Persona non grata

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Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
occupied zone to attend classes.  He said that after his brother Zeid was killed,  
SLA security officials refused to issue him a permit to travel outside the zone, and 
he missed the 1993-94 school year. His mother said that due to Sakr’s persistence, 
and the intervention of “good people” in the village, Sakr received a permit to 
leave the zone but not to return. 
After Zeid was killed, Khadija testified, she was questioned four times 
by SLA militiaman Abu Burhan in Aitaroun. She said that she was never 
summoned from her home, but each time was picked up and taken to Aitaroun 
while she was walking on the road in the village. She stated that Abu Burhan 
cursed her dead son, asked questions about his friends which she refused to 
answer, and instructed her not to inform anyone, even her children, that she had 
been questioned.   
Khadija told Human Rights Watch about  another encounter with the 
SLA several years later. Her son Hussam and a friend, who were fifteen and 
sixteen years old, had been ordered by the SLA security chief in Houla, Kamal 
Shreim, to inspect all the rocks along the three kilometers of road that led from the 
village to an SLA military position.
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    Hussam himself told Human Rights Watch 
that from a safe distance, Shreim and his assistant, Fouad Slim, closely watch him 
and his friend perform the dangerous tasks, which took about four to five hours. 
Hussam said that Shreim ordered him to carry out the work about thirty times. 
When Hussam finally mentioned to his mother what he and his friend had been 
forced to do, she went to the security office in Houla and complained. Hussam 
was no longer forced to serve as a human mine-detector, but Khadija’s daughter 
Miriam and her son Ali were then imprisoned in Khiam and held without charge. 
Ali was taken on May 5, 1995, and held until August 15, 1995. Miriam was taken 
fifteen days later and was released on the same day as her brother. 
Six months later, the SLA sought to force Ali into service with the 
militia. In the last week of February 1996, at 10:30 at night, a force of about ten 
uniformed and armed SLA militiamen surrounded the family’s house. Hassan 
Farid from Adayseh knocked at the door and said that SLA security official Robin 
Aboud wanted Ali, who was then nineteen years old and in the middle of  his 
third year of technical school. “We knew that they wanted him for the militia,” 
Miriam said. “My sister and I started arguing with him. We said that we would not 
wake up Ali, and that Robin Aboud should come and talk to us personally.  
Everyone started shouting and my mother fainted. Finally, Ali came into the room 
and agreed to go with them.” 
                                                 
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The Lebanese military resistance had been detonating roadside bombs, 
disguised as rocks, in attacks on Israeli forces and the SLA. 

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Punishing Flight from the Militia 
67 
 
 
 
Ali was taken to the SLA center in Markaba, where he was told to sign 
up for one to three    years of service with the militia. He refused and was beaten. 
His signature was forged on a document agreeing to three years of service. On 
September 10, 1996, Ali deserted the SLA and escaped the occupied zone through 
Wadi Slouki to Shaqra with his two younger brothers, Hussam and John. Seven 
days later, the remaining four immediate family members who lived in Houla 
were expelled. 
Khadija, sixty years old at the time of the interview, vividly recalled 
what happened. She said that one militiaman came to the house at six o’clock in 
the morning and others surrounded the building. He asked for her husband, and 
instructed the family that they had to report to the SLA position in Markaba, a 
village just north of Houla. They were transported to Markaba in an SLA civilian 
car. “We stayed there for two and a half hours, and no one talked to us. I thought 
that they were sending us to prison,” Khadija said.  Then, two militiamen 
informed the family that they were being expelled. Khadija asked if they could 
bring some possessions from the house. “No, you cannot set foot in Houla again,” 
she said one of the militiamen told her. Khadija, her husband, and two daughters 
were taken in another civilian car to the Beit Yahoun crossing point  and 
expelled. She remembered the taxi driver, who would not accept payment from 
the family, and drove them from the crossroads to the house of their oldest son in 
Sidon.  
Khadija and her husband were farmers in Houla, and operated a small 
produce store. They grew wheat, lentils, fava beans, and vegetables, and sold milk 
and eggs from the three cows and sixty chickens that they owned. “We don’t 
know what happened to the cows and chickens,” Khadija said, “and a militiaman 
now lives in our house with his wife and children.” The family received LL3 
million (about U.S. $2,000) in compensation for the expulsion from the Council 
of the South but “this is nothing because we could bring nothing from home with 
us,” she added.
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Less than two months after the Abdallah family was expelled, there were   
reports in the Beirut-based media that another family from Houla suffered a 
similar fate because a son had evaded service in the SLA.    According to Agence 
France-Presse, Ali Khalil Nasrallah, his wife and six children were expelled on 
November 8, 1996, “because one of their sons refused to enrol in the SLA.”
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    A 
                                                 
          93         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Ghaziyeh, Lebanon, April 1999 and June 
1999. 
          94         
Agence France-Presse, “SLA expels family of eight, Amnesty appeal for 
release of doctor,” November 8, 1996. 

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