Abass Awala
Interviewed for MAOHP - 07/03/2018
Reference Code: IE_MA_MAC_006_MAOHP_0032_D
Location(s): Tulin
Length: 5.43
In this clip Abass discusses Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996 [in one case he gives the year as 1986 but he is referring to events that took place in 1996]. He recalls eleven hundred inhabitants running into the United Nations camp where he was working, to be sheltered by UNIFIL soldiers. Among these were nine or ten heavily pregnant women, eighteen people doing pilgrimages and many mothers breast feeding or bottle feeding children. The pilgrims were evacuated to Beirut where they could fly to Saudi Arabia and the women were evacuated to hospitals in Tyre. Food was difficult and resources were limited and everyone stayed in the camp for eighteen days. He refers to the sounds of banging and shelling and hearing news reports of people being killed. Abass recalls that he had a mobile phone at the time, one of only two mobile phones in the camp, and they were in use twenty-four hours a day. A massacre at a United Nations Post in Qana happened while they were in the camp and was reported on the news, he says people began to feel they were not any more secure in a UNIFIL camp. Archives Note: Operation Grapes of Wrath was a sixteen day campaign by the Israeli Defence Forces against Lebanon; the stated aim of the operation was to attempt to end rocket attacks on Northern Israel by Hezbollah. During the campaign more than eleven hundred air raids were carried out and South Lebanon was extensively shelled. The Qana massacre refers to an action in April 1996 during Operation Grapes of Wrath when a United Nations Fijian compound was bombed, killing more than a hundred Lebanese civilians sheltering in the camp.
