Horror For Lebanon

Millions of people around the world did not have to take anyone's word for it that West Beirut was being made to suffer. For more than two months, after the Israeli encirclement of the city on June 13, they could watch it happen on their television screens.

What they saw was sometimes enough to make some of them turn off their sets in anguish: babies with burnt-off limbs; children dying of starvation and thirst: and mothers weeping in front of demolished apartment buildings where their children were buried under the rubble.

It was scenes like these which finally made President Reagan raise his voice to Prime Minister Begin for the first time during the siege (see story below), expressing his "outrage" at a policy which Israeli officials had described as putting necessary "pressure" on the PLO during the negotiations for evacuation of Palestinian guerrillas.

The problem for Mr. Reagan, however, as well as for the millions of others sitting in front of their television screens, was that the Israeli pressure tactics were bringing death, pain and hardship to thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who had nothing to do with the war.

According to Lebanese police records, more than 4,000 of them were killed during the siege, and uncounted others injured. Large areas of the city, including some in which no Palestinians were living, were devastated. Most of the death and destruction was inflicted by fierce and protracted shelling by land artillery and naval guns and bombing from the air. In one assault lasting 14 hours, it was estimated that 180,000 shells were fired and 200 bombing sorties made.

The assaults, carried out almost daily between brief ceasefires, drove panicked civilians from neighborhood to neighborhood seeking safety. According to New York Times correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, as the siege tightened people "began to shift from building to building and then floor to floor and finally room to room, ever in search of a secure corner.

Much of the shelling of West Beirut was of a random nature—perhaps in order to make Palestinians feel that no place of refuge was safe for them. During a 20-hour shelling on August 4 of downtown Beirut, which had few if any Palestinian military targets, Israelis hit not only mosques, movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, newspaper offices, shops, banks, apartment buildings, and hospitals, but also the Central Bank of Lebanon, the Ministry of Tourism and the Prime Minister's office. The Israelis hammered home their point—that no place was safe—but at a cost of an estimated 300 lives on that day, most of them Lebanese.

The people of West Beirut were not even safe in their hospitals, all of which were hit at least once during the siege, and many of them repeatedly. An asylum housing more than 500 mental patients was hit three times. The Babir Hospital, close to Israeli ground positions on the edge of West Beirut, was blasted so often that even the badly wounded balked at going there.

The suffering of West Beirutis was intensified during most of the siege by an Israeli cut-off of water and electricity and an embargo on import of food, fuel and medicine.

The lack of water, which in normal times was piped in from East Beirut, forced the population to depend on artesian wells, which soon became virtually impotable from over-use. When the water supply was occasionally turned on, in response to international appeals, the continued absence of electricity made it impossible to pump the water through the system. Much of it gushed from broken water-mains through the rubble and garbage-strewn streets. International relief officials said a number of children died from dehydration in the summer heat, and that there were serious cases of dysentery, scabies, eye diseases and gastroenteritis. Rats, flies and cockroaches proliferated. When fires were set off by the Israelis' liberal use of phosphorus bombs during their assaults, the shortage of water allowed the fires to rage out of control.

It may be a long time before the toll of the siege is known. There are indications that the casualties of the PLO fighting men, well dug into their military bunkers, were low. But for the countless civilians who died in their homes, it is a different story.

John De Salis, chief delegate in Beirut for the International Committee of the Red Cross, epitomized the horror that was West Beirut when he wondered out loud:

"How many people have died agonizingly slow deaths under the rubble?"