Milana Boutros, known as "Umm Hussein Al-Barji", sits at the entrance to the cemetery of the "Sabra and Shatila" massacre, carrying her own painting that separates it with two scenes, before the massacre and after the massacre, and says to Al Jazeera Net, "This is my identity, and this is the dividing line in my life."
This elderly woman of 70 years, whose image she carries in her hands, turned into one of the icons of the "Sabra and Shatila" massacre, which was committed by Israeli soldiers and Lebanese militias over 3 consecutive days on September 16, 1982, killing about 3 thousand Lebanese and refugees Palestinians.
Milana Boutros holds a picture of her relatives who perished in the massacre (Al-Jazeera Net)
Milana's eyes withered on her wrinkled face, because her tears dried up from the abundance of crying for 38 years, she said, resisting her exhausted nerves, and pointing with her trembling finger to explain her connection to the pictures she carried wherever she went "On the right is my husband, the martyr Ali Al-Burji, and on the left, my son Qassem Al-Burji, and in The middle is my neighbor, Ali Muhanna. As for me, at the bottom of the picture, I was searching for them among the victims ’bodies.
Milana, who only had her son and daughter left from her family, turned her house into a shrine, with pictures of her husband and son Qasim on all the walls, because "my life stopped in that mass slaughter," she says.
Hundreds of its victims were randomly buried in this cemetery, which was dug after the massacre, and dozens of Palestinian refugees and families of Lebanese victims arrived today, Friday, September 18, 2020, to commemorate the painful memory under the slogan "Sabra and Shatila, the massacres of Israel and its agents."
Sabra and Shatila camp, which witnessed the massacre in 1982 (Al-Jazeera Net)
Victims against normalization
into the cemetery, young refugee women wearing Palestinian dress flocked to carry a sign that read, "38 years after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, we will remain loyal to the blood of the martyrs."
On the other side, the Lebanese Abdel Nasser Alama (59 years) was standing, and angrily saying to Al-Jazeera Net, "Instead of removing from existence a cancer bomb called Israel, some Arab regimes sit with it to betray us and betray the Palestinian cause and betray all the victims of the massacres of this usurper entity."
Abdel Nasser tells the story of his brother Ali Hassan Alama, who went missing in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and was returning from Germany at the time, at the time of 21 years, without finding his body or any news of him.
He said, "We were born in the Sabra area. We lived the massacre in all its details, and on the second day we were preparing to flee towards Beirut, after we were unable to resist with our primitive weapons, so the massacre continued against us and the rights of our women and children."
On the third day - Abdel Nasser added - “I did not find my brother at home despite our agreement to flee together, and all eyewitnesses told us at the time that they saw him alive and shackled with a large group of young men on board a militia’s tank, and they took them towards the airport road, without To count one of them, and we are still waiting. "
Inside the Sabra and Shatila cemetery, where thousands of victims are buried (Al-Jazeera Net)
On the trunk of a tree, the Palestinian refugee Um Imad, 80, sits leaning on her stick, recounting her tragedy that dates back to the Tal al-Zaatar massacre in June 1976, then passes to the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, and then becomes without a family.
She told Al-Jazeera Net, "I used to live in the Tal al-Zaatar camp during its siege by the Syrian forces and Lebanese militias, and we lived the siege of more than 50 daily, so they killed my husband and four children in front of me by shooting in the neck."
In the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Umm Imad's sister and her five children were slaughtered, and she eventually lived alone in a dilapidated room in Shatila camp.
The misery after the massacre The
cries of Palestinian refugees over the massacres that they lived through in Lebanon cannot be separated from the tragic conditions they live in across the 12 Palestinian camps from north to south.
In Shatila camp in the Sabra area, which is located in the western part of the capital, Beirut, and is populated with thousands of Palestinians and then Syrians recently, the horror of the scene is evident.
Population density that exceeds its bearing capacity, complete wear of the infrastructure, uninhabitable public housing close to each other, electrical wires that have become more like the roof of the camp market, and streams of waste are randomly thrown inside the camp and on its outskirts, emitting unpleasant and poisonous odors all the time.
The "Sabra and Shatila massacre" was committed by Israeli soldiers and Lebanese militias on September 16, 17 and 18, 1982 (Al-Jazeera Net)
While the Palestinians of the Lebanese camps receive news of Arab normalization with Israel as a stab in the back, many of them express their feeling of helplessness about their cause and their right to return and improve their living conditions inside Lebanon, especially since they do not have any legal right to own and employ. The cemetery of the "Sabra and Shatila massacre" was to be sold while he lives outside Lebanon.
How accurate is that?
The mayor of Ghobeiry - belonging to the Sabra Aqarya district - Maan Khalil denies the validity of what he describes as "rumor."
It is stated to Al-Jazeera Net that this cemetery is not for sale. Rather, its owner seeks to solve an old file about it with the Lebanese state, with the aim of settling the status of the cemetery at the legal level.
Therefore, "he is working to become the cemetery at the disposal of the endowments of Dar al-Fatwa or the Shiite Islamic Council, in order to consecrate it as a regular official burial, because it is in private property, and no one in Lebanon can buy a land where the victims of the massacre are buried."