The numbers game

Christopher Walker

Jerusalem A few days ago, at the regular Israeli ..Foreign Ministry briefing on the pro- gress of the war in Lebanon, an embarrass- ed official was trying — and visibly failing — to provide a credible explanation of why the already low civilian casualty figures pro- vided by his ministry at an earlier stage of the conflict had now, inexplicably, dropped even lower. 'I know that resurrection is Popular in this part of the world,' remarked an American correspondent recently return- ed from a spell in West Beirut, 'but are you really saying that it happened on that scale?'

The tone of his remark was typical of the scepticism which has built up among the large international press corps providing Militarily censored coverage of the war from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; and the Israeli authorities, realising late in the day that they had lost badly in the information, as opposed to the fighting war with the Palestinians, have now been struggling manfully to make amends.

As well as issuing new casualty figures Which reduced the number of Arab civilians admitted to have been killed in the decimated Phoenician port city of Sidon from 400 to 265 (precision is the name of the game in attempting to convince out- siders that your figures are the accurate ones), the Foreign Ministry also repeated a previous estimate that the total number of individuals made homeless by the massive Israeli invasion was 20,000.

That figure had first been produced from a military helmet earlier in the war by the Ubiquitous Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, and was supposed to take into account both the thousands of Lebanese civilians whose homes had been destroyed and the Palesti- nian refugees, whose main camps had been reduced to unrecognisable heaps of rubble by precision bombing, heavy artillery and mortar attacks. Later underground bunkers In the camps, some under houses and schools, were also destroyed by Israeli demolition experts using high explosive.

Whole streets had been reduced to ruins, and the only thoroughfare through the re- mains had been cleared by large Israeli bulldozers, similar to those used only mon- ths before to level the Sinai settlement of Yamit before it was handed back to Egypt. When 1 showed some photographs I had taken in the camp to Israelis, they were visibly shocked at the extent of the destruc- tion. Although a few hundred of the Original inhabitants (women, children and the elderly) were still eking out an existence In the surrealistic ruins, many were in houses on the verge of collapse and others Were crammed up to ten in a single room. Even the Israeli press, which has been noticeably slow in assessing the damage done to the camps, had to acknowledge, when the press ban on entering Rashadiya was lifted after six weeks, that one in three of the homes had been destroyed. Gone also was the infrastructure which formerly provided the camps with water, sewage and electricity. After surveying the stinking piles of masonry (some still giving off the unmistakable smell of death), abandoned belongings, twisted hulks of vehicles and the expressions of bewilderment on the faces of the refugees who remained, facing growing health problems, particularly in- testinal diseases, one French United Na- tions official commented sourly: 'Whatever the provocations, surely this is the product of 20th-century man at his very worst.'

Already under pressure after the Israeli discovery of an extensive guerrilla training centre at Siblin, the largest UNRWA col- lege in South Lebanon, the UN officials dealing daily with the daunting new refugee problem were reluctant to become involved in the numbers game. But Terence David- son, UNRWA's reticent chief information officer, was adamant that at the lowest count the number of Palestinians left homeless was 35,000. Many thousands of these second and third time refugees are now to be found living in half-completed buildings which escaped the Israeli bom- bardment, or squatting in insanitary garages and schools which are due to be us- ed again when term begins in October.

As the Israeli Government figure for the total number made homeless was claimed to cover both Lebanese and Palestinians, it immediately became suspect to those who

had toured the area, including those parts that the army was anxious to prevent jour- nalists — and especially television cameramen — from seeing. But this did not prevent it from being widely quoted at political meetings and on television debates inside Israel, where public anxiety has been growing at the alleged failure of the coun- try's Hasbara, the Hebrew word used to describe an official propaganda campaign. As in the past when the government's infor- mation experts were under attack, few of the critics chose to question whether the ac- tual policy was capable of being presented in a favourable light.

Israel's task in trying to impress the world with its own, understandably minimised view of the death, damage and destruction caused by its invasion force was inadvertently assisted by the obvious exaggeration of the initial figure of 600,000 homeless put out from the Lebanese side and later apparently endorsed — along with a less obviously suspect figure of 10,000 civilian casualties — by the International Red Cross. It was perhaps no surprise that the Red Cross representative in Beirut quickly found himself replaced.

The homeless figure was later halved to 300,000, a number which still seemed too high to many of those who had made exten- sive tours of the 600 square miles of Lebanon occupied by the Israelis (and in- stantaneously fitted with a super-efficient network of Hebrew road signs which left a traveller wondering just what was the native language). I can make no pretence of being able to put forward an accurate alternative based on anything but guesswork assisted by instinct and repeated questioning over nearly seven weeks of the myriads of dif- ferent authorities involved; but like a number of other foreign journalists who have covered the war from the Israeli side, I am convinced that the number of Arabs left homeless as a result of the invasion — and perhaps now temporarily housed with relatives — cannot have been much under 100,000.

Exact figures for casualties on the Arab side, civilians and combatants (or in the of- ficial Israeli jargon 'terrorists') are even more difficult to assess accurately. By now, it is unlikely that the true total will ever be known with precision, as it is hard to see who is going to begin digging under the re- mains of a flattened camp like Ain Hilwe to begin the grisly business of trying to assess an objective final death toll. A figure of over 9,000 deaths was initially provided by the Lebanese police, who backed their claim with a certain amount of detailed in- formation about the location where deaths had taken place. At the last count, the of- ficial Israeli estimate of civilian casualties in the three main towns of Sidon, Tyre and Nabatiya had dropped to 331. Officials consistently refused to bring the besieged western sector of Beirut into their calcula- tions. Since most Israeli officials and ministers claim that those figures also in- clude Palestinian civilians killed in the final assault on the refugee camps (although others are more prudent), it is being treated with a caution bordering on outright cynicism by most Western diplomats.

Of those able or willing to flee camps like Ain Hilwe, it excludes an estimated 200 people killed in the days between the at- tempted assassination of Shlomo Argov and the launching of the invasion proper. The view of one Lebanese doctor in Sidon, who seemed to have little enthusiasm for the visitations on his once pleasant city by either the Palestinians or the Israelis, was that in Ain Hilwe alone around 600 Palesti- nians had been killed — most of them civilians.

This opinion was coincidentally sup- ported by a crack Israeli paratrooper who took part in the six-day-long battle for the camp and later told the Jerusalem Post that most of the guerrillas had been safely in- stalled in their bunkers during the repeated air and artillery strikes — which, he claimed

angrily, had succeeded mainly in killing in- nocent civilians.

But, like almost everyone else involved in this war, he had his own axe to grind, being an articulate member of 'Soldiers against Silence', one of the mushrooming groups of demobilised reservists who have returned from the front line to voice their bitter op- position to the conduct of the war and its continuation. He also had undisguised left-wing political views.

Some facts are incontestable, such as Mr Sharon's burning ambition to launch such a war for months before it began and the callous way in which the Palestine Libera- tion Organisation deliberately sited its guns in places where attacks on them would cause the maximum of civilian suffering. But when it comes to assessing the real — as opposed to imagined — human cost, it seems that an element of guesswork will always remain.