Agony of the Innocents

By Patricia Blake

For Lebanon's civilians, death and suffering are the victors

Hundreds of Palestinian refugees sat disconsolately under makeshift tents in the dusty, grubby Beirut park that goes by the absurdly fancy name of Garden of the Arts. Among them was Nefalah Farour, 38, who had fled the P.L.O.-dominated port of Tyre on the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Accompanied by five of her seven children, she had walked through the mountains to the dubious safety of Beirut. Exhausted, she squatted on a flattened cardboard box and fretted over the fate of the two youngsters she had been obliged to leave behind in her flight from the Israeli shelling. The two children had been playing at a neighbor's house when the family ran. Had they survived? The answer remained buried in the rubble of Tyre.

Such scenes of human displacement and despair had become appallingly commonplace in Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli blitz. To look into the plight of the civilians who were in the path of the invasion, TIME sent four journalists into the area: Beirut Correspondent Roberto Suro, Jerusalem Correspondent David Halevy, Cairo Correspondent Robert C. Wurmstedt and Reporter Leroy Aarons. Their combined report:

In the first days of fighting, hundreds of civilians, warned by Israeli leaflets dropped from the air of the coming attack, had rushed to the beaches, where they waited for two days without food or water. Others fled to the countryside or the capital. Trekking back after the ceasefire, many found their homes severely damaged or destroyed. Still uncounted dead were hidden under the shattered masonry of their buildings and shops. An incalculable number of wounded lay in makeshift hospitals.

Estimates of the total number of dead, injured and homeless varied wildly. United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar said that 1.5 million people--half the population of the country--had been affected by the fighting. According to Lebanese sources, about 10,000 were killed and 16,000 wounded. The State Department's Agency for International Development said that about 600,000 people from Beirut and southern Lebanon had been "directly affected." But officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is distributing medical supplies in Lebanon, called these estimates "much exaggerated." By Red Cross reckoning, about 300,000 civilian refugees had been displaced in southern Lebanon, the majority eventually returning to their homes in Israeli-occupied territory. Whatever the exact figures, the toll in human suffering was shockingly high.

In Sidon and Tyre, where some 3,000 Palestinian guerrilla fighters had been based, civilians were the hardest hit. In Sidon the stench of death hovered around Israeli headquarters on bombed-out Maa Rouf Saad Square. "There is no way of knowing how many people died because so many are buried in the bomb shelters," said a local official. Block upon block of high-rise apartment buildings were smashed. Furniture and clothing hung from gaping holes in the buildings. A few houses were still burning. White flags made of bedsheets were tied to automobile antennas and to television aerials. Tresha Baassiri, 27, who had come to Sidon from Houston, Texas, to visit her Lebanese husband's relatives, fumbled for words to describe the horror. "Anyone who has never lived through it just cannot imagine what it was like," she said. "You finally welcomed the explosions because it meant that the awful screaming of the jets coming in for an attack would end."

At the Meome'h Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon, Jihan Mahmud, 41, was beginning to prepare dinner for her husband and their 14 children when the Israeli air and sea attack began. The family ran into one of the camp's underground shelters. "About 50 of us were cramped in the shelter," Mrs. Mahmud said. "The one next to ours was hit. There were hands and heads--pieces of people--flying everywhere. When that happened I couldn't stand it any more, so we just ran." Like other Palestinians in the camps, Mahmud and her relatives piled into whatever vehicles were available and headed for Beirut. In the confusion, she was separated from her husband and a daughter. Two weeks later she was camped out in the Garden of the Arts, where she stayed for two days. "I just want to go home," she said. "I know our house is destroyed, but I would live under a tree if I had to. I want to see my husband and daughter."

In Tyre, cement-block structures, corrugated metal and glass lay crumpled and twisted under the blow of the Israeli assault and P.L.O. resistance. Automobiles, totaled by shells, lay belly-up like helpless insects. At an improvised hospital, a Pakistani surgeon who has worked in the city for the past four years praised the Israelis for dropping leaflets in Arabic warning the townspeople to evacuate before the bombings began. As a result, the vast majority of civilians had survived in Tyre, though many were wounded, including the 17 men, women and children who were in the tiny clinic. One woman, so slight that she seemed to fill only half the bed, had been injured in the head during the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp. In apparent delirium, the woman repeated in Arabic, "Where is my husband?"

Refugees from the Palestinian-dominated town of Damur, twelve miles south of Beirut, swarmed last week into the capital, seeking refuge from the bombing. Four hundred refugees made their way into the abandoned Concorde Theater, where they slept on the concrete floor without blankets. There was no milk for their children, though the Red Cross had provided some canned food. Said a 90-year-old woman, gesturing at her squalid surroundings: "I am a Palestinian and look at what Palestinians are today--nothing but rubbish." Mustafa Kamal, 37, a baker from Damur, came to the theater with his five children. "As soon as the first bombs dropped, I knew we had to leave," he said. "But for the first time in my life I cannot feed my children."

There were scarcely enough hospitals and doctors in Beirut to tend to those injured in the bombings. Lines of stretchers waited outside the American University Hospital. Distraught civilians kept vigil at the city morgue. The old, long-empty Triumph Hotel was converted into a P.L.O. hospital. Most of the patients were from the three Palestinian camps near Beirut airport that had been bombed by Israeli jets. In one of the dingy rooms on the fourth floor lay Autra Waehe'h, 43, who had deep shrapnel wounds in her right side. An Israeli bomb had crashed into the house next to hers at Bourjel-Barajneh refugee camp. The blast knocked out a wall of Mrs. Waehe'h's house, killing her 23-year-old daughter and seriously injuring her 16-year-old son. Waehe'h, a Palestinian, talked only of her desire to return home to her shattered house and start her life again. "I'm not afraid," she said. "Everything is from God."

Last week, amid reported criticism of Israel for preventing some relief supplies from reaching Lebanon, the U.S. and other Western countries prepared to send aid to the civilian victims of the war. In Washington, a House panel voted $20 million in emergency help for Lebanon. France sent the ship Argens with 35 tons of supplies. U.N. Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar announced that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency would supply $1.5 million for food, medicine, shelter and other necessities, and the U.N. World Food Program would deliver food worth $11.5 million.

Still, continued fighting around Beirut's international airport has so far prevented U.N. agencies from airlifting supplies. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to dispatch aid to Lebanon via Syria and Israel. In addition, the Israelis are gearing up to help the civilians they have made to suffer so grievously. Last week they sent a convoy of 20 ambulances, ten medical-supplies vehicles and 25 doctors to Tyre and Sidon. Individual Israelis have donated chocolate candy, blankets and clothes to Lebanese youngsters. There was even a scheme devised by the Israeli National Labor Federation to bring homeless mothers with infant children from Lebanon into Israeli homes for several weeks. Such moves were admirable. But to the innocent victims of Israel's push northward, there was little that could justify the suffering. --By Patricia Blake

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