One of the nurses told me that she said to my father, before they burst in, “We must flee, they will kill us.” He reassured her and said to her, “Your family is in Tyre. The Israelis occupied it but they did not just kill civilians arbitrarily. They shell us with airplanes and artillery, but when they occupy the place they don’t interfere with the women and children. We’re in a hospital. At worst they will imprison us, the men.” She said to him, “But they are the Phalange and they won’t have any mercy if we fall into their hands.” He laughed and said to her, “I thought you were braver than that.” The nurse told me, “Minutes after that they invaded the hospital. They came in the emergency entrance and I went out another door, three nurses and I and a little boy we took with us. We spent the night far from the area.”
When they entered the hospital they were speaking roughly, in Arabic and English, shouting and hurling insults and speaking obscenely. Then they took out the doctors and the hospital workers. They stood the foreigners in a line and the Arabs in another line. They examined the foreigners and then spread out a blanket for them and allowed them to sit on it. They gave them cigarettes and gum. They were relatively nice to them, but when they allowed them to go and saw them returning to the hospital to go on with their work they began to insult them and treat them differently.
My father was seen standing in the other line along the wall, with about ten or fifteen men. Then he was seen an hour or two later, as he was walking among the hundreds they were leading to the Sports City. It was obvious that he had been beaten and tortured.
Two doctors and two employees managed to flee from the hospital by way of the Yacoubian Building, adjacent to the hospital. They went in the gate and came out from the gate on the other side of the building.
As the foreigners and the doctors were standing outside the hospital, some of the Phalange men remained inside. They were laughing and joking sometimes, and asking the girls for tea and coffee. One Lebanese girl who had accompanied her father and brother, injured during the carnage the previous night, told me that they treated them like servants. Then they began to talk obscenely, so she was afraid, and fled. The girl’s instinct was right because at about the same time they took two nurses, one of them Palestinian and the other Lebanese. They pulled Intisar the Lebanese by her hair and took her down to the shelter of the hospital and took turns raping her, then they shot her. Then they returned for her coworker and raped her until she died.
I don’t know if my father tried to flee and they killed him, or if they tortured him and then killed him, or if they drove him to the Sports City and he was carried away by those trucks that took people to unknown places from which they didn’t return. There are two other doctors besides my father of whom no trace has been found, Dr. Sami al-Khatib and Dr. Muhammad Uthman. Someone saw four bodies floating in the pool of the Sports City, wearing white coats; but we don’t know if my father and the two other doctors were among them, because there were three ambulance workers from the Red Crescent who were shelled and killed when they were in an International Red Cross car. They were also wearing white uniforms. I didn’t see the corpses floating in the pool, but others told me the story. If I had seen them I would have been able to recognize my father whatever his state.
When the International Red Cross arrived — they came twice, at two in the afternoon (when the Forces were still in the hospital), and again at four-thirty in the afternoon (when they had left) — they transferred some of the patients to the Najjar hospital, and some of the children, with a foreign nurse, to the Amal Center. They also took four bodies: two women and a doctor and an Egyptian worker (the hospital cook or the worker in the gas station across the street? I don’t know). Was my father the doctor? The witnesses assert that my father was not among them.
A nurse from Shatila told me that she went to the hospital on Saturday after the Forces had left the area. The hospital was in a miserable state: the glass was broken and the curtains were burned and the cafeteria was demolished, including the refrigerator; all the supplies were strewn on the floor and the picture of Abu Ammar was torn, its frame broken and the glass smashed. They had trodden it underfoot. The children’s section was empty, and the nurseries also. The next day this nurse found a child killed and thrown into the hospital garden. She added that when she went back to Sabra she found there children who had been in the hospital and whom she knew, aged a year or two years or three, killed, including a paralyzed child who had been killed with an axe. She thinks that they threw them there so it would not be said that they killed children in the hospital. A number of people testified that in a closed shelter southwest of the camp, in the Irsal neighborhood, they found bodies piled on top of each other, and among them were the bodies of nursing infants and children not fully formed (I think that they were the newborns that they took from the nursery).
Going back to Father, there are three possibilities: that Father was killed or taken or escaped. Each of the three poses questions we have no answers for:
If Father was killed, then how, and when? Did they torture him, and what did he say or do? Where is his body? Did it stay under the rubble? Was he buried in one of the mass graves that they dug during the massacre, and that the government has refused to dig up? Was he taken by one of the three bulldozers that were seen leaving Sabra on Saturday, piled with victims? Or did they throw him in the sea, as they did with others, near al-Naima and al-Damour, after putting him in a sack and weighting it down with stones? Or did Father have the good fortune to be buried with religious rites, performed by Sheikh Salman al-Khalil or his brother Sheikh Jaafar al-Khalil on the following Monday, when they buried the martyrs in groups of ten or twelve, until they had buried eight hundred in one day in a single mass grave?
If Father was driven with hundreds of others to the Sports City, there is the possibility that they shot him just like that, for no reason, which is what they did to many. There is the possibility that they sent him down into one of the death pits where they buried people alive. Perhaps he was able to flee, because when they were driving the people a man shot an RPG missile at them and there was chaos and confusion among the guards, so dozens fled, as eyewitnesses asserted. Did Father flee then? And if he escaped then why has he not contacted us up until now, when three months have passed since the massacre? Is he imprisoned? I have tried to learn if the Phalange have any prisoners, but I have not obtained any information.
Legally, Father is among the missing. The Lebanese government has not issued an official report up to now, even though it’s known that there is a report prepared by the military prosecutor, Asaad Ger-manos. He completed it less than two weeks after the massacre. This report was not published, even though the Safir newspaper recently ran a summary of it. Perhaps it was not published because the number of victims it advances is ridiculous, since it estimates the number at 470 killed. The International Red Cross estimated the number of victims at 2,750, and the sources of the Lebanese Red Cross estimated it at 3,000, not including those who remained under the rubble, nor those who were bulldozed, nor those who were kidnapped or lost. Agence France Presse estimated the number taken away in trucks and never seen again at 3,000 persons. Other estimates say that they were 1,300. These numbers alone translate into insanity, when the difference between one estimate and another is 1,000 or 1,500 people.
My dear Sadiq and Hasan,
I have tried my utmost to investigate what happened at Acre Hospital on Friday morning, September 17; that’s what I promised you. I’ve only written four pages, but it took me months to get the details. I have many papers and clippings from the newspapers and reports and statements, as well as observations and testimony and a roster of the names of the witnesses whom I listened to and to whom we can return if we need to. I have tried as much as I was able to concentrate the information I had, and to present it clearly. As for the writing, it’s hard, really hard. We owe it to our father to find out what happened to him, and this report is only a small step at the beginning of the path. If he was martyred then we must be certain of that and learn the circumstances of his martyrdom, and the grave where he lies. If he was captured we must search for him and turn the world upside down to get to him. If we don’t, we do not deserve his name or his efforts to raise us and teach us or a single hour of the love he gave us. And I know we agree that he gave us an incalculable number of those hours.