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On the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Siegel recounted how she and other nurses struggled to take care of the hundreds of wounded Palestinians, how she herself was nearly executed, and how justice continues to remain elusive despite the magnitude of the atrocity.

"When I got to Beirut, I was shocked. It was one of the saddest scenes I had ever seen," Siegel told Middle East Eye, recalling the time from her home in Washington DC.

Israel launched an attack on Beirut on 15 September - breaking a weeks-long ceasefire that saw members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation leave the city - and sealed it off so no one else could leave.

Then on 16 September, the Phalange, a right-wing Christian Lebanese militia group, entered the Sabra and Shatila camps in response to the assassination of Lebanon's Christian president, Bachir Gemayel. They killed as many as 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

"The Phalange came in and started to kill people. They started to massacre people, but in the most horrendous way with axes and knives. Some of these pictures, some of these stories, are just horrendous," she said.

But Siegel says the Phalange wasn't operating in isolation.

"The Israelis shot flares into the air. One of the other physicians and myself, we went to the top floor of the hospital during this time, and we saw flares going up in the air and lighting up neighbourhoods of the camp followed by gunfire," Seigel said.

"What was happening is that [the flares] lit the way for the Phalange to go door to door and kill people."

Siegel and an international group of nurses worked tirelessly over the next several days to treat the wounded Palestinians.

The hospital had served as a sanctuary for those shot and wounded by militia forces, and even as it began to run out of supplies, blood, medicine and food, Palestinians continued to enter the hospital in the hope of escaping the violence.

"This went on for like two days and people started to flee towards the hospital, towards Gaza Hospital, looking for safety and security. The hospital got overwhelmed with people. The morgue got overcrowded."

Despite their attempts to stay at the hospital and continue to care for the wounded residents, Phalange forces took the international team of medics out of the hospital on 18 September and began marching them out of the camp at gunpoint.

On her way out of the camp, Siegel told MEE that she passed by dead bodies scattered across the streets, and mothers with their children being guarded by gunmen.

Being Jewish and growing up learning the horrors of the Holocaust, Seigel said her experience reminded her of the stories she heard of Jewish prisoners marching toward concentration camps and the gas chambers.

"As we got towards the end of the camp, they put us up against a bullet-ridden wall and they were about to shoot us," Siegel said.

"What happened was an Israeli stopped it. From the Israeli command post, [the Israeli] saw what the Phalange were doing and said 'we can't be killing white people, all these Norwegians and Swedish and Americans'."

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