Forty years ago, angered by television footage of the devastation of Lebanon by Israel’s 1982 invasion, I left my London home to volunteer my surgical skills to the wounded. The invasion killed thousands of civilians and destroyed homes, livelihoods, hospitals, libraries, factories, schools and offices.
I arrived that summer in Beirut, a Christian surgeon who supported Israel and believed the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were terrorists. My views were about to change.
With many hospitals destroyed, I worked as a volunteer medic in a field hospital in an underground car park. We dealt with devastating war wounds, many inflicted on children. Beirut was bombed and blockaded. Water, electricity, food and medicine were denied. Thousands of families whose homes were demolished were forced to live on the streets of the city centre – thirsty, hungry, destitute and traumatised.
With hopes again dashed, homes shelled and bulldozed, and loved ones deported and massacred, survivors once more tried to rebuild their shattered lives
The aggressive and relentless bombing stopped when the PLO agreed to evacuate in exchange for peace. Thousands of PLO members were ordered to leave Lebanon, undertaking never to return, while their families left behind were promised protection under a US-brokered plan.
Following the ceasefire, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) needed a six-member surgical team to support the reopening of the 11-floor Gaza hospital on Sabra Street – the only PRCS hospital still standing at the time, after the rest had been flattened by bombs. A group of us packed into a PRCS car, and with sirens blaring, we sped along roads empty of vehicles.
Upon arrival, we saw that the top two floors of the hospital were heavily bombed, but the ninth was largely intact, despite the window-glass having been blown out. This became our living quarters. There was still no electricity or running water, but at least the bombs had stopped falling.
Clearing rubble
The hospital was extremely busy. PRCS staff cleared rubble, and repaired and cleaned hospital wards, operating theatres, the pharmacy, the canteen and the mortuary. Wounded patients were transferred from various field hospitals to us for further care.
From the top floors of Gaza Hospital, the entire length of Sabra Street was visible, I watched displaced families of women, old men and children – since the able-bodied men had been evacuated – returning to their homes walking the entire length of that street with their scant belongings on their backs, carts and donkeys. They were determined to pick up their shattered lives, clear out the rubble and rebuild their homes. The US-sponsored peace gave them hope. Their courage and will to survive won me over.
What is the Sabra and Shatila massacre?
I made friends with many residents of this area, and was outraged to learn the history of Palestine from them. Their families were forced out of Palestine at gunpoint in 1948 to facilitate the creation of the state of Israel.
Around half of the country’s indigenous population, or 750,000 people, were driven out to become refugees in neighbouring Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Around 13,000 Palestinians were massacred and 530 villages destroyed in this massive ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba.
In short, Palestine was wiped off the world map. In 1948, Lebanon received about 110,000 of the fleeing refugees who were settled in refugees camps. By 1982, the refugee population had grown to nearly 400,000.
Despite the injustices committed against them, the Palestinians I met were kind and generous. They had suffered so much, and yet retained such humanity. I was overwhelmed by their hospitality in the midst of their poverty. Their story was not in any history textbook, but every Palestinian child knew the name of their ancestral village, many of which had already been demolished.
The women introduced me to their stunningly beautiful Palestinian embroidery, with motifs representing their destroyed villages sewn onto black cloth with brilliantly coloured silk threads. Each stitch was a testimony to their history, culture and resilience.
Raped and tortured
Three weeks after the evacuation, on 15 September 1982, the ceasefire was suddenly broken when hundreds of Israeli tanks invaded Beirut. Some of these tanks sealed all the escape routes of Sabra Shatila, and Lebanese Phalangist militia members were sent into Sabra and Shatila camps and massacred up to 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, as the Israeli army stood by. Multinational peacekeepers were nowhere to be found.
Residents of the camp were betrayed, left with no one to defend them. Many were raped and tortured before being killed during the three-day massacre.
At the hospital, we operated non-stop, struggling to save hundreds of people shot at close range. Some died upon reaching us, and were taken directly to the mortuary. The hospital ran out of blood, medicine and food. Thousands of frightened people fled into our hospital seeking protection from gunmen who had broken into their homes.
In the midst of the massacre, on the evening of 17 September, our hospital director sent PRCS staff away when it became clear that the gunmen would target them. But our 22-member team of international medical volunteers opted to stay. Anyone hiding in our hospital was asked to leave, as they were also likely to be gunned down. But the critically wounded on life-support could not leave.
Early at dawn the next day, we were forced out of the hospital at gunpoint, leaving behind 30 critically wounded patients, many of them children. A Swedish nurse and a German medical student insisted on staying behind to look after them, and I believe their selfless act of courage saved those patients’ lives.
We were marched along Sabra Street. Hundreds of unarmed camp residents – women, old men and children – were rounded up by the militia. I saw the terror in their eyes. A desperate young mother passed me her baby, but at gunpoint, she was forced to take him back. Both were killed, together with the others rounded up, after we were taken away.
Short-lived outrage
When photographs of heaps of dead bodies in the camp alleys were published after the massacre, there was worldwide outrage and condemnation. But international attention was short-lived. The victims’ families and survivors were soon left alone to plod on with their lives and relive memories of the massacre, of the horrors of the invasion, and of the painful dismantling of their families through the forced PLO deportations.
With hopes again dashed, homes shelled and bulldozed, and loved ones deported and massacred, survivors once more tried to rebuild their shattered lives, raising their children while burying the dead in mass graves. The world moved on, and they were forgotten – dead to the consciousness of the international community.
Among the children who made it, many homeless and orphaned, the spirit of defiance was very much alive
Since then, the downward spiral of hopelessness and despair for Palestinians, made worse by poverty and the sense of being abandoned, has only worsened. Their plight cannot seem to excite the headlines of mainstream media anymore.
Generations have lived and died in the refugee camps scattered across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and further afield. Children have been born refugees, grown up refugees, and died refugees.
But my hope for the Palestinian people was planted in the immediate aftermath of the massacre 40 years ago. I returned to Sabra-Shatila immediately after the area reopened. There were mass graves, decaying bodies, broken homes and grieving relatives. There was despair, desolation, piercing screams and a vale of tears. I was heartbroken.
Yet, it was not over. Among the children who made it, many homeless and orphaned, the spirit of defiance was very much alive. As they lined up for me to take their photographs, they raised their hands in the victory sign, saying: “We are not afraid. Let the Israelis come.”
The air was thick with the stench of decaying human flesh. In the foreground were bodies waiting to be identified; behind them their destroyed homes. But between death and destruction were the destitute Palestinian children defiantly staking their right to be part of humanity.
Dr. Swee Chai Ang
September 2022
Review of Swee Chai Ang’s book From Beirut to Jerusalem.
Utterly inspirational. Dr. Ang is intelligent, precise, humble, and a person of great compassion (both for the Palestinians and for the Israelis, and the Lebanese and Syrians and everyone caught in between). She’s done so much for the Palestinians, she even received the Star of Palestine from Yasser Arafat. It’s a transformative, universal story because Dr. Ang went into the conflict with no political preconceptions – in fact, she believes God called her to it – and ended up dedicating decades of her life to helping the Palestinians out of an instinctual human response to suffering. Initially it sent her into a crisis of faith because her Church seemed to be telling her different things from what God was telling her, but Ang Swee Chai was born with so much pluck and gumption, the reader delights in seeing how this tiny woman outwits, outplays, and fearlessly charges her way through some of the most life-threatening situations.
The fulcrum on which her story turns is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps while she was working at the hospital there. In 1982, Israel had invaded Lebanon in an attempt to “flush out the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from its bases in Lebanon”. After the end of this invasion, under a peace agreement the PLO fighters (mostly men) were evacuated from Beirut, then the international peacekeeping forces convinced the remaining women, children and old folks in Sabra and Shatila camps to disarm themselves, surrendering their pistols, machine guns and other weapons to the Lebanese Army for the promise of peace.
Then Israel announced it was “invading West Beirut to flush out 2,000 terrorists left there by the PLO”, giving time for Palestinian hospital workers to leave Gaza Hospital (where Dr. Ang worked), then Sabra and Shatila camps were bombed from overhead for 5 kilometres in any direction around Gaza Hospital, gradually giving way to Northern Lebanese gunmen coming into camp homes and shooting residents. Injured people streamed into Gaza Hospital and Dr. Ang operated for 72 hours straight on the victims, after which she and other foreign medics were escorted out of the hospital by gunmen who were poking her with their machine guns, and saw the camp transformed into heaps of rubble and mutilated corpses. Meanwhile other soldiers went into Gaza Hospital with machine guns and finished off the patients. Dr. Ang soon comprehended the true horror of the situation, and realised that her surgical work had probably not made any difference, saving dozens of people while they were dying by the thousands outside.
One of the most difficult parts of this book for me was a few days after the massacre, when some of these militiamen who had been killing her Palestinian friends and patients had the audacity to come to her hospital and demand treatment. Dr. Ang was so tempted to “get even” and refuse them treatment, but then Azziza, the Lebanese Palestinian hospital administrator, begged her to remember the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s principle of treating everyone equally. I can’t have been the only reader to want to shake Azziza in disbelief. What a saintly capacity the Palestinians have for humanity and forgiveness, instead of justice – the book overflows with examples of this. So Dr. Ang treated their injuries, gained the militiamen’s goodwill and saw them as human beings too.
As a Singaporean, it hurts me to know that the country I share with Dr. Ang has exiled her and her husband, but I am so proud of her, and as someone who also fell in love with the Levant the first time I visited, I understand her pain.
Laetitia
California, USA
August 7, 2015
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