Muhammad Ibrahim Faqih

Above: Mohammed poses with his daughter. Photograph by Philip Reynaers.

That morning, they started shelling around the outside of the camps, including Shatila, and we could hear the sustained shooting. The shelling reached the main roads and we didn’t know what the reason for it was. We could not believe it. We couldn’t even move from one place to another or escape because of the shelling and machine-gun fire.

We stayed at home and suddenly a shell hit our neighbour's house. Some of the shrapnel hit my son in the chest and the leg, and we took him to Akka hospital, but they wouldn’t admit him because of the large number of injured people already there. We took him to Gaza hospital. My brother and I stayed with him at the hospital, and meanwhile the shelling of Sabra and Shatila camps intensified. A woman came to tell us that she had seen them coming; I fled but I saw how they entered and took away all the injured and sick people. So I ran away and I came back three hours later. They had taken away many people and the only one left was my injured son. I don’t know how many people they took away alive.

Then we took my son to a hospital in Hamra, and the next day I heard that they had come to Sabra and they had taken away the girls. When I came back here I saw my daughter Fatima had been hit with an axe, along with my little girl. I noticed that they had dug a ditch in the ground and they had buried them alive in the ditch. The baby’s throat had been slit. I also saw people who had been killed and pregnant women with their stomachs ripped open. About thirty young people had been massacred near our house, both Lebanese and Palestinian. They didn’t spare anyone; they killed everyone they came across. In the home of our neighbour Ali Salim Fayad, they had killed his wife and children.

My God, what can I say, what can I tell you? They had demolished the shops in Sabra road and dug large ditches where they had buried the victims. I saw about 400 children’s corpses. They upturned the earth and buried them. From the twelve members of our neighbour’s family, eleven were killed and only one escaped.

Mr Faqih’s two daughters were aged 2 and 14 at the time of the events.

The above text is an extract from the Complaint lodged in Belgium against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron and other Israelis and Lebanese responsible for the massacre. The full text of the Complaint can be found in the section of this website titled The Case Against The Accused.

[The Sabra & Shatila Massacres]