For more than 40 years, Adelaide man Mustapha Chahine has yearned for answers over the disappearance of his son Khaled from a Lebanese street.
The family suspects he was taken when he was just 16 by Israeli soldiers as the first Lebanon war was about to erupt.
It came after Mustapha had already experienced immense loss from a young age.
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He was displaced when his family fled the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, then came the biggest blow in 1982 when Khaled went missing.
The 16-year-old was told to accompany his mother and his younger siblings, who escaped Lebanon’s east, to the country’s south, following reports parts of the region would be a safe zone while Israeli forces invaded in a bid to wipe out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon.
Khaled went to buy snacks from a nearby deli with his friend, Nizard Ali Merhi, in the city of Wadi El Zayni, but neighbours said they were both dragged by soldiers into a vehicle before they made it home.
“We asked for help from everybody … the Red Cross, the Palestinian Red Crescent … but nobody could help us,” Mustapha said.
“Until now, I don’t know if he is still alive or has died.”
“Now I watch the news, they are releasing prisoners who have been for years in jails in Israel … I am thinking of my son,” he said, referring to the recent ceasefire amid the current conflict between Israel and Hamas during which Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners were released.
After their disappearance, the two teenagers were named on a United Nations list of detainees who went missing or were arrested during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
It’s estimated 17,000 people went missing in Lebanon in the country’s conflicts between 1975 and 1990, some arrested or captured by the various forces and militias involved in the fighting.
However, the suspects involved in Khaled and Merhis’ disappearance remain a mystery.
Mustapha’s daughter Sabrin Shahin said from the day he went missing, what happened to Khaled has been a sensitive subject in her household as it pained her 76-year-old father to recount memories of his firstborn child.
It was only very recently the family hung the few photos of Khaled they had on the wall.
When his wife spoke of her memories of Khaled, Mustapha said he’d leave the room because it was too traumatic for him to engage in the conversation.
While it’s agonising for him to talk about, the 16-year-old boy, who was his golden child, often appeared in his dreams, Mustapha said.
“I dream of him with long hair, which in Islam means he is in a good state,” he said, holding back tears.
As she grew older, Sabrin realised her father’s anxiety about his children was related to the trauma of losing his eldest son.
“He always had a fear. He would call us millions of times whenever we left the house. Even when we were at school, we would get a phone call at the office and they would say your dad is on the phone and checking on you,” she said.
Renewed investigation
While many of Mustapha’s family members left Lebanon for Australia in the 1980s, he stayed until 1996, hoping he may one day hear news of what happened to Khaled. But there was no update.
Recently, there was renewed hope for families of the missing when the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared formed in Lebanon in 2020.
Despite it being three years since its inception, the commission’s acting president, Ziad Achour said the independent body had not yet solved any of the cases.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has been supporting the commission’s efforts to identify missing persons, so far providing it with thousands of biological reference samples and information gathered relating to about 3000 missing persons.
The ICRC is now in the process of contacting Mustapha’s family to obtain a DNA sample, which can help future investigations into Khaled’s case.
Achour said the commission faced two key obstacles: a lack of political will from governments to investigate the cases and financial constraints as Lebanon grapples with a deep economic crisis as a result of years of mounting government debt.
When a grave was found in the village of Mdoukha in August 2023 with three bodies believed to be Palestinian fighters killed between 1982-1983, the commission began its first investigation, with a report into the graves due in early 2024.
Achour expects by the end next year the commission will have a list of priorities which will outline how it will begin solving the thousands of remaining cases.
International Centre for Transitional Justice head of Lebanon programs Nour El Bejjani said as the relatives of many missing people had become elderly and some have died, it was urgent the commission met its mandate to clarify the fate and whereabouts of loved ones.
“As long as justice is not achieved for thousands of victims of human rights violations … we will never be able to restore the rule of law or build a real democracy or to achieve sustainable peace,” she said.
A life of struggle
For Mustapha, losing Khaled was the ultimate tragedy after the 1948 war that followed the announcement of the independence of Israel, which would become known to Palestinians as the Nakba — Arabic for catastrophe.
Mustapha was four years old during the Arab-Israeli war in which the State of Israel was established, while 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.
Mustapha remembers his heavily pregnant mother Nayfeh and his older siblings walking two days on foot to Lebanon from the village of Safed as bombs rained down.
“We walked about one or two hours, and then we found a tree to sit in the shade. I remember my mother rode a horse … every half an hour one of us rode the horse with her,” he said.
“(My mother) would look at us and her tears would drop from her eyes.“
After they crossed the border, in the town of Bint Jbeil, Neyfeh, went into labour with no medical assistance, with her nine-year-old daughter helping her through the birth.
Baby Adel was born unwell and died at three months old.
“I remember it like a dream … but even now, (when I remember), I cry,” Mustapha said.
“My name is Mustapha, but at that time I wasn’t Mustapha, I felt I went crazy. (I was thinking) what are we doing? Which mistake we did?
“Jewish, Christian, Muslim — we lived in peace, all of us.”
The family home in Safed, a city which became part of Israel post-1948, was given to a Jewish man, as happened to other Palestinian families under Israel’s 1950 Absentee Property Law in which the state had powers to expropriate abandoned properties.
Amnesty International associate campaigner Nikita White said the repercussions continued today, with over 70 per cent of people in The Gaza Strip descendants of those who fled in 1948 and considered refugees unable to return to their homes.
Lebanon also experienced an influx of refugees during the war, and many are still living in refugee camps decades after leaving their homes.
“Because of the Nakba, many Palestinians are displaced … they are stateless,” White said.
“Stateless people are unable to rely on the protection of the state like many of us around the world would … many of them have been in Lebanon for decades since 1948, and they’re still not recognised as Lebanese citizens.
“Many of them still live in overcrowded (refugee) camps 75 years after the Nakba and these camps lack basic infrastructure.
“We’ve documented them often being subject to discriminatory laws and regulations (in Lebanon) that deny them the right to own property, laws that prevent them from working in a lot of professions,” she said.
Holding on to hope
Decades after leaving Safed, Mustapha’s eldest brother, Fatih (Fred) Shahin, who became a well-known businessman in Adelaide, revisited the family home and met a Jewish man living in the house.
Mustapha said the man knew the house belonged to the Palestinian family, and after sharing their experiences of brutal consecutive wars, both men, overwhelmed with emotion, cried.
A number of international governments, including Australia, do not officially recognise a state of Palestine.
But in August 2023, the Federal Labour Government resumed using the term “Occupied Palestinian Territories”.
It said this was to strengthen its opposition against increasing Israeli settlements considered “illegal under international law”.
The latest conflict between Israel and Hamas has been devastating.
More than 1200 people were killed and about 240 people taken hostage during the brutal Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, while more than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the months following that attack as the Israel Defence Forces attempt to wipe out the militant group.
Although a long mooted two-state solution looks even further away amid the current conflict, Mustapha said he hopes to be alive to one day hear that it has happened, as it would be a step towards healing his many open wounds.
