Tears for Tarshiha Page 9

  He became furious then. ‘Do you know what I want to do?’ he shouted. ‘I want to go into that camp there and kill you. I want to kill all Palestinians.’

  It finally dawned on me at this point that he believed Palestinians had killed Gemayel, although the Christian Lebanese man responsible by then had been arrested.17 I knew if he thought that, plenty of others in the army would, too, as its ranks had been swollen by members of Gemayel’s Christian Lebanese Forces militia. His anger made my anxious—I knew we were vulnerable in the refugee camps. We had no protection there at all.

  Two hours after this exchange, the soldiers left the checkpoint. We were so happy to see them go. But within minutes of their departure, Israeli tanks and soldiers took over the position. Had there’d been an arrangement between the two armies? Then heard on the radio that Israel’s Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, and his chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Rafael Eitan, had broken the US-sponsored ceasefire agreement, ordering Israeli troops from their positions south of the airport back into Beirut’s southern suburbs. We could see them stationed all around Akka Hospital and knew they must have surrounded the nearby refugee camp of Shatila as well. While we weren’t sure what all this meant, we did know that during their occupation of south Lebanon, the Israelis had arrested male doctors and nurses as well as male patients. This gave us cause to be seriously worried for all the males in Akka Hospital; it was possible the Israelis might take the rest of us prisoner too.

  Hiam, a Lebanese Druze nurse, and I decided to volunteer to see what would happen if we tried to leave the hospital in our uniforms. We knew if we could get out, it might be possible for the young male doctors and staff to leave too, as we feared what might happen to them if they stayed and were caught. The moment we stepped out of the hospital, Israeli soldiers stationed around it rudely ordered us back inside. Hiam and I told them we were nurses on duty. One of the soldiers said, ‘No, go back inside! They won’t hurt you. Go back!’

  I was confused. What did the soldier mean by saying ‘they’ wouldn’t hurt us? Who were ‘they’?

  I had a premonition that something terrible was about to happen, but when we contacted Umm Walid, the head of the PRCS (Palestinian Red Crescent Society) in Beirut, on our walkie-talkie, she tried to reassure us. The PLO had left and there were no fighters or weapons in the camps, only unarmed civilians, so there was no pretext for an attack on the camps. Umm Walid said she believed the military redeployment was due to Gemayel’s assassination and she suggested we stay put. Camp residents didn’t share her confidence, however, fearing a resurgence of fighting. Hundreds of people from Shatila, mostly women, young children and the elderly, crowded into the shelter under the hospital. The men and older children stayed behind in the camp to look after their homes. As well as Jean Calder, the Australian physiotherapist, we had nurses from Norway, Denmark and Sweden working at the hospital. We also had a French journalist with us at the time. We desperately hoped the presence of foreigners would give us some protection.

  Not long after the Israeli troops took up their positions, we heard Israeli planes flying over the camps, followed by shelling and small-arms fire. Fighters from the Lebanese resistance movements had started attacking the Israelis in the streets. There was no fighting in Shatila itself, but we could hear it in the streets around us. We were effectively trapped in the hospital. The fighting went on for hours and quite quickly we ran short of food and water for the patients, and we had no electricity or running water. One of the hospital administrators, Mr Orabie, had been shot and killed by the Israelis earlier in the day while he was trying to repair the hospital’s water pipes. I was working in the emergency department at this stage and, because we had only a few patients, I offered to accompany two ambulance men who were about to drive to Gaza Hospital to fetch some food and water. The hospital lay on the other side of Shatila, less than five minutes away, in a poor Lebanese area called Sabra. In the poorer districts, outsiders often had difficulty differentiating between Lebanese and Palestinian enclaves, so the two were lumped together as Sabra Shatila.

  We loaded a young man into the ambulance who was too badly wounded for us to treat, and the French journalist joined us as well. In hindsight, it seems a crazy, foolhardy mission. But we had no way of knowing how long the lockdown would last, and we could not stand by and see our patients die with lack of food and especially without water for drinking as well as washing. The moment we drove out of the hospital and began to cross the road into Shatila, the Israelis, positioned just up the road near the Kuwaiti Embassy, fired a heavy volley at us, even though our ambulance was clearly marked. The driver yelled to us to get down. He was driving without looking, his head below the level of the dashboard.

  Once inside the camp, we were safe for the time being. We drove down the small roads to Gaza Hospital, where everything was quiet, and saw no fighters, militia or soldiers in the camp. It was late afternoon and the shooting around the camp had waned. Our colleagues at Gaza Hospital gave us food, hummus, bread and water. We drove back through the small camp lanes to a point just across the road from our (Akka) hospital. There we stopped, knowing that if we tried to drive across the road we’d be shot at. In the end we got out of the ambulance and, when the coast seemed clear, sprinted over to the hospital entrance carrying only a small quantity of the much-needed provisions. Later, when the fighting had died down completely, one of our drivers, Nabil Maroof, was able to bring the ambulance, with the rest of the food and water, into the hospital grounds.

  On the afternoon of Thursday 16 September, representatives of the people in the shelter and camp, decided to approach the Israelis to reassure them there were no fighters in the camp. They split into two groups of about 50, each carrying white flags. One grup turned left outside the hospital gates and headed up the hill towards the Israeli position near the Kuwaiti Embassy, and the other turned right and walked down the road to the bridge. After a short while the group that had gone towards the embassy returned, asking about the people who had gone towards the bridge. We told them they had not returned. The people in the embassy group became worried. We’d been under the impression that Lebanese army soldiers were there. But the embassy group had learned the bridge checkpoint was manned by Israeli soldiers and militiamen from Gemayel’s Christian Lebanese Forces. The Palestinian civilians, elderly men and women, who’d gone to the bridge checkpoint carrying white flags and seeking peace never came back. They disappeared. We later learned they’d all been executed.

  That night the camp was illuminated by ‘light bombs’—flares. We couldn’t work out what was happening. All we knew was the Israeli army had surrounded the camp and there were probably Christian Lebanese Forces among them. Since the Lebanese leftist groups still in West Beirut could not enter the camp and all PLO fighters had left, there couldn’t possibly be any fighting inside. So why were the Israelis firing flares? Throughout Friday, we could hear shelling and small-arms fire as the Israelis clashed with Lebanese leftists, apparently in a street nearby.

  We remained trapped inside the hospital, still with no electricity and once again short of food, water and medicines for the patients. The street fighting decreased during the afternoon and by the early evening everything was quiet. Seeing that some in the hospital craved coffee and cigarettes, I and another nurse slipped across the road to a small shop in the camp. While we were there, two young boys in a state of near-hysteria came in yelling that someone was in the camp killing people. We didn’t believe them but suggested they come back with us to the hospital anyway. At the hospital we told the doctors the boys’ story, but no one thought it was true.

  With little left to eat and no place to prepare meals for the people in the hospital shelter, several women set off to their homes to fetch food for their children. Soon after they’d gone, one returned, screaming there’d been a massacre in the camp and her family had been slaughtered. Her husband and other children had been stabbed and their throats slit, she said. H
er clothes were covered in blood where she’d been holding her dead husband. She was hysterical. We all asked ourselves how murderers could enter the camp and do such things with the Israeli army surrounding it. We knew the Israelis would fight us, but we couldn’t believe they would massacre us. We thought the killing must be the act of some deranged individual acting alone, and we tried to calm her.

  At one point, our two ambulance drivers set off for Gaza Hospital to pick up drugs we needed urgently. Their vehicle was clearly marked as an ambulance. Instead of going through Shatila, they tried to take a longer route around it. They never returned. We later learned they were stopped, hauled out of the ambulance and executed by soldiers in an area where both the Lebanese Forces and Israelis were stationed.

  That flares again lit up the camp area, turning night into day. Why were the Israelis doing this? To make ourselves laugh, we joked that they knew we had no electricity and wanted to give us some light. Food and water ran out completely during the night. We received only one casualty but knew from our radio exchanges with Gaza Hospital that it had received many on Wednesday night and on Thursday, though we had no details. We thought they were from the fighting in the surrounding streets. We found our lone casualty after hearing a weak cry for help in a street near the hospital. On investigating, we found a boy of about 13 with a bullet wound in his chest. His name was Mofid Muhammad. We took him immediately to the operating theatre where, without anaesthetic, water and electricity, Dr Mohammad al Khatib inserted a chest tube. He said that in the morning we should try to take the boy to Gaza Hospital, which had better facilities.

  When I talked to the boy, he said, ‘They came ... They killed my father, they killed my brother, they tried to kill me. I pretended I was dead. When they left the house, I crawled away to the hospital.’

  I asked him who had done these things.

  ‘They were speaking with a funny Arabic accent. They came into the house swearing and shooting, saying they would kill all Palestinians.’

  I went and reported to Dr Mohammad what the boy had said. By now it was becoming clear to us people were indeed being butchered in the camp. A sickening fear began to weigh heavily in the pit of my stomach. Dr Mohammad and I looked at each other.

  ‘What do I say?’ he asked, despairingly. ‘Do I tell everyone there’s a massacre taking place in the camp? There are hundreds of people in the bomb shelter under the hospital. What will happen if we tell them? Where can they go? We’re surrounded and trapped here. The Israelis have already shot at us when we’ve tried to move. We have to stay quiet and calm and pray no one will enter the hospital. Let’s try to contact Gaza Hospital on the walkie-talkie and find out what’s happening there now.’

  Dr Mohammad, myself, and a nurse named Iman Massar went to the men who had the walkie-talkie and asked them to contact Gaza Hospital. As Dr Mohammad was speaking over the radio to the hospital, men with heavy Lebanese accents intercepted the call and began to abuse us. Using foul street language, they told us that they would break into the hospital at midnight and rape the women and kill the men. I was sickened at the way they talked to us. Their ugly threats made us feel more frightened and powerless than ever. There was really nothing we could do. Undoubtedly those men would kill us if we tried to leave the hospital. I was gripped by a kind of fear I’d never known before. I told Iman I didn’t want anyone to touch me; that to be raped without trying to resist would be unthinkable. I said that when those men entered the hospital they would probably shoot wildly, and I would prefer to die by the bullet than be caught and raped.

  We told no one about the walkie-talkie conversation; the last thing we wanted to do was terrify the other nurses and hospital workers. Iman and I were working in the emergency department so since we had no patients at that time, we decided to sit by the main gate hoping when the attack came we’d be shot first. We sat there from 11.30 p.m. for about four and a half hours. It felt like 100 years. I couldn’t think of anything other than saying goodbye to the world, to life. Now and then we’d try to make ourselves laugh. We’d say silly things and laugh hysterically. But all the time I felt death was a moment away. I felt as if we were in another world.

  By 4 o’clock in the morning of Saturday 18 September, we were ready to collapse. We decided to go inside and get some sleep. Opposite the emergency room was a small clinic. There we took off our shoes and lay on the floor—without mattresses or covers—and slept until 7 o’clock. On waking, I was actually amazed to find we were still alive, and immediately wondered if everyone else had survived. I carefully opened the door and saw our three doctors (Mohammad al Khatib, Sami al Khatib and Ali Othman) and nurses working in the emergency room. Nothing had happened. The murderers hadn’t come. The Israelis still surrounded the hospital and the camp. Those men on the radio must have just been trying to terrorise us.

  Not long after we woke, however, we heard shooting and screams. Our relief at finding ourselves alive quickly dissipated, the gnawing fear returning. The terrifying sounds went on for about 10 minutes, to be replaced by an eerie silence. During this interlude an old man, Abu Ali, a PRCS bus driver whose house in Shatila stood directly opposite the hospital, decided to risk the dash across the road to get food for the staff. He made it safely, but just as he was about to open his front door, he heard voices in a neighbouring house. It sounded as though men were consulting a map and discussing how to attack the hospital. The old man ran back to warn us. All of us in the emergency department looked at each other in silence. At that moment, with hundreds of people in the shelter, we knew the huge responsibility we faced.

  Around 10 o’clock, a Lebanese woman came running into the hospital from a poor Lebanese area called Hursh which was near Sabra. Militiamen had entered this area and accidentally slaughtered many Lebanese, thinking they were Palestinians. When they discovered their error, they stopped the massacre and let remaining residents out through the ring of Israeli soldiers around the camp. This Lebanese woman knew us well, however, as she had often brought her children to us for treatment over the years.

  ‘The murderers told me they were planning to kill everyone in the hospital,’ she cried. ‘Please, you must leave now!’

  ‘We can’t. It’s impossible. We’ve already tried—without success. The Israeli army is all around us,’ I said—I prayed she’d heard incorrectly.

  In the midst of a desperate discussion about what we should do to save our patients and the people in the shelter, we noticed the Israelis had suddenly withdrawn from the checkpoint under the bridge. A gap had unexpectedly opened up in the armed ring around the camp. Several of us hurried down to the people in the shelter and told them to get out of the hospital immediately. We told them that once outside, they should turn right and run under the Ghobeiry bridge towards the Haret Hreik and the Shiyah areas, to get as far away from Shatila as possible.

  Now we faced a dilemma. How could we get all of the non-ambulant patients out of the hospital? After telling those who could walk to leave immediately, we began discussing what to do with the bedridden patients. The foreign nurses urged us to go quickly, saying they would look after the remaining patients. As foreigners, they were bound to be safe, they insisted.

  Dr Mohammad was reluctant to go. ‘It’s our duty to stay,’ he insisted. ‘And as doctors and nurses, we’ll be safe.’

  ‘As safe as all those nurses and doctors slaughtered in Tel al-Za’atar?’ I reminded them.

  The tense discussion went back and forth, with the foreign nurses urging us to leave immediately. Suddenly we were interrupted by the sound of intense gunfire at the hospital entrance. The Lebanese militia were attacking from the position the Israelis had just vacated. Dr Ali, Dr Mohammad, Iman, several other nurses and I were on the ground floor. We ran to a window at the back of the hospital, clambered out and ran into the garden of a villa owned by an Armenian family behind the hospital. Dr Ali, who had a paralysed leg, was doing his best to keep up with us. Th
e front gate of the villa was locked; the only way out was over the fence. Several of us tried to help Dr Ali scale the fence but he found it impossible. He and two of the nurses opted to hide inside the villa. Once over the fence, we ran for our lives towards the bridge and then scattered. As I ran, I thought that what was happening in Shatila might also be happening in Burj Barajneh, so instead of heading home, I made for Haret Hreik, a suburb sandwiched between the two camps. Haifa Hospital in Burj camp had been damaged beyond use during the Israeli invasion, and I knew its staff were in a makeshift but empty hospital in Haret Hreik. I knew my sister, Mervat, was there too.

  She was asleep when I found her.

  ‘Don’t you know what’s happening?’ I was crying, out of breath, in total shock. ‘The Lebanese and Israelis are massacring our people!’

  However, neither she nor the others there believed me. The doctors thought the presence of the Israeli army had made me hysterical; they wanted to give me an injection of Valium to settle me. I left and ran to my uncle’s place. I thought that, as a journalist, he might know what was happening. He rang the newspaper he worked for but none of the other journalists had heard anything. While I was there, my mother happened to come by.

  ‘My dear, why are you making up these terrible rumours and frightening us?’ she scolded.

  ‘Why won’t people believe me?’ I cried. ‘I am not imagining this! People have been slaughtered. The militiamen are in the hospital and are killing nurses and doctors. You’ve got to believe me!’ At that point, I turned around and walked out.

  In a daze I headed back towards the Ghobeiry bridge where the Lebanese army was now stationed. An officer stopped me, saying I couldn’t go any further because there’d been a massacre. So, I returned to the makeshift hospital in Haret Hreik. By then the other nurses and Dr Mohammad had arrived and were quick to verify my story. Everyone stood frozen in silence. They knew the same thing could happen in this hospital. We were acutely conscious of our utter defencelessness, having no idea what to do, or where we could go. Later, I learned that when residents of Burj Barajneh—which apparently hadn’t been surrounded—heard about the massacre, most fled. Hundreds ran wherever they could, terrified their camp would be next.