Persona non grata

Collective Punishment 
49 
 
 
 
October 1998: Hasbaiya and Ibl al-Saqi 
On October 2, 1998, two elderly Druze sheikhs and their wives were 
expelled from their villages in the northeastern area of the occupied zone, one 
couple because a son had defected from the SLA intelligence apparatus and the 
other because a son had allegedly killed an SLA intelligence officer. According to 
Future News (Beirut), the parents “were summoned early [on October 2] to the 
militia’s security office in Hasbaiya.  The two couples were ordered by militia 
officers to leave the Israeli-occupied border zone through the Zimraya crossing 
point at the edge of its eastern sector.”
60
   
Mahmoud Hassan Ward, eighty years old, and his wife Zahr Muhamed 
Nammur, seventy, lived in the predominantly Druze town of Hasbaiya.
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  Their 
thirty-seven-year-old son, Raja Ward, a high-ranking SLA intelligence officer in 
the eastern sector of the zone, turned himself in  to the Lebanese army in June 
1998 and caused an uproar. According to Lebanese military security officials, 
Ward handed over a notebook with the names of fifty-two Lebanese who 
allegedly collected information for an arm of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency 
known as Section 501.
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    The alleged collaborators were indicted by the military 
prosecutor, and nineteen were arrested in July; their trial opened in August 9, 
1998.
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After Raja Ward’s defection, he was replaced by Nidal Nasr. According 
to the Lebanese media, Nasr  was killed on September 26, 1998, reportedly by 
Naji Mundhir, an SLA militiaman who then fled the occupied zone.
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  The 
expulsion of Mundhir’s father and mother, Fawwaz Husayn Mundhir, 
seventy-five, and Aziza, seventy, from Ibl al-Saqi, took place less than a week 
later. 
                                                 
          60         
"Israeli-allied militia expels elderly Druze couples from border zone,” Future 
Television,  Daily Report, October 2, 1998. 
     61         
"SLA officers throw elderly couples out of occupied zone,” Daily Star, 
October 3, 1998. 
          62         
Robert Fisk, “Israeli spies exposed by defector,” Independent, August 28, 
1998. 
          63         
Youssef Diab, “Trial of 78 alleged Israeli `informers’ gets under way,” Daily 
Star, August 10, 1998. 
          64         
Daily Star, October 3, 1998, and Future Television Daily Report, October 2, 
1998. 

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50 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
 
May 1998: Sheba’ 
A family from Sheba’ paid a high price in May 1998 for publicly 
celebrating the release of a relative who had been detained without charge for 
twelve years in Khiam prison on suspicion of involvement in the armed 
resistance. On May 7, 1998, thirty-one-year-old Ghassan Moussa was released 
from Khiam and expelled immediately. He told Human Rights Watch that he was 
escorted to the Zumrayya crossing by SLA security officers Fares al-Hamra and 
Muhamed Naba’.  “If we see you here, we have orders to kill you,” he said 
al-Hamra told him at the crossing. A week later, Ghassan’s    sixty-four-year-old 
father, Muhamed, and his sister, Mona, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher, were 
expelled, along with Mona’s infant daughter.   
On the day of Ghassan’s release, a welcoming gathering was arranged 
for him in the town of Chtoura, at the office of Asaad Hardan, a former Lebanese 
government minister who also is a member of the ruling Higher Council of the 
Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.
65
  
Relatives, residents of the village, and some SSNP officials attended the 
event. The next day, Ghassan, his parents and his brothers were interviewed on 
Lebanese television. Ghassan’s mother remained in Beirut with her son, and his 
father and sister returned to Sheba’. Security officer Muhamed Naba’ visited the 
family’s house at midnight with a message from his superior, Fares al-Hamra, 
instructing Mona and her father to report to the security office in Hasbaiya the 
next day. Mona protested that she was a teacher and had to be in school. “You had 
time to go away for Ghassan, and you cannot come to us?,” she said Naba’ told 
her.  
They traveled to Hasbaiya the next morning, with Mona’s 
five-month-old daughter Maya. According to Mona, a security officer in civilian 
                                                 
          65         
Asaad Hardan served as secretary of defense for the SSNP from 1985 to 1995, 
according to a Lebanese member of the party. Human Rights Watch telephone 
interview, June 1999. The first suicide bombings with vehicles in Lebanon occurred in 
1983. “The initial spate of Shia suicide bombings was so successful that it inspired 
other, secular organizations — particularly the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party — to 
adopt the tactic in 1984 and 1985,” the Federal Research Division of the Library of 
Congress reported. Thomas Collelo, Ed., Lebanon: A Country Study (Washington, 
D.C.: 1989) p. 228. The SSNP “claimed responsibility for eight of the eighteen suicide 
bombings directed against Israel in southern Lebanon between March and November 
1985.” Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition (New York, Oxford, 
Oxford University Press: 1990) p. 127.     
 

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Collective Punishment 
51 
 
 
 
clothes asked them to identify themselves and then said that he had orders to expel 
them at the Zumrayya crossing point. “I told him that we did not have milk for the 
baby, or our identity cards. I asked to see Fares al-Hamra and Alameddin 
al-Badawi [another senior security officer] to know what we did wrong. He said 
that we could not see them, and that the expulsion decision had been taken,” 
Mona told Human Rights Watch. They were also told that no other members of 
the immediate family could  return to Sheba’. (Ghassan’s mother, 
fifty-nine-year-old Shihira Atweh, for example, had remained in Beirut with her 
son and did not return to the village with her husband and Mona.)   
The family was stunned by the expulsion. “His life is there,” Mona said, 
referring to her father. “Our house was old, and my brothers sent money to 
renovate it and to maintain our land. They invested everything in Sheba’.”    She 
added that the family pursued many avenues to have the expulsion decision 
reversed, including then-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the International 
Committee of the Red Cross, a local parliamentarian, and a prominent Druze 
sheikh from Hasbaiya. “Hariri told us that the government would speak to the 
U.S. embassy about getting us back,” Mona said. “After fifteen days, Hariri’s 
people told us that there was no way.    They said that the U.S. ambassador talked 
to [Gen.Antoine] Lahd [the commander of the SLA] and he said ‘no way.’”
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In a separate and unrelated case, sixty-four-year-old Khowlah Daleh and 
her husband, Ibrahim Hashem, fifty-seven, were also expelled from Sheba’ in 
May 1998. They had returned to the occupied zone from Beirut the previous day 
and said that they found SLA security official Muhamed Naba’ waiting near their 
house. Khowlah Daleh told Human Rights Watch that the official asked for their 
permits. When the couple presented the documents, she said that Naba’ tore the 
photographs out and told them to report to the security office in Hasbaiya the next 
day, May 19, 1998.   
In Hasbaiya,  Naba’ and another security operative whose name they 
did not know questioned them for about an hour. The militiamen asked detailed 
questions about their son, Sheikh Khalil Hashem, who lives in Beirut and    gained 
prominence in Hizballah since his conversion from Sunni Islam to Shia Islam ten 
years earlier. They also questioned the couple about their thirty-one-year-old 
daughter Hana’, a teacher of Islamic education in official schools who had not 
visited Sheba’ for ten years and was studying law in Beirut at the Islamic Sharia 
School of  the Islamic Sunni Council, the highest Sunni authority in Lebanon 
(dar al-ifta’ in Arabic).  Khowlah Daleh told Human Rights Watch that she 
believed the questions were perfunctory and that the decision to expel her and her 
husband had already been made. The two men put the couple in a car and drove 
                                                 
          66         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Shuweifat, Lebanon, April 1999. 

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