Photo: Marwan Tahtah)

"A more transient atmosphere existed on the other side of the front line, just beyond the heaps of dark earth at Galerie Semaan. If the Syrians moved to a coordinated plan, their potential Palestinian opponents still lived on their emotions. On their side of the line, singing was coming from inside the shell-smashed, desecrated church of Saint Michel. The Palestinian gunmen crouching behind the sand embankment across Boulevard Ariss went on watching the Syrian tanks, ignoring the sound. But when we walked inside the church, we found five small Palestinian boys standing in a line just where the altar would have been.

"Each was dressed in a miniature guerrilla uniform and each carried a gun. The eldest, who had unwashed brown hair and could have been no more than ten or eleven years old, was holding an automatic rifle in his arms. The boy on his right was grasping a rocket-launcher. The youngest, perhaps only eight, was bowed down under the weight of an M-16 rifle. He had grenades strapped to his chest with military webbing. Under the eyes of a serious, tall Palestinian with a pistol in his holster, they were singing, over and over again: 'Fatah, we are your children and, when we are older, we will be your soldiers.' Stamping their hopelessly outsize boots, they trudged in single file out of the gutted, white-stone church and slogged off over a ditch away from the barricade.

"The guerrillas there still ignored them. Instead, they went on watching the Syrian tanks manoeuvring down the road half a mile away, in what had the previous day been the Christian front line. Shells exploded a long way away across Beirut, down by the port. The thump of each explosion sounded like a door being slammed far beneath our feet. One of the Palestinian guerrillas turned irritably to a companion and asked 'Why don't we shoot at them?' Had he not heard the Arab League spokesman that morning, promising that the Syrian 'peace-keepers would 'strike with an iron fist' at any resistance?

"But then a remarkable event occurred. From behind us, from the Muslim district of Shiyah, came about 20 people, husband and wives and a few girls in summer dresses and a man with two little boys walking beside him. They were the nearest residents to the front line and most of them had not dared to walk down the boulevard for more than a year. Cars began to draw up amid the rubble and whole families, 60 or 70 people in all, climbed out of them to view the silent barricade. Businessmen and elderly women picked their way over the broken concrete and steel to stare in disbelief at the crippled buildings with their bulging walls and blackened balconies."

Robert Fisk -- Pity the Nation, The Abduction of Lebanon, 1990