Persona non grata

Summary 3 
 
 
 
• 
 In December 1989, Kamal Abdel Karim Yunes, a trader who lived in 
Markaba, was detained without charge for three days in the SLA security 
office in the village.    Then he was informed that he and his family were 
being expelled and, according to his testimony, he was told they could 
not even “take a spoon” with them. Yunes said that an SLA militiaman 
accompanied him back to the family’s house, where he was bundled into 
a car with his wife Aziza and two of their children, aged three and seven 
years old. “All we had were the clothes that we were wearing,” Yunes 
told Human Rights Watch.  The family was transported in a three-car 
convoy to the Kfar Tebnit crossing and expelled.     
 
• 
 In September 1996, members of the Abdallah family in the village of 
Houla were awakened by an SLA militiaman who arrived at their home 
at 6:00 in the morning.  Other soldiers surrounded the house.  He 
instructed the family that they must report immediately to an SLA 
position in the nearby village of Markaba, and transported them there in 
an unmarked 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,” said 
Khadija, the matriarch of the family. Finally, two militiamen told the 
family that they were being expelled.    Khadija’s request to bring some 
possessions from the house was denied. She was transported in another 
unmarked civilian car, along with her sixty-seven-year-old husband, 
Abdallah, and her two daughters, Miriam and Rima, to the Beit Yahoun 
crossing point, where the family was expelled.     
 
• 
In May 1998, an SLA security officer arrived at midnight at the home of 
sixty-four-year-old Muhamed Moussa in the village of Sheba’. He 
instructed Mr. Moussa and his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Mona, 
who was a teacher at a local school, to report to the SLA security office 
in nearby Hasbaiya the next day. When they arrived at the office the next 
morning, with Mona’s five-month-old daughter in tow, a security officer 
wearing civilian clothes asked them to identify themselves. He then  
informed Mona and her father that he had orders to expel them.    “I told 
him that we did not have milk for the baby, or our identity cards,” Mona 
told Human Rights Watch.  “I asked to see Fares al-Hamra and 
Alameddin al-Badawi [two senior SLA security officials] to know what 
we did wrong.  He said that we could not see them, and that the 
expulsion decision had been taken.”  They were transported to the  
Zumrayya crossing and expelled.     

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4 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
 
• 
In January 1999, twenty-five members of one extended family were 
expelled from Sheba’, including the family’s sixty-year-old matriarch 
and sixteen children between the ages of nine months and thirteen years 
old. Qassem Naba’, twenty-five years old and the father of two of the 
children, said that at 4:30 one afternoon, as the families were preparing 
food for the fast-breaking   iftar meal during the Muslim holy month of 
Ramadan, a joint force of Israeli and SLA security forces arrived at their 
houses in three unmarked civilian cars. “They said that all of us had to 
come with them to Hasbaiya,” Qassem told Human Rights Watch.    The 
large group was brought to the SLA security office there. “We stayed 
outside in the cold for one hour, until about 6:30,” Qassem said.    “Then 
Alameddin al-Badawi and Fares al-Hamra told my brother Ahmad that 
they were expelling us.  Ahmad asked why, and he was hit with a 
Kalashnikov on his back.    Then four militiamen beat him in front of us 
for five minutes.  He was bleeding from his face.” The twenty-five 
adults and children were then crammed into two cars, including the 
trunks, and expelled at the Zumrayya crossing point.       
 
• 
In January 1989, Qassem Ali Shahrour and three of his children were 
expelled from the village of Kfar Hamam.  Mr. Shahrour, whose wife 
Youmna had been expelled the previous month, described how the 
expulsion was carried out: “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,”    recounted Mr. Shahrour, now sixty-nine years old.   
“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.  Alameddin al-Badawi was in our house, speaking with an 
Israeli in Hebrew.” He added that Badawi and an Israeli officer appeared 
to be in charge of the operation. Mr. Shahrour’s youngest daughter, 
Nejla, thirteen years old at this time, was expelled wearing only her 
pajamas. 
 
• 
Taleb Ahmed Saad, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker from 
the town of Khiam, came under pressure in 1998 to work as an informer 
for the SLA security apparatus.  He was approached three times, and 
always refused. In July 1998, he was detained without charge in Khiam 
prison and held for forty-two days. Saad told Human Rights Watch that 
he was released on August 17, 1998 at 4:00 in the afternoon, and  

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Summary 5 
 
 
 
moved to the SLA security office in Khiam, where he was held 
overnight.    The next morning, two SLA    security officers came to him.   
“I thought that they were taking me home,” Saad said.    Instead, he was 
transported to the Kfar Tebnit crossing and expelled.    He recalled that 
the officers told him that the expulsion was an Israeli decision.   
 
As the testimony in this report indicates, many of the expelled families 
left behind productive agricultural land, livestock, and small businesses, in 
addition to the homes that they owned. The abrupt dispossession has imposed 
difficult and enduring economic hardships on expelled families. Human Rights 
Watch found former homeowners living in small, overcrowded  rented 
apartments in the suburbs of greater Beirut and other urban centers. They said that 
their houses in the occupied zone sat empty, or in some cases were occupied 
rent-free by SLA militiamen. Families lost all personal possessions, including  
clothing, home furnishings, and vehicles. Valuable income-producing livestock, 
most typically sheep, chickens, and cows, had to be left behind. Women who 
worked as farmers expressed sadness and anger at having lost not only sources of 
self-sufficiency and livelihood, but the fields and orchards that they cultivated and 
loved. 
Many expelled families have been reduced to poverty because of lost 
income from agricultural land and small businesses in their villages. Farmers 
expressed deep concern about the deterioration of their idle land, particularly 
olive groves and orchards, from lack of care. Those men and women who 
managed to find some type of employment in Beirut earned meager salaries that 
did not match former earnings in the occupied zone, and their standard of living 
has been dramatically reduced. This was particularly true for families who were 
farmers and had been largely self-sufficient. Every expelled resident whom 
Human Rights Watch interviewed in March and April 1999 for this report was 
profoundly bitter, and many were indignant that there has been little attention to 
their plight, in Lebanon and internationally.   
This report is not a comprehensive historical survey of the expulsions. 
The  cases of expulsion and other forcible transfers described in the report 
occurred in villages and towns across the occupied zone, from Tair Harfa and 
Chihine in the southwest to Kfar Hamam and Sheba’ in the northeast, between 
1985 and 1999. The report is based primarily on the personal testimonies of 
expelled individuals and families whom Human Rights Watch interviewed in 
Lebanon.  It notes additional expulsions that the Lebanese media and 
Beirut-based international news agencies reported. 
The total number of Lebanese civilians who have been expelled from the 
occupied zone over the years is unknown. According to the Arqoub Citizens 

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