Persona non grata

52 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
them directly to the Zumrayya crossing.  They refused Ibrahim Hashem’s 
request to stop at the house and gather some clothing.     
This was not the family’s first encounter with SLA security officials. 
Khowlah said that she was summoned four years earlier and questioned about her 
children by senior SLA security officer Fares al-Hamra: “He told me that my son 
was in Hizballah and asked questions about my daughters. He said that they all 
wore the veil and that maybe they were members of Hizballah. One year later, he 
summoned me again and said the same things.” At the second meeting, he asked 
Khowlah to deliver a letter to her son, but she refused. She added that al-Hamra 
said that Hana’ was studying Shiism in Beirut, when in fact her daughter was a 
Sunni religious scholar. 
Khowlah and her husband were financially and emotionally devastated 
by the expulsion and particularly by the loss of their farmland. “We invested all of 
our money in our house and land.    The children helped us build the house, and we 
planted and worked on the land,” Khowlah said. The couple said that their 
orchards of cherries, walnuts and pomegranates produced about U.S. $6,600 in 
income each year. The expulsion marked the second time the family had been 
dispossessed. Until 1967, they lived in a section of the Arkoub known as the 
farms of Sheba’ and lost their twenty-dunum farm in Haret Qafwa when Israel 
seized this area.
67
   
 
April 1998: Ramieh 
Qassem Muhamed Eissa, a father of four from the village of Ramieh,  
told Human Rights Watch that he escaped as he was about to be questioned at 
SLA security headquarters in Bint Jbail and fled the occupied zone. Following her 
husband’s flight, his wife Ghazala said that she was barred from leaving the zone 
for almost two years and was harassed by SLA security operatives until she was 
                                                 
          67         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Beirut, Lebanon, April 1999. The “Sheba’ 
farms” area is located at the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Other families 
expelled from Sheba’ and interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they too had title 
to land in this area. The names of the farms are: Maghr Sheba’, Zibdeen, Qafwa, 
Ramta, Barakhta al-Tahta, Barakhta al-Fouqa, Marah al-Malloul, Fashkoul, Khalla 
Ghazala, Ruaissa al-Qaran, Joura al-A’qarib, al-Raba’a, Beit al-Barraq, Dahar 
al-Baidar, and Mazra’a Bastara. See  General People’s Council, Sons of Arqoub, 
Mazaaria’ Sheba’ al-lubnaniyya fi muwajahat al-atmaa’ al-sahyuniyya [The 
Lebanese Sheba’ Farms in the Face of Zionist Ambition] (Beirut, National Studies 
Center: undated), p.8. 
   
 

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Collective Punishment 
53 
 
 
 
finally expelled in April 1998.    According to Ghazala, after her husband left the 
zone, three SLA militiamen — Ali Saleh, Ridda Nasr, and Bassam Obeid — 
stormed her house and ransacked it, claiming to be searching for weapons. She 
said that they found no arms, but took Qassem’s pick-up truck, which had been 
sent to him by his brother in Saudi Arabia and was worth about U.S. $9,000.    She 
also charged that the militiamen stole $5,000 in cash that the family had been 
saving to purchase a school bus. “Ridda Nasr counted the money in front of me,” 
said Qassem’s mother, Nimri Ali Eissa, who also witnessed the search. 
After this, Ghazala reported that she lived uncomfortably in the village, 
ostracized by her neighbors. “Ahmed Shibley [an SLA security officer] warned 
everyone not to have contact with us or help plough our land,” she said. “Once, 
my youngest son broke his hand and no one would drive him to the hospital in 
Bint Jbail. Taxis that charge LL10,000 refused LL20,000. We walked until we 
found a car from outside the village that would take us to the hospital.” Ghazala 
said that she was expelled with her children on April 1, 1998, and was not 
permitted to bring any possessions with her.
68
   
 
December 1996: Markaba 
The parents of two slain Lebanese guerrillas were expelled from the 
village of Markaba on December 23, 1996.    According to Agence France-Presse, 
Hussein Dakik, fifty years old, and his wife were expelled ten days after their son 
Ali, a fighter with the Amal Movement, and another guerrilla were  killed in a 
clash with Israeli forces in Wadi Slouki.
69
 Radio Lebanon reported that 
seventy-year-old Muhamed al-Hayik and his sixty-four-year-old wife Khadija 
were also expelled from Markaba    through the Beit Yahoun crossing on the same 
day.  It  noted that their son Ahmad had recently been killed in a military 
operation in Wadi Slouki, and that another son, Husam, had fled the SLA and 
turned himself in to the residents of Qabrika village. “The Israeli forces sent a 
message with the deportees threatening any relatives of the martyr [Ahmad] 
against entering the occupied region again,” the report concluded.
70
     
 
December 1988 - January 1989: Kfar Hamam 
                                                 
          68         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Ras al-’Ain, Lebanon, March 1999. 
          69         
Agence France-Presse, “Israel expels parents of slain guerrilla from buffer 
strip,” December 23, 1996.   
          70         
Radio Lebanon (Beirut), December 23, 1996, as reported in FBIS Daily 
Report, December 26, 1996, FBIS-NES-96-248. 

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