For Lebanon's civilians, death and suffering are the victors
Hundreds of Palestinian refugees sat disconsolately under makeshift tents in the dusty, grubby Beirut park that goes by the absurdly fancy name of Garden of the Arts. Among them was Nefalah Farour, 38, who had fled the P.L.O.-dominated port of Tyre on the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Accompanied by five of her seven children, she had walked through the mountains to the dubious safety of Beirut. Exhausted, she squatted on a flattened cardboard box and fretted over the fate of the two youngsters she had been obliged to leave behind in her flight from the Israeli shelling. The two children had been playing at a neighbor's house when the family ran. Had they survived? The answer remained buried in the rubble of Tyre.
Such scenes of human displacement and despair had become appallingly commonplace in Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli blitz. To look into the plight of the civilians who were in the path of the invasion, TIME sent four journalists into the area: Beirut Correspondent Roberto Suro, Jerusalem Correspondent David Halevy, Cairo Correspondent Robert C. Wurmstedt and Reporter Leroy Aarons. Their combined report:
In the first days of fighting, hundreds of civilians, warned by Israeli leaflets dropped from the air of the coming attack, had rushed to the beaches, where they waited for two days without food or water. Others fled to the countryside or the capital. Trekking back after the ceasefire, many found their homes severely damaged or destroyed. Still uncounted dead were hidden under the shattered masonry of their buildings and shops. An incalculable number of wounded lay in makeshift hospitals.
Estimates of the total number of dead, injured and homeless varied wildly. United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said that 1.5 million people—half the population of the country—had been affected by the fighting. According to Lebanese sources, about 10,000 were killed and 16,000 wounded. The State Department's Agency for International Development said that about 600,000 people from Beirut and southern Lebanon had been "directly affected." But officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is distributing medical supplies in Lebanon, called these estimates "much exaggerated." By Red Cross reckoning, about 300,000 civilian refugees had been displaced in southern Lebanon, the majority eventually returning to their homes in Israeli-occupied territory. Whatever the exact figures, the toll in human suffering was shockingly high.