Week after week, as warring militiamen fight for control of the war-torn city, the people of Beirut face the possibility of dying from car bombs, shelling or gunfire. Last week the inhabitants of two Beirut refugee camps confronted a new threat: starvation. The food shortage was the result of a long and bloody siege of Burj el-Barajneh and Shatila, Palestinian settlements on the southern edge of the city. Since October, the camps have been under attack by the Amal militia, a Syrian-backed Shi'ite Muslim group.
The plight of the two camps came to light in a shocking request by Sheik Khalil Sharkiyeh, the chief Sunni Muslim clergyman of the Burj el-Barajneh camp. Because of acute food shortages, Sharkiyeh appealed to Muslim scholars for a fatwa, or religious ruling, that would allow starving residents to eat human flesh if that became necessary for survival. Though no such edict was forthcoming, an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose forces are defending the camps, said last week that conditions for the 35,000 besieged Palestinians had grown desperate. "Our people in Burj el-Barajneh have already eaten all the cats and dogs they had," he said. "Nothing is left to eat."
Others reported that some residents had been reduced to feeding on rats. "Don't be surprised," one Palestinian told an incredulous newsman. "Mothers boil the rats, and children eat them." Pauline Cutting, a British surgeon who had been trapped in Burj el-Barajneh for 15 weeks, told a Washington Post reporter by telephone that the camp's only hospital had run out of pain-killing medicines, was short of antibiotics and anesthetics, and got its electricity from a single, unreliable generator. Food and medical shortages were believed to be almost as extreme at the nearby and similarly besieged Shatila camp, which gained infamy as one of the two sites of Palestinian massacres by Christian Phalangists after the 1982 Israeli invasion.
P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat labeled the violence a "crime, a genocide," and called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to end the siege. Arafat neglected to point out, however, that it is the steady reinfiltration into Lebanon of P.L.O. forces, which were pushed out by the Israelis, that provoked the rival Amal to attack and isolate the camps. In the past two years, an estimated 3,500 P.L.O. fighters have returned to Beirut and southern Lebanon, mostly by ships that deposit them in coastal areas.
Two unsuccessful attempts were made to break the blockade. In the first, four occupants of a truck loaded with flour were killed when they tried to drive the vehicle into Burj el-Barajneh and were blasted with Amal rockets. Militia officials claimed that the truck was also carrying ammunition for the P.L.O. Then on Friday, after the Amal had agreed to a cease-fire, an Iranian envoy riding in a small U.N. convoy of trucks and an ambulance was killed when the vehicles were halted by rocket and machine-gun fire just outside the camp's main gate. Finally, in the early hours of Saturday morning, three trucks carrying 15 tons of flour and two tons of powdered milk were escorted into the camp by representatives of Syria and Iran. While the arrival of the supplies hardly ended the miseries of the crowded enclave's residents, it at least provided a temporary respite to the siege of Burj el-Barajneh.