The Ghosts of War Haunting Beirut’s Gaza Hospital

There is a nondescript, rundown complex of concrete buildings in Beirut’s Sabra neighborhood, steps beyond the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. It is one among hundreds of such buildings there, slowly decaying amid piles of garbage and a spiderweb of side streets. 

Inside, little cats scurry through dark halls blackened by mold. Water drips from tiny white ceiling stalactites of salt hardened by time. It pools on the floor. In one nook above an ancient stairwell sits, inexplicably, a fully functioning corner-shop fridge shilling juice and Pepsi. 

The hallways are said to hold ghosts, too. 

They lurk among the living. Hundreds of people, most of them Palestinian refugees, call these four conjoined buildings home, squatting informally in rooms that line the damp hallways. Ali Hleihel, a middle-aged father of four, is among them. 

“Sometimes I hear things with no explanation, or doors open and close with nobody to push them,” says Ali, whom I find in his makeshift apartment at the end of a long hallway. He and his wife Hiba, whose family are originally from the village of Alma in northern Palestine, have lived here for decades.

This was, once, the Gaza Hospital. Decades ago, it was a beacon of healthcare for Palestinian refugees here in Beirut. 

When I visited last spring, Israel was already half a year into a daily televised genocide on Gaza. It was months before the onslaught reached Beirut. Among the mostly Palestinian families living in these four buildings, I, too, felt a heaviness walking through the moldy halls — a deadly quiet packed with the lives and loved ones of the people housed behind them. With each passing door, I walked past dozens of little rubber house slippers waiting outside, tangled webs of electrical wire powered by some unseen generator. 

Former Glory

“It was just like the American University of Beirut hospital!” multiple people tell me as I walk the now darkened hallways, comparing these four buildings to Beirut’s state-of-the-art medical center by the sea.

The Gaza Hospital opened its doors in the 1970s, one of a series of hospitals founded around that time by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. The society’s co-founder Fathi Arafat (brother of the quite more famous Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat) said in a long-ago interview the hospitals were meant to “strengthen our people.”

“But it was a vision of solidarity,” too, insists Aziza Khalidi. She was administrative director at Gaza Hospital starting in 1982. “Solidarity with the Lebanese people — the health services were open to both Palestinians and Lebanese.” 

That dream for Gaza was decades ago. I think what initially drew me and my colleague João here was simply the hospital’s name: Gaza. By the time we visited, Israeli forces had already been bombing Palestinian hospitals in the actual Gaza Strip for months. To find an abandoned Palestinian hospital here in Beirut sharing that name intrigued us.

“But it was a vision of solidarity.” – Aziza Khalidi

When the Gaza Hospital had fully opened, the Lebanese civil war had already broken out. Tens of thousands of Palestinians lived impoverished in refugee camps across the country. 

The Gaza Hospital would be able to treat their wounds, even as the war continued to rage outside its walls.

“We were determined to make the operating rooms be underground,” Yasser Arafat said in an interview around that same time. “This was very important, because we remember that … this operating room can be able to continue its work, even with the Israeli [air] raids.”  

An Opportunity

Rami* was in his 20s when he started working at the Gaza Hospital as a nurse in the mid-1970s, treating some of the most serious injuries to come through its doors. He still lives nearby. 

I met him almost a year ago, in his home through a maze of informal concrete apartment blocks. A little caged parrot tweeted cheerily in his kitchen.

He had wanted to be a doctor, but at the time there were few opportunities for Palestinians to go to medical school. When the Palestinian Red Crescent offered Rami a spot in a nursing certification program, it seemed like a good opportunity. 

He took it.

Fresh back from training, and at the start of his career, Rami got a posting at the newly minted Gaza Hospital. He’d work in the intensive care unit, and the emergency room. It was a decent job at the time for a young person from Beirut’s Palestinian camps.

In old videos of the hospital, neatly labeled the “Gazza Surgical Hospital” in red English lettering, the halls are still whitewashed and fresh, filled with young doctors and patients in 1970s bell-bottoms. 

Among them was a then-29-year-old Aziza Khalidi. A public health and preventative medicine expert, she had just recently been hired as the Gaza Hospital’s administrative director. 

The hospital was even rumored to have employed a Jewish doctor at one point, a Lebanese orthopedic surgeon named Dr. George Hannoush, multiple residents tell me. It was merely a rumor though — I managed, through Lebanon’s syndicate of doctors, to find a surviving family member in France, who denied the man was Jewish at all. Rather, he was part of Lebanon’s Christian community.

“It was a misunderstanding, after he got stopped at a Palestinian checkpoint once,” the relative says.

But they did have a Jewish nurse. 

Calm Before the Storm

Her name is Ellen Siegel. She was 40 years old when she traveled from her hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, to volunteer as a nurse in Lebanon. She had already been active in the pro-Palestine movement back in the US, and visited refugees in Lebanon back in 1972, three years before the country’s 15-year civil war broke out.

Now in the depths of the civil-war years, Ellen went via a Palestinian solidarity group that was coordinating medical aid with the Palestinian Red Crescent. Also in Ellen’s group was Dr. Ang Swee Chai, an orthopedic surgeon who would later go on to co-found Medical Aid for Palestinians.

It was August 1982. 

“They assigned me to the Gaza Hospital,” Ellen tells me. She’s in her 80s now. Her voice is sweet and kind, almost tinged with a Southern twang. 

It was a difficult time to be in Lebanon. Seven years before her arrival, in 1975, right-wing Christian gunmen fired on a bus full of Muslim Palestinian refugees just south of Beirut, igniting already sharp sectarian and class tensions into the full-blown civil war that would last — off and on — until 1990. The fighting would pit Lebanese against Palestinians against Syrians against Israelis, Christians against Muslims, and even Christians against Christians. 

The killing reached a fever pitch in the summer of 1982. That June, Israel invaded Lebanon in the hopes of ousting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israeli forces would besiege Beirut for two months, killing thousands of civilians and destroying block after block as it pummeled the city by land, air and sea. 

Then, in early September, an assassin from the Damascus-aligned Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) allegedly planted a bomb, killing the recently elected Lebanese president: the right-wing Kataeb party’s Bachir Gemayel. 

The Kataeb (also known at the time as the Phalange) wanted revenge. 

Israeli forces in Beirut would soon allow it. They gave the green light to Phalangist fighters to enter Sabra neighborhood and next-door Shatila Palestinian camp, alleging that the PLO — whose fighters had already been evacuated from Beirut weeks earlier — was behind Gemayel’s death.

Gaza Hospital was situated right between Sabra and Shatila. 

Thousands of Palestinian innocents would wind up dead, many of them reportedly sliced across the neck with knives and hatchets.

But that was all still several weeks away. 

In the meantime, Ellen Siegel settled into her work. For personal safety, she didn’t tell many colleagues or patients she was Jewish, though she’s open about her faith today. She remembers the lack of electricity in the hospital to run the elevators, the Palestinian and Lebanese janitors carrying trays of food on their heads, the smell of antiseptics and patients “wandering the rooms, poking their heads in and listening when a doctor would be sitting with a patient talking to them.” 

“I was enamored by it.” – Ellen Siegel

She says, “I found that very sweet. I was enamored by it.” 

She remembers one patient in particular, Layla, a toddler-aged Lebanese girl who had been burned across her face and abdomen by a kerosene heater. In a 1982 BBC documentary on the hospital, Ellen speaks to Layla through big early-1980s glasses and brunette curls. Layla moans in pain on the bed, her face covered in yellowed scabs. 

“Wow, Layla, you’re looking so much better today!” Ellen cooes in broken Arabic, in that same kind voice. “Let’s get you some water?” 

One night, Ellen was resting up on the roof with her colleagues. In the distance, flares light up the dark sky. “I thought they could be fireworks, I didn’t know what the hell they were.” Everything was eerily silent. “No screaming, no hollering.” 

It was Sept. 16, 1982. 

“Sitting Ducks”

That was the day the massacre began. But, according to Aziza, “We didn’t even know it was going on yet. We anticipated something bad happening, we accumulated medical supplies, and some of the staff moved to other facilities.” They converted the fully-functioning hospital into a smaller, emergency center. Still, the scope of what was going on outside was not yet clear. 

Meanwhile, Rami, the young ER nurse, remembers “wounded people starting [to come] in, lots of them, with knife injuries.” 

“We heard the sound of shooting outside, snipers.”

Hundreds of Palestinian refugees would take shelter in the hospital’s basement, figuring it was a safe place, according to Aziza. After all, who would attack a hospital? Ellen remembers food quickly running out as she and the other workers struggled to feed everyone.

“We knew something very bad was happening out there,” Rami says. 

By day two of the three-day massacre, they got news: The nearby Palestinian Red Crescent-run Akka Hospital had been brutally attacked. Some people there had been raped, Aziza later found. Others, including the medical staff, were marched out at gunpoint. Gaza was no longer safe.  

“We knew the Palestinian staff in Gaza Hospital were sitting ducks,” Aziza says. “They didn’t want to, but we convinced the Palestinian doctors and nurses to evacuate.” The housekeeping staff, which included Egyptians, also evacuated. Aziza went with them, in an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) convoy.

The foreign volunteers, including Ellen, were able to stay behind and treat patients.

The bloodshed would last three days. 

“Crazed Expressions”

Dead bodies lay strewn in the streets. Among them were women and children. Weaving in between them were the Phalange fighters, some of them still in uniform, some simply walking around dazed, wearing street clothes. “They had these crazed expressions,” Ellen says. 

She would know: on the last day of the massacre, fighters came to Gaza Hospital and ordered the foreign volunteers to leave. Only three were allowed to stay behind with the wounded patients.

What she saw next she would later submit, via a journalist, to the Israeli Supreme Court’s official inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre — also known as the Kahan Commission. 

The resulting report, released in February 1983, names Ellen among a group of foreign medical workers whom Lebanese Phalangist fighters removed from Gaza Hospital under “armed escort.” On their way out of the camp via a main street in the neighboring Sabra district, Ellen and the other two workers saw “several corpses on both sides of the street,” the report stated. 

“And we saw these bulldozers with Hebrew writing on the side,” she tells me, “just moving back and forth, back and forth.”

She and other foreign volunteers left Lebanon not long after. So would the PLO, Israel’s offensive to oust them apparently successful.

Aziza stayed for another couple years, “until the hospital came back to normal.” But she was tired, and traumatized. 

“But we are not victims!” Aziza insists. “As members of the Palestinian Red Crescent, we are always portrayed as victims. I want people to know about the time when our hospital stayed working even in the middle of a massacre.”

“Firing on the Camp”

Soon, in 1985, came the War of the Camps, a sub-conflict of the civil war that saw gunmen from the Lebanese Amal Movement attack and besiege Palestinian camps in Beirut as part of their fights against PLO holdouts. 

It was another bad omen for the Gaza Hospital.

Zuheir Harb, a somewhat debonaire aging resident of Sabra who claims to speak some Italian, tells me he was there. I find him sitting at his friend’s clothing shop near the entrance of the Gaza Hospital one day at the height of spring. 

“There were tanks, right here, firing on the camp,” he tells me. “Amal tanks.” 

“And there were all these generators inside the hospital, which provided electricity. I saw them tie the tanks to Land Rovers — something like that — and drag them outside. It’s something I’m never going to forget.” 

Rami, the young nurse, was still working in the hospital at the time. In his living room with the parrot chirping near us, his voice becomes a bit pained at the memory of 1985. 

Amal fighters “came inside the hospital, they took away some of the staff. They killed some of them, too,” Rami says. Luckily, he wasn’t on shift at the time. “I had the daytime shift. Still, though, I couldn’t sleep that night.” Also lucky for him, he chose to spend the night at his home nearby, instead of the staff sleeping quarters on the top floor of the hospital. 

Some of his friends were among the medical staff who disappeared that night. His voice trails off; he doesn’t want to elaborate. It’s too painful.

It’s a part of the hospital’s history that remains sensitive to this day — Amal leader Nabih Berri has been the country’s Parliament Speaker since 1992. Some people I spoke with in Sabra and Shatila didn’t like to mention that it was Amal fighters who were responsible for the destruction, fearing potential reprisals. Among them was Rami, the nurse, who ultimately asked that I not publish his real name.

The Martyrdom of a Hospital

After about an hour sitting with Rami in his home, he walks me out, and we make our goodbyes. He invites me to an upcoming Ramadan iftar, and we smile. He only just recently retired from nursing. 

It isn’t until I’ve begun walking away that, unprompted, he tells me more.

His sister, who worked in the operating theater, was among the medical staff killed back in 1985, inside the Gaza Hospital. She was about 30 years old, pregnant. The memory of it was hiding somewhere inside of him before that.

I stay silent for a moment, let him talk.

I don’t like to imagine which hallway she may have died in, or, perhaps, which of the now hundreds of informally burrowed apartments in the hospital were once the sites of slaughter. 

Nobody I meet there knows where the bodies might have gone. Perhaps in the courtyard among the rubbish, perhaps somewhere else entirely. 

“The trauma lingers.” – Aziza Khalidi

Though she wasn’t there anymore by 1985, Aziza describes the death of Gaza Hospital simply: “It was martyred.”

The hospital stayed empty for some time after the 1985 war. Then, with nowhere else to go, displaced Palestinians simply moved into its abandoned clinics. The curtains they put up for privacy later calcified into walls and a mishmash of foraged doors. 

Some of them are the original occupants of their apartments, the residents explain, while others rent from those who occupied the clinics decades ago, a chain of “tenancy” spilling tenuously across the generations. 

Phantom Quakes

Today the hospital is slowly decaying with its residents inside. The hallways smell loudly of mold. A few foreign workers emerge from the basement levels, where the mold and damp is even stronger. 

Most people living here have some form of breathing issue, according to Jamal Abu Shahla, who lives alone in a former clinic room, among cooking pots that collect the water dripping from the ceiling. He describes himself as the “mokhtar,” or a sort of neighborhood-level representative, of the hospital residents. He walks though the old hospital and makes introductions for me from apartment to impromptu apartment, each one adorned with house slippers and Palestinian keffiyeh scarves.

They are still here months after my initial visit. They remained there even after deadly Israeli bombs filled Beirut’s sky once again this past September through November. The bombs landed not far from the hospital complex itself. Some nights they were the only things visible in the sky through the tangle of buildings.

At the end of one hallway in the Gaza Hospital, father of four Ali Hleihel rests on his living room sofa. Behind him is the TV, the measured formal-Arabic rhythm of an Al Jazeera newscaster announcing death counts in the Gaza Strip. By time of writing, in January 2025, Israel has killed nearly 47,000 people in the besieged city and its outskirts — though the likely death count could be much higher, with the bodies of the missing still trapped under rubble. 

It isn’t his first war. From a massacre in 1976 in Beriut’s Tal Zaatar camp, where he was born, to a steady stream of displacement in neighborhood after neighborhood until he ended up here in the Gaza Hospital. At one point, his teenage brother went missing, and no one ever found him.

“The trauma lingers,” Aziza says. “The years don’t count. … People have been accumulating trauma after trauma.” 

Ali has long felt a sense of haunting inside the old hospital building. I ask him for specifics. 

There was one night, in the early days after the 1985 killings, when Ali moved into the Gaza Hospital with his family. He was still a little boy. “In that time, there were no lights in here, just candles and gas lamps.” 

Back then, the residents on his floor all shared one bathroom; one night, he crept to the bathroom for a shower. He opened the faucet. Suddenly, “I heard a screaming sound, I don’t know what, perhaps a person, maybe a cat. So I opened the door.” There was nothing in the hallway. 

“I went back inside and turned the water to a cooler temperature. Then, I heard the sound of walking outside the door, the sound of footsteps. Again, I opened the door.” Nothing.

“There are things like this, things that you can’t see.” 

He remembers more than a year ago, in February 2023, sleeping early one morning on the sofa, when his cat began playing and jumping around, shaking the sofa. He woke up, only to find it wasn’t the cat at all, but rather the entire room shaking, the entire hospital complex with its decayed inpatient clinics-turned-bedrooms swaying back and forth dangerously, teetering on some edge. The lights shook hanging from their ceiling wires and furniture bumped against concrete walls as the earth split open somewhere. 

It was only an earthquake — yet another in the hospital’s troubled life. The earth had in fact split open, it turned out, in southern Turkey, shaking Beirut and the Gaza Hospital along with it. 

Nobody was hurt.

But the lurking feeling, of memories tinged with past massacres and death, exists outside the walls of the Gaza Hospital, too. Like the memory of September 1982, when Ali was 10, looking down at the butchered bodies of fellow Palestinians, killed in the hundreds or perhaps even thousands by right-wing Phalangist fighters.  

And like the echoes today of the hospital’s namesake, Gaza, where Israeli forces spent 16 months systematically attacking hospitals and killing medical staff before finally reaching a ceasefire deal this past week. Only 16 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals are still operating, the World Health Organization recently said. 

There are also little moments here in Ali’s home. Doors close and open of their own accord. Long, dark hallways with silent people hidden somewhere behind the walls.

“This whole place is a city of ghosts,” he figures. 

*This interviewee spoke on condition of anonymity for personal safety, as parts of the hospital’s story remain sensitive today.

** All photos by João Sousa. Sousa is a photojournalist based in Lebanon and focused on social issues.