The human shield allegation collapsed most clearly in the case of hospitals, which were clearly marked with Red Cross signs on their roofs. Those hospitals weren’t spared either. Doctors denied that guerrilla guns were positioned next to them — allegations consistent with a pattern repeated in previous years and for decades to come.
These false Israeli claims about hospitals underscored what became impossible to ignore: civilians were not accidental victims but central to the story of the war. This is where AP Beirut’s reporting was at its strongest — exposing the human toll of the invasion and documenting Israel’s calculated targeting of civilian life.
Fisher and I took on the grim task of compiling casualty figures, drawing on police tallies from our stringer Bahjat Jaber, hospitals, government agencies, Lebanese media, and both local and international relief organizations. We also tried — whenever possible — to put faces to to the dead, the wounded, and the displaced.
One of my daily assignments was to walk a few blocks from AP to the offices of the ICRC, where spokesman Jean-Jacques Kurz briefed me on the latest casualty counts, the number of people fleeing the Israeli onslaught.
Another was a harrowing daily routine of making rounds of hospitals and makeshift clinics where exhausted surgeons in basements and garages performed surgeries on overwhelmingly civilian patients maimed by Israeli cluster bombs and other munitions. Doctors coined the surgeries the “Begin amputation” — the widespread, often unnecessary amputations. The horrific injuries included: limbs shattered beyond repair, flesh torn apart, and wounds too contaminated or complex to treat with the limited resources under siege.
By calling it the “Begin amputation,” medical staff were not only describing the brutal medical consequences of the war — they were directly blaming Israeli Prime Minister Begin for the scale and nature of the violence. It was a form of bitter gallows humor, a coping mechanism in the face of mass trauma, and a political accusation rolled into a single phrase.
The Triumph Hotel in Ras Beirut was converted into a Palestinian convalescent center. Nearby, the Bristol Hotel was also repurposed as a clinic.
Blood streaked the corridors of both hotels.
The Armenian sanitarium south of Beirut, a center for children with developmental disabilities, that was clearly marked by Red Cross flags, was repeatedly hit by Israeli artillery and naval gunfire, including four phosphorus shells. Rockets set fire to beds in a nursery of mentally ill children. Several patients were killed and several others died of starvation for lack of personnel to feed them.
Eight-hundred patients — many with senile dementia and violent schizophrenia — were released into the streets; about half were children.
No military target was found within a half-mile of the hospital to validate Israeli human shield charges. By August 4, eight of the nine homes for orphans in Beirut had been destroyed by cluster and phosphorus bombs. A U.S. Navy Lt. commander tasked with removing unexploded ordnance reported finding five bombs in an orphanage, with about 45 cluster bombs in the front yard. Four children were killed and five injured. On August 4, Israeli mortar fire struck the American University Hospital killing half the intensive-care patients. By the war’s end, 12 of West Beirut’s 17 hospitals and emergency centers — including the ICRC’s field hospital at the Bristol Hotel — had been forced shut. Israeli shellfire was the primary cause, but the Israeli siege and resulting shortages made continued operation impossible.
At a military barricade, Israeli soldiers told employees of Berbir Hospital: “We shelled your hospital good enough, didn’t we? You treat terrorists there.”
Lone Doctor
One person stood out as the face of hope and humanity in this landscape of carnage and despair: Dr. Amal Shamaa, a petite, 37-year-old pediatrician at Berbir Hospital. While high-profile doctors fled to the mountains, East Beirut, or abroad, she stayed behind - alone. In a dark, half-functioning hospital, she fought to save lives with whatever tools she could find.
Berbir Hospital, which lay in no-man’s-land — just 800 yards from the Museum crossing - came under relentless Israeli shelling, trapping staff inside with the stench of decomposing corpses. As in all other hospitals in Lebanon, staff at Berbir had painted large red crosses on the roof.
Dr. Shamaa had no doubt the attacks were deliberate and the Israelis knew exactly where every hospital was. Her charges were widely reported by the international media - and as expected the Israelis denied.
“When you think that on one day, 17 hospitals are shelled, that's not a coincidence,” she told me.
With a limp from childhood polio, Dr. Shamaa personally carted casualties around her hospital in a wheelbarrow. Every time I visited, she gave me a tour: the morgue overflowed; bodies were piled on the floor outside - entire families wiped out and no one left to claim the dead.
Depending on how close the bombings were, the hospital saw anywhere between 30 and 80 casualties a day. Some died. And this grim reality became a daily reality as the violence escalated.
In the early days of the invasion, Berbir had two emergency rooms with four stretchers — and not much else. No resuscitation equipment outside the operating rooms. A handful of nurses and junior doctors handled routine cases: colds, coughs, fevers. Nothing prepared them for war.
Dr. Shamaa took over the ER. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I learned the hard way.”
The casualties kept pouring in. Most were civilians — women, children, the elderly - those who refused to leave their homes. They’d say, “Palestinians left their homes in 1948 and were never able to go back. We’re not going to make that mistake. We’re staying.”
“I had to decide who to treat first — and I didn’t even know what triage meant.”
She learned fast.
It meant making impossible decisions. It’s not the ones who are injured the worst that you treat first. It’s the ones who are salvageable, the ones most likely to survive. That’s the brutal truth.
She described a cruel irony: “If someone came in covered in blood, it was often just superficial wounds. Five people would jump to save them. But the one with internal bleeding, nothing visible, would quietly die in the corner.”
She trained everyone — literally everyone. Doormen learned CPR. Nurse aides, orderlies got a crash course in how to intubate, how to handle a test tube, how to recognize when someone was dying.
One of the two doormen was Riyad - a big guy. With few stretchers to spare, Dr. Shamaa depended on him to carry the heavy patients. “We’d lift people from the floor to the stretcher, and back to the floor when we needed it for someone else,” she said. But when the casualties became too many, they had nowhere to put them. Every inch of space was in use — corridors, the area near the morgue, even the electrician’s room and the mechanics’ workshop. Stretchers became beds. Babies in incubators were laid on stretchers. When ambulances weren’t available, staff flagged down taxis or private cars in the street, pleading with drivers to take patients to the AUH or anywhere that still had room.
At times, when the bombardment was heavy, patients, staff and visitors were trapped for days on the lower floors or in the basement.
Medical supplies came through a patchwork of favors and desperation - the Lebanese Red Cross, the ICRC, Doctors Without Borders —anyone who could spare anything. Local distributors gave what they could or sold from their warehouses. “Sometimes we had nothing. We’d stabilize casualties and transfer them out — if there was anywhere to send them,” recalled Dr. Shamaa in an interview in 2012.
The wounded kept coming, wave after wave — July, August, September. Berbir stayed open even under fire. It was one horror story after another as Dr. Shamaa bore witness to the suffering of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and to the near-superhuman efforts of her team. In her, I found an unflinching, defiant, and intimate account of war. As a young reporter, I thought that only people like her deserved to be called heroes. Her testimony filled the pages of Western media.
By late July, new horrors arrived — burns from phosphorus bombs. On July 31, Dr. Fathi Arafat — head of the Palestinian Red Crescent and Yasser Arafat’s brother — told reporters that the Israelis were using fragmentation, cluster, and phosphoric bombs on a scale that was causing mass psychological trauma in Beirut. Lebanese newspapers published graphic images of infants scorched by white phosphorus shells.
Hospitals lacked both the expertise and supplies to treat the burns. Entire families arrived, raw and blistered. Some died. Some lived. None were untouched. The deaths weren’t from actual burns, but from inhalation. When the lungs are destroyed by inhaling phosphorus, there’s no breathing. Nothing can be done, Dr. Shamaa explained.
Faced with phosphorus burns she’d never seen before, Dr. Shamaa, turned to old medical textbooks for guidance.
I had to use copper sulfate from a lab, mix it with something and put it on the burns. That was supposed to help them until we could transport them to the American University Hospital (AUH).
Dr. Shamaa transferred most of the children and the worst phosphorus burn victims to AUH. Some time later, when a team from the U.S. War College visited Berbir, asking about the types of injuries they’d seen during the Israeli invasion, Dr. Shamaa told them phosphorus bombs had been used. They said no one else had mentioned that.
What was disturbing was that other hospitals to which we had transferred the phosphorus patients had not mentioned this to the Americans. I had followed up with the patients in those hospitals. I know they were there. Very strange.
Doctors in hospitals also spoke of wounds caused by high-energy, high-velocity projectiles — pellets from fragmentation bombs. They saw two distinct Israeli attack patterns: the use of massive-caliber bombs against buildings; and a more chilling tactic — a concentrated use of antipersonnel bombs designed to clear paths for the infantry and tanks to enter the capital — leaving the roads intact, but the bodies broken.
By early August, at least nine of West Beirut’s fifteen hospitals and twenty-seven clinics had been struck during a single 20-hour bombardment — the longest and most devastating assault since the beginning of the invasion. Several others had already sustained damage in previous attacks. At least four small hospitals had shut down entirely, crippled by the lack of medical staff, running water, and fuel for generators during the Israeli-imposed blackout.
“The hospitals’ staff are victims of just terror,” ICRC spokesman Kurz told me alarmingly. “And if there’s another day of bombing and shelling as on Aug. 4 and there will not be a single bed in any hospital in west Beirut for wounded people.”
With municipal water cut off by Israel for two weeks, hospitals were forced to use salty well water. Fuel — blocked by the Israeli siege —couldn’t reach West Beirut. Even AUH, one of the few major medical centers still operating after the August assault, warned it would soon have to shut its doors unless fuel arrived. The PLO, which maintained its own closely guarded fuel reserves, delivered half a dozen tanks of fuel to the high-rise complex. The hospital stayed open — but barely. It was critically short-staffed: most of its nurses had fled — either foreign nationals terrified by the fighting or Christian Lebanese who couldn’t safely cross the Green Line from East Beirut.
The city's other main hospital — the Islamic Association’s Makassed Hospital, sat dangerously close to the Green Line and the nearby horse racetrack - the frontline for some of the fiercest battles. It had been hit hard. Like the AUH, it was operating at less than 10 percent of its capacity.
As the war ground on, vivid accounts of civilian suffering filled Western newspapers and dominated television broadcasts: told by victims, doctors and international humanitarian organizations. The targeting of civilians, hospitals, orphanages, and other civil infrastructure shocked much of the world.
Unsurprisingly these reports drew strong criticisms from Israel and its U.S. supporters who accused the media of anti-Israel and pro-PLO bias. At the same time, media scholars, such as Chomsky, accused the same media outlets of being pro-Israel.
Based on a random survey of American press and television reports, the “anti-Israel” charges appeared to center on stories filed from Lebanon, while most of the “anti-PLO” stories originated in Israel or in the U.S, mostly as editorial or opinion pieces.
Pro-Israel critics in the U.S. specifically disputed casualty figures because they were provided by the Lebanese police, Lebanese government, the PLO, and international relief workers. (Lebanese government casualty figures were based on police records drawn from hospital counts, as well as civil defense centers.)
The Lebanese government put the death toll at nearly 18,000 civilians. However, the Israelis, in the words of their Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, gave a vastly lower tally: just 930 Lebanese killed - including 340 civilians - and 4,000 PLO fighters. He claimed only 117 Israeli soldiers had died “in the entire western sector of Lebanon,” excluding the Syrian front. Of those, only eight had died in Beirut — three in accidents.
The Israeli numbers were met with open ridicule by most reporters and aid workers on the ground. Even inside Israel, journalists and soldiers turned to foreign media for a clearer picture. Military correspondent Hirsh Goodman noted that “thousands of Israeli troops who bear eyewitness to events… have taken to listening to Radio Lebanon in English and Arabic to get what they believe is a credible picture of the war.”
A dark joke circulated among Israeli soldiers: “the idiot in the ordnance corps must have put all Israeli cannon back to front. Each time we open fire, the army spokesman announces we’re being fired at…’”
Earleen Fisher put it more bluntly. “If you took the numbers from one day to the next,” she said, “it was like — how many people had come back to life?”
Human stories
After Israel laid siege to Beirut in mid-June and civilian deaths mounted, AP stories grew more skeptical and began challenging many of Israel’s narratives — from the human shield allegation to its denial of using cluster and phosphorus bombs — and acknowledged that Israel was deliberately targeting the civilian population. The reporting was generally comprehensive, with strong emphasis on human stories.
Reports of Israel’s use of phosphorus bombs against civilians were among the most damaging to its reputation and credibility. Israel denied deploying them against civilians until journalists saw dying and dead. Dr. Shamaa, who was routinely interviewed by a vast number of international journalists, including myself, was one of the first medics to publicly draw attention to phosphorus bombs. Her blunt accounts of Israeli actions were widely covered by Western media, making Israel’s claims of taking pains to avoid civilian suffering difficult to believe.
Terry A. Anderson, one of the AP correspondents who came to Lebanon to reinforce the war coverage, watched Dr. Shamaa try in vain to save a three-year-old boy from burning phosphorus that had struck his Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp a day earlier, spewing white smoke over the family of 12. In his exclusive story on July 19, Anderson wrote:
Three-year-old Ahmed Baytam, his face and part of his chest covered with severe burns, was tied to the bed with soft bandages. As Dr. Amal Shamaa leaned over to point out the injuries caused by burning phosphorus, his heart stopped.
The doctor bent over his body and put her stethoscope on his chest, then called to a nurse and medical orderly, “Arrest.” The slim, intense pediatrician began pushing hard on the wounded chest, while the orderly started breathing into his mouth. The nurse ran for heart needles and an electro-shock machine. Dr. Shamaa ... leaned against a wall. “It was respiratory damage. They inhale the phosphorus,” she said.
Ahmed's two-day-old twin sisters had died on arrival at the hospital. Their bodies were still smoldering, so Dr. Shamaa put them in buckets of water to put out the flames.
“When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smoldered for hours,” Dr. Shamaa told a British newspaper reporter. The next morning, when she retrieved the tiny corpses from the mortuary for burial, they again burst into flames. Ahmed himself died not from burns but from inhaling phosphorus and lung injuries that could not be treated, Dr. Shamaa told me years later:
The worst thing [was that] the kid seemed to be OK, then all of a sudden, he stopped breathing and this happened while Terry was there and I think that was one of the worst things that happened at that time to him. He ran out of the hospital and I didn't see him again.
The widespread death and destruction was brought home by other personal stories, such as AP’s “Death of a Button Seller” of August 9, 1982, by Earleen Fisher (Nicolas Tatro’s former wife, whose byline at the times was Earleen F. Tatro).
Bassima Subra was a plain, thin woman in her late 30s who used to sell buttons in her brother’s small fabric shop. She died last week, cut to pieces by an Israeli shell as she tried to run away from a gun battle that broke out shortly after sunrise in a bread line at one of the few bakeries still functioning in West Beirut.
Fisher explained in her 800-word dispatch that Subra was one of about 300 people standing in line at 6 a.m. outside a bakery a few blocks from the AP office - the only one in the neighborhood that still had enough flour during Beirut’s Israeli blockade. Eyewitnesses told her that as five gunmen from a small PLO faction exchanged fire with four members of a Lebanese armed group at the bread line, people ran for cover, including Subra. As this was happening, Israeli shells began raining down - perhaps 15 shells in 20 minutes, according to one of the Lebanese gunmen she interviewed.
This is what he told Fisher:
Bassima must have run up the hill to get away from the men with the guns, and in that one minute while she was running the shelling started and she got hit just opposite Cinema Versailles. ‘We found the pieces of her body, but we didn’t know that it was Bassima. We found the head on the street, but the face was gone. There was a hand, too. We found other pieces and we took them to the American University Hospital, but they said they only had place for people who were still alive, so we left Bassima in a corner of the room and covered the head with a piece of paper.
Such eyewitness accounts, reported by journalists and amplified through the testimony of doctors and aid workers, laid bare the scale of civilian suffering. They also shaped television coverage in the U.S., where nightly news broadcasts carried some of the most critical depictions of Israeli actions. It was the reporting of the networks, more than print, that bore the brunt of Israeli military censorship and the ire of pro-Israel supporters in the U.S.
Read Chapter One, Part 4 in the next post.