Exclusive - Lebanese Residing in Israel: Collaborators or Victims of Govt. Negligence?

Lebanese refugees, many of them relatives of fighters with the South Lebanon Army, wait to enter Israel after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on May 23, 2000. (Getty Images)
Lebanese refugees, many of them relatives of fighters with the South Lebanon Army, wait to enter Israel after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on May 23, 2000. (Getty Images)
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Exclusive - Lebanese Residing in Israel: Collaborators or Victims of Govt. Negligence?

Lebanese refugees, many of them relatives of fighters with the South Lebanon Army, wait to enter Israel after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on May 23, 2000. (Getty Images)
Lebanese refugees, many of them relatives of fighters with the South Lebanon Army, wait to enter Israel after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on May 23, 2000. (Getty Images)

Rajaa Beshara, a resident of the Deir Mimas village in Lebanon’s southern Merjeyoun province, says the South Lebanon Army (SLA) killed her brother in the early 1980s because he was active in resisting Israeli occupation of the South.

He helped men who refused mandatory military conscription in the SLA, which is why the Israelis killed him, she told Asharq Al-Awsat. They booby-trapped the area around his corpse to prevent anyone from burying it.

“They broke my mother’s heart,” she recalled. It took them three days to find a way to retrieve his body.

A native of the town of Qlayaa revealed to Asharq Al-Awsat that his aunt used to work as a servant since she was 13-years-old in order to raise money to pay for her siblings’ education. She married a military officer at 16. He was killed by Israeli strikes against Palestinians in southern Lebanon. No one but an Israeli family would take her in, so she worked for them during the 1980s, he said on condition of anonymity.

“Now she is labeled as an agent and collaborator.”

The issue of Lebanese collaborators with Israel during its occupation of the South, which started after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, has returned to the spotlight as debate rages over an amnesty law. One of its articles calls for pardoning people who did not collaborate with Israel’s military, including families of SLA members. The article stipulates that those seeking to return to Lebanon must abandon their other (Israeli) nationality. Many Lebanese fled to Israel on the eve of the May 25, 2000 liberation out of fear of persecution.

The SLA was formed in Marjeyoun in 1976 by Saad Haddad, a Lebanese army defector. In 1984, another defector, Antoine Lahd assumed command. He killed and tortured Lebanese and Palestinians and received military and logistic support from the Israeli Defense Ministry.

No official figures exist over the number of Lebanese who fled to Israel in 2000. They are estimated at 8,000, while those still in Israel are estimated at around 3,000-3,500. The others have immigrated to other countries. Some refuse to return to Lebanon after they obtained Israeli citizenship and integrated in its society and even served in its military. Other were even born and raised in Israel and know no other home.

The Qlayaa resident spoke of a family that fled to Israel and how one of its children, a seven-year-old at the time, could not tolerate living there. He snuck back into Lebanon and lived with his relatives. When he became an adult, he was able to restore his family home where he now lives.

Rajaa said that talk of the amnesty takes her back to 1976 when Haddad formed the Free Lebanon Army, which later became the SLA, under the claim of “protecting Christians and Palestinians.”

“The Israelis at the time tried to appear as though they harbored good intentions. They even opened the border to the Lebanese, claiming to help them,” she added, criticizing leftist, nationalist and Palestinian parties for failing to realize the Israelis’ real intentions of exploiting the poor in areas that were neglected by the state.

Some of the poor saw no other way to earn a living but through working for Israel for good pay, she revealed. The SLA had imposed mandatory conscription for all youths regardless of their sect.

Francois al-Hajj, a Rmeish native who would later rise up the ranks and become a prominent Lebanese army officer, refused to enlist and collaborate with the enemy. He fled to Beirut. He would later be assassinated for his role in commanding battles in the northern Nahr al-Bared camp in 2007.

Other families were not as lucky and did not have the luxury of being able to flee to Beirut, said Rajaa. They were forced to stay in the South and their sons ended up working for Israel.

She said the label of “collaborator” should not be generalized to everyone who was forced to work for Israel. She recalled how a guard at Khiyam prison was kind to the inmates and smuggled food to them. When the South was liberated, the freed inmates even visited his house and promised that his wife would be unharmed. The guard ended up in prison for his role. The former inmates even visited him in prison to thank him for his kindness.

“I don’t know how someone who fled to an enemy country could be included in an amnesty…. The law is being used for sectarian and electoral purposes,” she charged.

The Qlayaa resident agreed with Rajaa in that the amnesty law is vague on the concept of treason, specifically towards those who chose to commit their crimes. Those people should be heavily punished. As for the poor, they were forced to join the SLA and work in Israel. They should be helped and rehabilitated, he suggested.



'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
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'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

After surviving more than a year of war in Gaza, Aisha Khaled is now afraid of dying of hunger if vital aid is cut off next year by a new Israeli law banning the UN Palestinian relief agency from operating in its territory.

The law, which has been widely criticised internationally, is due to come into effect in late January and could deny Khaled and thousands of others their main source of aid at a time when everything around them is being destroyed.

"For me and for a million refugees, if the aid stops, we will end. We will die from hunger not from war," the 31-year-old volunteer teacher told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

"If the school closes, where do we go? All the aspects of our lives are dependent on the agency: flour, food, water ...(medical) treatment, hospitals," Khaled said from an UNRWA school in Nuseirat in central Gaza.

"We depend on them after God," she said.

UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza, running the enclave's schools, healthcare clinics and other social services, as well as distributing aid.

Now, UNRWA-run buildings, including schools, are home to thousands forced to flee their homes after Israeli airstrikes reduced towns across the strip to wastelands of rubble.

UNRWA shelters have been frequently bombed during the year-long war, and at least 220 UNRWA staff have been killed, Reuters reported.

If the Israeli law as passed last month does come into effect, the consequences would be "catastrophic," said Inas Hamdan, UNRWA's Gaza communications officer.

"There are two million people in Gaza who rely on UNRWA for survival, including food assistance and primary healthcare," she said.

The law banning UNRWA applies to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

Israeli lawmakers who drafted the ban cited what they described as the involvement of a handful of UNRWA's thousands of staffers in the attack on southern Israel last year that triggered the war and said some staff were members of Hamas and other armed groups.

FRAGILE LIFELINE

The war in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas attack. Israel's military campaign has levelled much of Gaza and killed around 43,500 Palestinians, Gaza health officials say. Up to 10,000 people are believed to be dead and uncounted under the rubble, according to Gaza's Civil Emergency Service.

Most of the strip's 2.3 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting and destruction.

The ban ends Israel's decades-long agreement with UNRWA that covered the protection, movement and diplomatic immunity of the agency in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

For many Palestinians, UNRWA aid is their only lifeline, and it is a fragile one.

Last week, a committee of global food security experts warned there was a strong likelihood of imminent famine in northern Gaza, where Israel renewed an offensive last month.

Israel rejected the famine warning, saying it was based on "partial, biased data".

COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, said last week that it was continuing to "facilitate the implementation of humanitarian efforts" in Gaza.

But UN data shows the amount of aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level in a year and the United Nations has accused Israel of hindering and blocking attempts to deliver aid, particularly to the north.

"The daily average of humanitarian trucks the Israeli authorities allowed into Gaza last month is 30 trucks a day," Hamdan said, adding that the figure represents 6% of the supplies that were allowed into Gaza before this war began.

"More aid must be sent to Gaza, and UNRWA work should be facilitated to manage this aid entering Gaza," she said.

'BACKBONE' OF AID SYSTEM

Many other aid organizations rely on UNRWA to help them deliver aid and UN officials say the agency is the backbone of the humanitarian response in Gaza.

"From our perspective, and I am sure from many of the other humanitarian actors, it's an impossible task (to replace UNRWA)," said Oxfam GB's humanitarian lead Magnus Corfixen in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"The priority is to ensure that they will remain ... because they are essential for us," he said.

UNRWA supports other agencies with logistics, helping them source the fuel they need to move staff and power desalination plants, he said.

"Without them, we will struggle with access to warehouses, having access to fuel, having access to trucks, being able to move around, being able to coordinate," Corfixen said, describing UNRWA as "essential".

UNRWA schools also offer rare respite for traumatised children who have lost everything.

Twelve-year-old Lamar Younis Abu Zraid fled her home in Maghazi in central Gaza at the beginning of the war last year.

The UNRWA school she used to attend as a student has become a shelter, and she herself has been living in another school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat for a year.

Despite the upheaval, in the UNRWA shelter she can enjoy some of the things she liked doing before war broke out.

She can see friends, attend classes, do arts and crafts and join singing sessions. Other activities are painfully new but necessary, like mental health support sessions to cope with what is happening.

She too is aware of the fragility of the lifeline she has been given. Now she has to share one copybook with a friend because supplies have run out.

"Before they used to give us books and pens, now they are not available," she said.