Persona non grata

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1989: Markaba   
Kamal Abdel Karim Yunes, a trader from the village of Markaba, 
recounted a two-year pattern of harassment and arbitrary arrest before he and his 
family were finally expelled in December 1989.    As a trader, he made frequent 
trips to Beirut to purchase items that he sold in the village.  He traveled on the 
permit that is required for all residents to  exit or enter the occupied zone.  
Yunes told Human Rights Watch that in 1988 he was summoned to meet with 
Said Hamoud, an Israeli officer, in Turmous, a former Lebanese army base known 
as Kilo Nine that was located close to the Israel-Lebanon border. He said that 
Hamoud asked him to provide information about Lebanese military positions and 
Hizballah activities, and that he refused. Hamoud threatened that if he did not 
cooperate his permit to travel outside the zone would be canceled. The trader 
again refused, and he paid the consequences: “They seized my permit, and I was 
prohibited from leaving the village. I had to close my shop because I could not go 
to Beirut to trade,” he told Human Rights Watch.
110
 
Then the pressure on Yunes intensified. He was summoned to report to 
the SLA office in the village, where he was held for about seven hours. “They 
released me, and I stayed at home for twenty-five days. I could not leave the town. 
Then one night they came for me after midnight.    I [escaped from] the house, and 
they came back again in the morning. They detained me for five days,” he said, at 
the SLA security office in Markaba.  He spent one day at his house, and then 
word came again that he was wanted at the security office.  When he did not 
appear, militiamen came for him in a civilian car. He said that he was taken to a 
room where two Israeli intelligence agents questioned him:   
 
They asked why I was being so stubborn, and I told them that I 
do not work for anyone. They told me to go home, and the same 
week they took my thirteen-year-old son Hussein to Khiam 
[prison].    They said that Hussein would be released if I agreed 
to work as a collaborator. They put me under house arrest, with 
a guard outside my house.  Hussein was held for two months 
and sixteen days, and then released.   
 
                                                 
     110     
Human Rights Watch interview,    Beirut, Lebanon, March 1999. 

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76 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
When Hussein was released from Khiam, Yunes arranged for him to 
leave the occupied zone, an action that triggered additional harassment. He said 
that one morning a car was sent to his house and he was told that he had to talk 
again to Said Hammoud in Turmous. Yunes told Human Rights Watch that 
Hammoud once more pressured him to collaborate and again he refused. “Then 
you will have no permit and you will stay at home,” he remembered Hammoud 
saying. 
During this period of intense pressure, Yunes said that SLA militiamen 
forced him to drive his truck on militarily dangerous roads to deliver supplies to 
Israeli military outposts in the zone. These trips usually took place at night, and he 
carried out about twenty-five missions, transporting water or fuel. “They would 
come to the house and tell me that I had to go with them.    It was dangerous but 
you cannot say no because they are armed. Once they came when I was ploughing 
the land, and said that I had to deliver fuel. They started shooting at me, and my 
wife told me to go,” Yunes said. He finally set his truck on fire to escape this 
potentially life-threatening coercion.
111
           
After his last meeting with Said Hammoud, Yunes was placed under 
surveillance. After several days, he was detained at the SLA security office in 
Markaba and held for three days.    Then he was told that he and his family were 
being expelled and that they could not “take a spoon.” A militiaman  
accompanied him back to his house. “All we had were the clothes that we were 
wearing,” Yunes told Human Rights Watch.    Yunes, his wife Aziza, and two of 
their children, aged three and seven years old,  were bundled into a car and 
transported in a three-car convoy to the Kfar Tebnit crossing. It was December 15, 
1989.    He was warned not to inform anyone about the expulsion. His son Hussein 
— who had been imprisoned in Khiam — later joined Hizballah as a fighter and 
was killed at Wadi Slouki in a military operation in April 1994.       
Yunes left behind farmland that he said yielded between U.S. $10,000 
and $15,000 annually from its harvest of olives, almonds, and grapes. He noted 
that his brother, who still lives in Markaba, does not farm the land. “No one dares 
touch this land,” he said, explaining that this would raise the militia’s suspicion 
that the earnings were being sent to him and his family. Yunes added that he does 
not even contact his brother by telephone, for fear of putting him at risk.   
 
1998: Khiam 
                                                 
     111         
Human Rights Watch recorded another account of civilians, this time 
children, being forced to carry out military activities.    See “Houla: 1996,” above.     

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Punishing Refusal to Serve the Occupation Security Apparatus 
77 
 
 
 
Taleb Ahmed Saad, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker from 
the town of Khiam, was expelled in August 1998. He told Human Rights Watch 
that he had been approached three times to work as an informer for the SLA.    He 
said that he was contacted at his home and instructed to report to the local SLA 
security office, where he met with Ali Sweid (also known as Ali Kuftan), the head 
of security in the village. “He wanted me to work for them in Beirut, but I 
refused,” Saad said. In July 1998, he was brought to Khiam prison and detained 
for forty-two days. Saad said he was interrogated for twenty-five days, each time 
with his hands cuffed in front, a sack placed over his head, and a blindfold over 
the sack. Many of the questions focused on his brother Saad Ahmed Saad, who 
was expelled from the village in February 1988 on suspicion of involvement with 
Hizballah. He was repeatedly beaten, insulted in vulgar language, and threatened 
that his father, mother and sisters would be taken to the prison. “They  wanted 
names, they wanted to know what I did when I went to Beirut, they asked for 
information about my brother,” he said. He said that his interrogators were 
relentless: “Whatever you say is considered a lie, and they keep on trying.”   
Saad was released from prison on August 17, 1998 at four o’clock in the 
afternoon.    He was moved from the prison to the SLA security office in Khiam 
and held there overnight. The next morning, two SLA security officers — Ahmad 
‘Issa, who is the officer responsible for the Kfar Tebnit crossing, and Hussein 
Nasr — came to him. “I thought that they were taking me home,” Taleb said.  
Instead, he was transported to the Kfar Tebnit crossing and expelled. He recalled 
that the officers told him that it was an Israeli decision. At the time of  his 
interview with Human Rights Watch, Saad, who is not married, had not been able 
to find employment in Beirut. His parents, three sisters, and older brother were 
still living in Khiam.
112
   
 
Flight 
In some cases, the sustained pressure that SLA and Israeli security 
officials have applied on targeted men and women has literally forced them to flee 
their villages out of fear, political principle, and often a combination of both. 
Most of these individuals described themselves as “expelled,” although in this 
report Human Rights Watch characterizes such cases as related but distinct 
phenomena. The circumstances surrounding the flight of civilian residents from 
the occupied zone have often been similar to those that trigger expulsions.     
One example is Majid (not his real name), a former resident of Kfar Kila, 
who recounted the pressure on him, which he said began in 1990, to work as an 
                                                 
     112     
Human Rights Watch interview, Beirut, Lebanon, April 1999. 

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