Secret “Israeli” mass graves that hold Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese victims.

Introduction:

When the crow croaked for the first time in the skies of the Hula plains in Al-Jalil, Ismail Al-Abdulah thought he was in a nightmare. He hid under the blanket, but the croaking did not go away. He got out of his bed and went to the yard infront of his house looking for the source of the noise.

The night was dark with heavy rain, he did not know what to do. The next day when he told his friends of what he heard, each gave his own personal explanation for this strange phenomenon. The story that he most likely did not believe was the one told by a modern looking young man, those who watch a lot of movies. This young man said with confidence: “the crows croak when they find a corpse of a human or an animal that is being eaten by a beast or a vulture”. What made it sound unlikely was the fact that the young man got this information from a movie that he saw.

But because the incident kept repeating itself the story began to seam more likely to him, until he started watching the incident more carefully till the day he saw that freighting scene.

Let us allow him to tell us what he saw that left him shocked to the bones and cannot forget it until this very day after twenty years have long passed on the incident: “the bird would dive down from the sky onto a piece of land next to us and fly back up again. It would do that a few times a day, and it would return for the same thing the following day. I walked towards that area and found it surrounded with barbed wire, inside and spread across the land were numbered metal signs struck into the ground. When the bird arrived it would dived from the sky right down next to one of the signs and it would start digging the earth. Suddenly I noticed a human hand sticking out of the ground and the bird was pecking at it…” Ismail would go silent for a while and then continue saying: “it was a horrific sight and I could not sleep after that for nights to come”.

This sight would reoccur many times a day, but not only with the birds. A number of “Israeli” soldiers would come carrying corpses. The situation was clear to him now.

This land was a military graveyard under the control of “Israeli” army, it was set up in 1967 around the area of the Banat Yakoub bridge on the western side of the Syrian occupied Golan heights. The land is used to bury the dead that was later known to hold the bodies of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian victims of the war as admitted by the “Israeli” army, most of them died during military operations against “Israel”, but after the war bodies did not stop coming into the graveyard instead it flourished especially after the first, second and third “Israeli” invasion of Lebanon and during the Palestinian Intifada. It then flourished once again after the “Israeli” withdrawal from south Lebanon.

We will also discover that two other graveyards are setup elsewhere with the same specifications, one in the area of Jericho which is now shut since the Palestinian Authority took control of Jericho in 1995, and the second in the valley of Al-Hamam to the west of the Tabaraya lake, but the largest graveyard and which is still in operation is the one in Banat Yakoub bridge on the western side of the Syrian occupied Golan heights.

The graveyards are of two kinds:

The first, in all the graveyards and on top each body is a sign with a special number.

The second, which are mass graveyards which have no signs what so ever. The only thing they have in common is that the grave is not deep. That is why the bodies come to the surface after any heavy rain, or by the digging of wild animals and birds of prey.

“Once we were walking in the valley picking herbs, a military car arrived and ordered us to leave the place. We left, but because of our curiosity, and because we were afraid of the croaking of the crow, we decided to stay and hide close by to watch what they were up to. The care entered the graveyard. The soldiers unloaded some digging equipment and started digging. They did it very quickly, just as someone trying to get rid of a fire. That is why the hole was not deep enough. They then took out a couple of bodies out of the car and buried them, and they threw some kind of white powder on the bodies, and then covered the bodies with sand and left the place. A day or two after that we witnessed with our own eyes how the wild animals would come and dig their fangs into the dead bodies after digging them out. And how the birds of prey would swoop down onto them. Scenes that would make ones body shiver, says Ismail Abdullah to the “Al Wasit” who lives in an area near the graveyard of Ba

It is not easy to reach this graveyard, getting near or into it is forbidden, it is surrounded with barbed wire with signs that say: “No entry, Military zone”. And of course anyone who disobeys the “Israeli” orders is interrogated with. Inside the graveyard are old barbed wires that are torn. Eyewitnesses that followed us there say that the barbed wires were torn by wild animals, but new wires have been put since then, and that was after the “Israeli” withdrawal from south Lebanon.

Ahmad Habibullah, the president of “The society of the friends of the detainees” who always follows the situation of all the Arab detainees in the “Israeli” jails and who visits them every now and then regardless of all the difficulties that he faces with the administration of the prisons, always makes sure that he visits the graveyards and throws flowers on them from behind the wires on the graves that have numbers. He is sure that those group of numbers were put after the “Israeli” withdrawal from south Lebanon, the numbers are written in red different to the other numbers that are written in black, and that they are very recent, and that they are 17 in number and in sequence starting from 235 till 242 and 247 until 250 and 256 and 257 and 259 and 261 and 262.

Who do these bodies belong to?

Why are they numbered in a different color?

Why this sequential disorder? Where is the number 258 for example, or the number 244?

Many questions could be asked, but the main question regarding this graveyard is the amount of large space inside the graveyard that have no numbers, who are buried there and what are their numbers? Are they fighters or civilians? Are they women and children or men?

The areas close to this graveyard is accessible to shepherds and they were eyewitnesses to the mass burials of the Lebanese during the days of the occupation, and most of the shepherds are afraid to talk about the matter, some say that parts of the bodies were still uncovered after the soldiers buried them, and that there were nurses clothes thrown beside the graves, but they are afraid of being exposed and to talk about what they saw, “may God help them, what use is talking about them today”, one of them said while another added, “one word out of us could get us into jail there is no need to talk”. “Anyway, a shepherd used to go there everyday to watch go and ask him”. But of course that shepherd as the others was afraid to talk. The most important thing is that they all agree that there exists mass graves inside that land.

Ismail Abdullah who at first hesitated to talk to us, talked to us in brief saying: “the area next to the graveyard is considered one of the prettiest areas of North, we used to reach there to gather and pick herbs, and on our way back we would pass by it, at that time, during invasion trucks would arrive to the area, and if we were spotted they would drive us away, but most of the time we were successful in watching. One would stand inside the truck and the other outside it next to a large grave that was not so deep, then they would pass one anther the bodies, some in bags and some without and they would then be buried”, he continued adding: “and after a while the bodies would appear above the ground especially after a heavy rain, one day three bodies were outside the grave and were pulled by willed animals”.

He added saying: “when we arrived to the graveyard the area was peaceful with few cars passing by. No one would reach the area. The new fence surrounds the area and besides some of the numbered graves is a box filled with numbers that belonged to the bodies that were handed to Hezbollah during the last exchange with “Israel”.

Wadi Al Hamam graveyard.

The problem of the missing is not only that they were buried in mass graves in Banat Yakoub graveyard, it is much wider and complicated than that, there are hundreds of missing fighters since 1948 and especially in 1967, the graveyard of Wadi Al Hamam holds more than 70 bodies most of whom have no numbers. And there was a group that was buried in one day without the knowing anything about them what so ever, today’s visitor to the graveyard will find a large number of metal sheets with the numbers eaten away by rust leaving no trace of the number.

Those fighters are mainly Palestinians, buried by Palestinians after they were delivered there by “Israeli” soldiers: “we noticed the arrival of the soldiers carrying bags that they intended on burying, we came close to them and one of them suggested that we bury them for a certain amount of money, we said we only wish to pray for them as a reward for burying them. We prayed on their souls and then buried them. Trad Abu Eid told us that hundreds of fighters were buried in Wadi Al Hamam since 1976, he said: “some wore military uniforms and others civilian clothing, some of the bodies were deformed with torture marks on them, and some had just one bullet in the head or in the chest”.

Abu Eid was not the only one in this job, when the inhabitants of the area would see the soldiers arriving carrying the bodies, they would rush over to the graveyard and start shaking and crying. “whenever we buried a fighter we felt as if a piece of us was buried with him, it was a fearful sight”.

Wadi Al Hamam, a small village along side the Tabaraya lake with its inhabitants of a couple of hundreds fled their homes in 1948, after that and when the “Israelis” hit almost every village some of them arrived in Wadi Al Hamam especially from the area of Al Hula and Al Absiyeh and today the village is inhabited by about 1200 persons. These families stayed for many years in Al Khyiam before getting papers giving them ownership of the land instead of the villages that they fled form.

Abu Eid says: “it is true that at that time we did not take care to register the details of the bodies that we buried, except the ones that we heard died on the Sound of Palestine radio station, other than those we did not recognize anyone”.

A few of those received numbers by the “Israeli” army on their graves but most of them did not have any number and you could not distinguish between one grave and the other.

The district of Om Mayet

The issue of missing persons does not necessary mean those that are buried, there exit ten probably hundreds of stories of missing young men who disappeared without knowing their fate, and you find their families living in the hope that one day they might come back. Ahmad Habibullah says: “many are sure that their loved ones have been detained by “Israel” and after looking for them in all the prisons they found no signs of them, maybe they are in a cell and no one knows anything about them and they do not meet with others or maybe they died under torture and no one knows of their fate”.

Habibullah adds: “the matter is not only with the Palestinian people, there are also Syrian and Lebanese families who do not know the fate of their loved ones who are in “Israeli” jails and those were caught while attempting military operations against “Israel”, and those have friends who have been killed and buried in the “numbered graveyard”. And we in the society work very hard to try and find out any information about them, and we communicate with the families and the “Israeli” authorities which denies all these details and sometimes do not even bother to give us any answer.

Al Wasat 08-01-2001