Persona non grata

54 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
In 1988, Youmna Khalil and three of her children from Kfar Hamam, a 
village in the northeastern part of the occupied zone, were detained without 
charge in Khiam prison to force the return of her sons Jamal, twenty years old and 
Ahmed, nineteen, who had joined the resistance.  The pressure of the 
imprisonment of immediate family members did not yield the return of the two 
brothers, resulting in the expulsion of their mother in December 1988 and their 
father and three siblings in January 1989.   
According to family members, for two months the SLA inquired 
repeatedly about the two brothers. Then Naji al-Qadi and Nidal Jamal, two 
militiamen from the SLA security office in Hasbaiya, came to the house and 
questioned their mother. “They asked me where my sons were. I said that I did not 
know, and they said that they were taking me,” said Youmna, who was in her 
sixties at the time of her interview with Human Rights Watch. According to the 
family, Youmna and her thirteen-year-old son Rabah were detained in Khiam 
prison on March 23, 1988. Rabah was taken, the family said, because the SLA 
suspected that he had been in contact with his brother Jamal and knew where 
weapons were hidden. Two of Youmna’s daughters were imprisoned the next 
month: twenty-five-year-old Nadia on April 4 and seventeen-year-old Jamila on 
April 26.
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Youmna told Human Rights Watch that she was held without charge for 
three months and tortured during interrogation for fifteen days. She said that her 
interrogators would come at night, blindfold her eyes,  place a sack over her 
head, and cuff    her hands in front. She was then pushed to the floor and beaten. 
She was also doused with very cold or very hot water, and electricity was applied 
under her fingernails and on her breasts.
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They beat me while I was on the floor. Then, they would stop 
and there would be silence. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, 
they would start beating me again.    They told me that I would 
be released if my sons returned. I refused to bring back my 
sons. They threatened to expel me or dynamite our house.     
                                                 
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Jamila was held without charge until November 1989,  and Nadia until 
August or September 1989 (the family was not sure of the exact date but said that she 
was released three months before Jamila). Rabah was detained for fourteen months, 
until May 16, 1989, and was expelled immediately after his release.   
   
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      Youmna and other women torture victims who told Human Rights Watch that 
electricity was applied to their breasts said they were clothed when this occurred.   

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Collective Punishment 
55 
 
 
 
 
After her release, Youmna said that SLA militiamen came to the 
family’s home at night and threatened to blow it up. On December 17, 1988, she 
was summoned to the security office in Hasbayya and again instructed    to bring 
her sons or face expulsion.     
 
I refused. So they drove me to Zumrayya [crossing].  It was 
raining heavily and there was nowhere to sit, so I sat on the wet 
ground. I wanted to go to my sister’s house in the Beka’ and had 
only LL4,000. The taxi driver [who took her there] would not 
accept my money when I told him what had happened. 
 
Youmna was expelled alone, without her husband and four children who 
lived at home. She told Human Rights Watch that she tried once to enter the 
occupied zone at the Zumrayya crossing, but was informed that there were orders 
not to admit her unless her sons returned. “I told them that I had other children in 
the village, and sheep, but they said that was not their problem,” Youmna 
recalled.  
On January 5, 1989, Youmna’s husband Qassem Ali Shahrour and three 
of his children were expelled from the village.
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  Over ten years later, 
sixty-nine-year-old Qassem recounted some of the details:   
 
They woke us up at 3:30 in the morning. There were tanks and 
many cars, and soldiers on the upper floor of our neighbor’s 
house. They searched the house and told us that we were going 
to be expelled. It was a mixed group, and Arabic was spoken. 
But there were Israelis with them. [SLA security official] 
Alameddin al-Badawi was in our house, speaking with an 
Israeli in Hebrew. 
 
Badawi and an Israeli officer appeared to be in charge of the operation, 
he said. He watched as Badawi used a folding knife to tear pieces of fabric from 
the sofa to use as blindfolds. Before he was blindfolded, he saw them loot gold, 
money, and a television set. The children were herded into a convoy of cars in 
their nightclothes.    
The family suffered major economic loss. They had owned over three 
hundred sheep, a horse, and generated income from five hundred olive trees, as 
                                                 
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The children were Ramez, twenty-three; Ikram, fifteen; and Nejla, thirteen. 

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56 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
well as harvests of grapes and figs. “We lived off the land, and had everything that 
we needed,” Youmna said. For the first four years after the expulsion, they lived 
in poverty in a village in the Beka’ valley. “It was very cold in the winter. The 
house had no windows and we used cardboard in place of glass,” said Nejla, who 
was expelled with her father and three siblings. “You will not believe this, but it 
was so difficult for a while that we were living on potatoes and water.” The family 
moved to Beirut when some of the children found jobs, but their circumstances 
were still difficult at the time of the interview with Human Rights Watch. Nejla, 
who was twenty-four years old, said that she had hoped to study accounting, but 
the family was unable to finance her education.
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October 1988: Markaba 
                                                 
          74         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Beirut, Lebanon, March 1999. 

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