Palestinian Refugee Camp, Shatila, Lebanon, September 16th. 1982.

The bitter tastes of gun oil and cordite filled the boy’s mouth. The barrel of the gun between his teeth and the foresight digging into the roof of his mouth prevented him from swallowing. His eyes, wide with fear, stared at the hand holding the gun, anticipating the movement of the finger on the trigger.

“Where are your daughters?”

The question was snarled at the boy’s parents, kneeling on the floor, their hands on their heads, the slightest movement of their bodies covered by Maronite Christian weapons.

The boy’s mother shook her head in disbelief at what was happening. Distraught she moved her hands to cover her face in an attempt to blot out the scene. The gunshot in the confined space was deafening. The boy’s mother pitched forward at his feet, a finger shot off; a blackened hole in her forehead and the back of her head blown away. The boy’s father reached out to his wife’s twitching body and was shot through the right ear. He fell on top of his wife. Blood, cerebral fluid, brain tissue and bone fragments sprayed onto the TV screen distorting the picture of the game show host; canned laughter brayed into the room.

The boy’s control turned to water. A warm dark stain spread through the front of his clothing and the smell of urine mingled with the cordite fumes.

“Ha, he pissed his pants.” The gun barrel was jerked up digging the foresight blade further into the boy’s palate and then yanked out brutally tearing a triangular flap of flesh from the roof of his mouth. The gun barrel, swung through a short vicious arc, smashed the boy sideways to the floor spraying blood from his ripped mouth. A poorly aimed shot went through his shoulder; his bowels loosened and the smell of faeces added to the horror of the room. Shame and fear, two prime generators of hatred, began to fester in his mind. He blacked out before the Phalangist Christian militiamen hacked off his mother’s hands to get her gold bracelets and rings.

Mercifully he remained unconscious as his beautiful sisters, twelve and fourteen years old, were dragged screaming from their hiding place under the floor, raped, mutilated and left with him to die. When he came round, covered in his own blood and the blood of his sisters, the horrific brutality perpetrated on his family hit him again. A vicious black hatred began to grow in this small survivor of the massacre at Shatila Palestinian refugee camp.