Persona non grata

Punishing Refusal to Serve the Occupation Security Apparatus 
81 
 
 
 
Rasmiya told Human Rights Watch that she remained in the village with 
their daughter, then eleven, and nine- year-old son. They were not permitted to 
leave the zone and remained for eight years, in a state of extreme isolation. “If 
anyone talked to me, even my brother, they would be summoned for questioning,” 
she explained. Once, she recalled, a Christian friend from another village stopped 
by for a visit. Rasmiya said that his license plate number was recorded and he was 
later called in for investigation.   
When Rasmiya’s son reached sixteen years old, he was summoned to the 
SLA security office in Naqoura and pressured to work with the militia by security 
officer Akram Alayan and an Arabic-speaking Israeli investigator. At his last 
meeting with the two men, his mother accompanied him and waited outside.   
 
They threatened to send me to Khiam [prison] if I did not agree 
to work with them. I was worried about my mother, so I said 
yes.  They explained that they wanted me to mingle with the 
people and listen. They wanted me to tell them if anyone came 
to the village at night. They gave me money and made me sign a 
piece of paper.    I told them that I did not want the money.    The 
meeting lasted three or four hours.    My mother and I got back 
to the house at one in the morning.    I told her that we could not 
sleep one more night there.   
 
He fled the village the next day with his mother, taking the same route 
through the hills and wadis that his father had used eight years earlier. 
The family left behind a large house and thirty dunums of land, planted 
in tobacco, wheat, and barley, and 240 olive trees.    They calculated their loss in 
agricultural earnings at about U.S. $20,000 annually. “The SLA has forbidden 
anyone to plough the land between our olive trees. Without ploughing, the trees 
will die,” Ali Yousef lamented. Rasmiya said that at the time she left in 1998 the 
village’s population had been reduced  to “very old people” and those who 
worked for or supported the SLA. She said that about seventy-five homes were 
occupied, but some of them had only one or two residents. The high school had 
been closed, and only thirty students attended the only other school, which served 
five villages in addition to Tair Harfa.
116
   
                                                 
     116     
Human Rights Watch interviews, Tyre, Lebanon, March 1999.     

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82 
   
VII. OTHER FORCIBLE TRANSFERS     
 
“Zuhair Shukair [a local SLA security 
official] said that I must collaborate and 
meet Israeli officers.    I told him that I would 
never do that.” 
 
—Rasmiya Fawzi Jaber, 
who was given a permit to 
leave her village of 
Mhaibib in 1991, when she 
was twenty-six years old, 
on the condition that she 
could never return. 
 
 
In this report, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of formal 
expulsion, instances  in which men, women, or sometimes entire families have 
been summoned to a local SLA security office near their homes in the occupied 
zone, informed that they were being expelled, and then transported by security 
officials or soldiers to an SLA crossing point and forced to leave. This chapter of 
the report includes cases in which residents of the occupied zone have been 
denied the right to return to the zone, or have been offered an exit permit to leave 
with explicit instructions that they are not permitted to return to the zone and their 
homes villages. 
Families from the occupied zone who have not been permitted to return 
to their homes or who have been offered a “one-way ticket” out of the zone by 
occupation security officials, in the form of a long-sought exit permit, consider 
and describe themselves as “expelled.” For such families, the difference in the 
method by which each family member was dispossessed or excluded is 
meaningless because it was clear to them that the entire family was targeted and 
punished for actions that they themselves did not personally commit. The 
example of the Moussa family from the village of Sheba’ is a case in point. As 
discussed in Chapter IV, Ghassan Moussa was expelled in May 1998 at the 
Zumrayya crossing immediately following his release from Khiam prison, where 
he had been held without charge for twelve years.    One week later, his father, his 
sister, and his sister’s infant daughter were also expelled from the  village 
through the same crossing point, and informed at that time that    no other family 
members could return to Sheba’.  Ghassan’s mother, Shihira Atweh,  was in 

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Othe Forcible Transfers 
83 
 
 
 
Beirut on the day that her husband, daughter, and granddaughter were expelled. 
Presumably, had Shihira been present in the village, she would have been 
expelled with her husband and daugher. The Moussa family considers Shihira to 
be “expelled,” even though she was not ordered to leave her village and then 
driven to an SLA crossing point (because she happened to be outside, not inside 
the zone when other family members were expelled). Cases such as these, in 
which residents are denied the right to return to the occupied zone, constitute  
forcible transfers, in violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and 
grave breaches under article 147 of the convention. 
The other paradigm of dispossession — forcing residents of the occupied 
zone to “voluntarily” accept an exit permit to leave, with the understanding that 
they will not be permitted to return — should be understood in the context of    the 
strict control that occupation security authorities exercise over the freedom of 
movement of all residents out of and in to the zone. As the cases presented earlier 
in this report make clear, entire families have been prohibited from leaving their 
villages, sometimes for years, as punishment for the known or suspected actions 
of their relatives. In several cases documented by Human Rights Watch, and 
noted in earlier chapters of this report, these arbitrary and punitive actions have 
left women and men suffering from serious medical problems without access to 
specialized care, and in one case led to blindness (see “1996: Houla,”above).    In 
this context, it is obvious why some residents of the occupied zone decided to 
accept offers of    exit permits, enabling them    to leave their villages but never to 
return. Residents who have been forced to accept such devil’s bargains from 
occupation security authorities also describe themselves as “expelled.”   Human 
Rights Watch believes that these measures amount to illegal forcible transfers in 
violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.   
For the victims, these forcible transfers are comparable in effect to 
expulsions.  Those who have not been permitted to reenter their villages in the 
zone, or those who have been forced to leave, are denied access to their homes and 
local employment, and are separated from members of their families who remain 
in the occupied territory. It should also be noted that the denial of reentry of one 
member of a family temporarily outside the territory has sometimes been 
accompanied by the prior formal expulsion of other family members. Those 
affected may have been the object of the same form of expulsion order as those 
physically placed over the border. The circumstances surrounding such forcible 
transfers are detailed in the three cases that follow from 1991, 1997, and 1998.     
 
February 1998: Aitaroun 
In February 1998 and again in April 1998, fifty-nine-year-old Zeinab 
Beydoun and her husband Khalil, sixty-three, were not permitted to enter their 

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