted on the 14th of April, after almost 6 months of siege. And the situation gradually normalized. But still, at this very moment, people do not have the permission to bring in any building materials, be it stones, cement, iron. So people are still forced to live in the middle of the rubble. For instance, Shatila camp, which is very small, The small camp right now was destroyed for 85%, and people could not, could not live in there anymore. And Buzdabarashe was in a better shape. It was destroyed for 60%, about that number. But living conditions are still extremely difficult. During this last summer, There was extreme heat in the eastern Mediterranean, and there was no electricity there, so the fans couldn't work. The fridge— fridges didn't work, so people were not able to maintain their—

Speaker 2: Keep it cold.

Ben Alofs: Keep food cold. The water was still, especially in Shatila, a big problem, because Because of the shelling, much of the system had been damaged or destroyed, and this drinking water was mixing with the sewage water and, of course, caused a lot of diarrhea and related diseases. The living situation just is miserable. And I think the Amal militia and also the Syrian army was doing it to just force the people to leave and to some kind of surrender.

Pauline Cutting: But it— I mean, it's— they haven't got anywhere to go.

Ben Alofs: Yes, where can they go?

Pauline Cutting: They're already refugees. Where can they go?

Speaker 2: They tried— a lot of them tried living in Jordan, and through a civil war there, they were kicked out of Jordan. And so many of them are now—

Pauline Cutting: Some came from Jordan to Lebanon.

Ben Alofs: I tried to talk the other day with someone about these Palestinians. And this man, he was not too knowledgeable, and he didn't like Palestinians very much. And he just told me, why just aren't these Palestinians going home? So, of course, that's what everybody wants.

Speaker 2: That's what they want.

Pauline Cutting: Yeah.

Ben Alofs: That's the problem. And that's also the only long-term solution that is possible, that also can guarantee some kind of stability in the Middle East, because still the Palestinian problem at this moment is still at the center of the whole problem in the Middle East, even though now at this moment the— The conflict is over. Iran-Iraq War is more prominent. But I think without solving that, there will be no peace. And if you live in the— live and work in the Middle East and you watch American policy, American foreign policy at work, then you sometimes wonder what kind of people they have in the State Department. What kind of people they have in the Pentagon? Don't they know the Middle East? I mean, the policy is so biased, so— yeah.

Speaker 2: Pro-Israeli.

Ben Alofs: It is not balanced, you know? I think if the Americans, for instance, in Lebanon in 1983 would have had a balanced policy and would not have sold supported only the Israelis and their—

Ilan Ziv: The Phalangists.

Ben Alofs: Allies, the Phalangists, then I think they would not have had all these problems with explosions in the US Embassy and blowing up of the Marine headquarters in Beirut. It just has created enormous resentment.

Pauline Cutting: They have a big role to play.

Ben Alofs: Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 2: But the big thing is the Palestinian question, a homeland somewhere or in their own original homeland from which they were kicked out by the Israelis.

Pauline Cutting: Yes, I think that's— I mean, it's what they want, of course, as the long-term solution. But exactly where and how has to be negotiated.

Ben Alofs: You see—

Pauline Cutting: And that's for the politicians.

Ben Alofs: Well, of course, you have to look at it in a realistic way, and that is that the state of Israel is a fact, and it's going to be there.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Ben Alofs: But the Israelis, they have to learn that if they want to be a viable state in the Middle East, if they want to have— if they want to be there in the future in the Middle East, then they will have to get good relations with the surrounding Arabic countries, and they, they have to get good relations with the Palestinian people. And in '67, they occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They occupied the whole of what was called Palestine, and they did not accept the The partition plan that in '47 was accepted by the United Nations, they want all of it. It's not possible. They cannot have all of it. They will have to share.

Pauline Cutting: I think, yes, we'll let—

Ben Alofs: They will have to give the Palestinians their rights, because it is a crime. It is a crime to throw people that have been living there always, that had their villages there, that they were growing their crops there. And you see all the old Arab houses in the old cities like Haifa and Jaffa and Jerusalem. Do you think the Israelis built those in 1948? They were there hundreds and hundreds of years before. They were Palestinian. And if— even if people are expelled forcibly, that doesn't make it right. I mean, violence doesn't make things The Palestinians lost basic rights in 1948, and I think anyone with an open mind realizes that they have to be given back their rights. It's very simple.

Pauline Cutting: I think there are Israelis now— we met some Israelis at a conference of non-governmental organizations in Geneva, and they, I think, I think also want to work for some just peace because it's in the interests of both communities.

Speaker 2: It is.

Pauline Cutting: Both the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians and all the other groups, it's in all their interests to have a just peace in the Middle East.