“They walked us single file against a bullet-riddled brick wall. It seemed like about 40 soldiers facing us. Their rifles were pointed. They looked like a firing squad. Some of my fellow hospital staff started crying. I wondered, was anyone going to know that I died in this refugee camp?
“But I thought, it’s OK I’m here, it’s because I did the right thing. I was humming ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”
Ellen Siegel, now 79 and a retired nurse in Washington, D.C., is telling me what happened to her in 1982, when she was working as one of two volunteer American nurses at the hospital in the Shatila neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, which served the Palestinians in Sabra Refugee Camp.
It was the early morning of September 18, in the waning hours of a three-day onslaught against the unarmed camp residents. She had been working there since September 2, caring for burned and gunshot-wounded Palestinians. A staunch friend of the Palestinians despite growing up Jewish in Baltimore and spending time on an Israeli kibbutz, she had pulled strings to get into Lebanon to help care for Palestinians trapped in the Israeli siege of Beirut. The soldiers pointing their guns at her were Lebanese Kataeb militia, known in
— source mondoweiss.net | Steve France | Sep 16, 2021