Bodies Still Entombed in Rubble : Palestinian Camp Scene: ‘Scorched Earth’ in Beirut

The Sabra Palestinian refugee camp, overrun by Shia Muslim fighters, is a scene of devastation.

Bodies are still entombed under the rubble of entire blocks of houses, blown up by shellfire or dynamited after the Shias swept away the last Palestinian guerrillas to end 12 days of fierce street fighting.

“They don’t want the Palestinians here any more,” Said Fatwah, an engineer, asserted as he surveyed the ruins.

“The Shias are driving the Palestinians out. You’re watching something very terrible. This is scorched earth.”

Six Muslim rescue workers, wearing gas masks to ward off the smell of death, were seen bringing the bodies of four Palestinians out from a battle-scarred psychiatric asylum where Shias and Palestinians fought hand to hand in the corridors.

One of the bodies was dumped in the back of a battered pickup truck and covered with a dirty blanket. Six feet away, Shia soldiers from the Lebanese army’s 6th Brigade lounged in chairs, telling jokes.

Nearby, Palestinians clambered over the wreckage of their homes, salvaging what they could. Among the meager belongings they carried away were an attache case with a gaping hole, a dented electric fan with twisted blades and a shell-splintered table with one leg missing.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away in neighboring Chatilla, where vastly outnumbered Palestinian fighters are still holding out, gunfire crackled amid exploding rocket-propelled grenades.

As part of their drive to prevent Palestinian guerrillas from re-establishing a foothold in Lebanon, fighters of Amal, the major Shia militia, and soldiers of the 6th Brigade overwhelmed the last Palestinian strongpoint in Sabra on Friday.

More than 500 people, civilians and fighters, are known to have perished in the combat at Sabra and at two other camps on Beirut’s southern outskirts, Borj el Brajne and Chatilla, which the Shias continued to besiege Sunday.

The actual death toll may be far higher. Wounded Palestinians rescued from Borj el Brajne say hundreds of dead in the encircled camp are being buried in mass graves.

International Red Cross officials said they evacuated 29 wounded men and women Sunday from Borj el Brajne, the largest and best defended camp. Another Red Cross convoy Saturday removed 32 wounded from Borj el Brajne in the organization’s first successful operation in nearly a week.

On Sabra’s main street, meanwhile, a man stumbled over a 10-foot-high pile of flattened concrete that once was a row of houses.

“I’ve lost everything,” he said. “There are five bodies under the wreckage in my house. I don’t know who they are. My family survived, thank God, but I don’t know how.”

Sabra and Chatilla seem cursed. Nearly three years ago, Lebanese Christian militiamen butchered hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in the two camps.

In the days before the massacre, the camps were bombarded and rocketed by the Israelis, who had invaded Lebanon weeks earlier to smash the Palestine Liberation Organization.

On Sunday, two days after the hard-won Shia victory, smoke from smoldering houses hung like a shroud over the devastation at Sabra.

A Pile of Furniture

Outside a scorched apartment block, women sat beside a pile of chipped furniture, weeping silently. Water from burst pipes rippled over their feet.

In the asylum, nurses and doctors swept up debris. Nazem Houri, the 37-year-old assistant director, lamented: “We’ll have to rebuild. It’ll take months.

“This is the second time we’ve had to rebuild. The Israelis rocketed us with planes in 1982. We had only just completed that work when this happened.”

Both sides held the six-story asylum during the recent fighting. Floors were littered with spent bullets and boxes that once held U.S.-made grenades. Walls of corridors were scorched and shattered. On upper floors, rooms were smashed into rubble.

The wards, where 840 mentally retarded patients, psychiatric cases and elderly people were once cared for, were ransacked by fighters who turned them into sniper posts.

Death in a Wheelchair

Houri said one old man died in his wheelchair after he sat alone without food or water for three days because no one could reach him.

The walls were scrawled with obscenities written in felt-tip pens by Amal fighters. “Amal Is Everywhere,” said one slogan in Arabic. “We Will Kill All Palestinians,” said another.

Doctors said Shia fighters on the roof set fire to tires and threw them onto Palestinian houses. Others poured generator fuel over the edge, then lobbed grenades into it to set houses on fire.

“There is only one other hospital for psychiatric cases in Lebanon,” said Houri, who found shelter from the fighting in the asylum’s shock-therapy room.

“After 10 years of war, we need a lot more than that.”