Sabra and Shatila, 1982: A massacre remembered

17 September 2012. A World to Win News Service. Thirty years ago, on 16 to 18 September 1982, thousands of Palestinian children, women and men were massacred by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut with the aid and encouragement of the Israeli army. Two months after Israel invaded Lebanon in the summer of 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, whose armed forces and leadership had taken up residence in Lebanon after being driven out of Jordan, was forced to leave Lebanon for Tunisia. When an American government representative brokered an agreement under which the PLO and the Israeli army were both supposed to pull out of Lebanon, a guarantee was signed that the 14,000 Palestinian civilians (and some Lebanese) living in refugee camps would be protected. But then the UN-flagged forces comprising American, French and Italian troops themselves left Lebanon and Israeli troops reoccupied Beirut. On 14 September Lebanon's pro-Israeli president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated. Israel publicly blamed the PLO for this assassination, though this was not true. On 15 September, claiming that "2,000 terrorists" remained in the camps, the Israeli army surrounded and sealed off Sabra and Shatila. According to Time magazine, "[Israeli Defence Minister] Ariel Sharon reportedly told the Gemayels that the Israeli army would be moving into West Beirut and that he expected the Christian forces to go into the Palestinian refugee camps. Sharon also reportedly discussed with the Geymayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge for the assassination of Bashir, but the details of the conversation are not known." (Time, 21 February 1983) On 16 September Israeli jeeps ferried Phalangist militiamen into the camps. Israeli flares lit up the evening sky enabling the systematic slaughter of Palestinians. The Phalangist leader of the operation, Elie Hobeika, and the senior Israeli field commander on the scene, Brigadier General Amos Yanon, were stationed together atop the tallest building in the area, from where they could survey the scene. Throughout the next few days they received progress reports of the atrocities unfolding on the ground, reports that were passed along to the Israeli government. An Israeli lieutenant later told a Knesset (Israeli parliament) commission that an hour after the Phalangist militia went into the camp, an officer in the camp radioed for instructions about what to do with the women and children. Hobeika answered, "This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do." The Israeli general was aware of this exchange (see indictsharon.net). There is evidence that the Israeli army itself killed many Palestinians, even after the massacre had ended in the camp. Only about 600 bodies were found in Sabra and Shatila, while almost 2,000 people are known to have disappeared and the actual toll may have been higher. Witnesses says that Israeli soldiers prevented civilians from escaping. Israeli snipers located on several rooftops fired down on people in the streets. The first people allowed into the camps after the massacre found alleyways filled with piled-up bodies and courtyards full of dead families. British journalist Robert Fisk, described seeing "probably well over a thousand" Palestinian men and boys held prisoner in the nearby sports stadium. Many of them had been brought from neighbouring areas during the massacre or from the camp afterwards. Israeli secret police officers (Shin Beth) and Phalangists took some prisoners away one or two at a time. A few were released. But when Fisk went back, the stadium was deserted. A woman survivor who went in search of her husband described convoys of canvas-covered Israeli trucks leaving the stadium with unknown cargo. She, Fisk and other experts and historians believe that the Israelis killed most of the prisoners and buried them in secret graves. (Robert Fisk, The Independent, reprinted by Counterpunch, 28 November 2001) Robert Fisk captured the scene immediately after the massacre: "I walked into a place of such horror that – for the first and only night of my life – I suffered ferocious nightmares. I had walked into the Palestinian camp of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut while Israel's Lebanese militia thugs were still finishing their work of butchery and rape. There were corpses covered in flies, disembowelled women, babies with bullets in their heads. To cross one street, I had to clamber over a pile of bodies, their arms and stomachs and heads pressing around my legs. All that moved were the flies that covered my face and the minute hands of the watches, on dead wrists. On the other side of the pile was a mass grave. When I hid from the militiamen, I found myself crouching beside a beautiful young woman whose blood was still running from a hole in her back." An American journalist wrote to her husband of her experience on entering the camp: "I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their waists and their legs spread apart; dozens of young men shot after being lined up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles." The personal testimony of survivors later given to a Belgian investigative judge speaks for itself. From Samiha Abbas Hijazi: "On the Friday that there had been a massacre, I went to my neighbours' house. I saw our neighbour Mustafa Al-Habarat; he was injured and lying in a bath of his own blood. His wife and children were dead. We took him to the Gaza hospital and then we fled. When things had calmed down, I came back and searched for my daughter and my husband for four days. I spent four days looking for them through all the dead bodies. I found [my daughter] Zeinab dead, her face burnt. Her husband had been cut in two and had no head." Mohamed Ibrahim Faqih lost his two daughters, aged two and 14: "A shell hit our neighbours' house. Some of the shrapnel hit my son in the chest and the leg. We took him to hospital and when he came back, he found his daughter Fatima had been hit with an axe, along with my little girl. I noticed that they had dug a ditch in the ground and they had buried them alive in the ditch. The baby's throat had been slit. I also saw people who had been killed and pregnant women with their stomachs ripped open. About 30 young people had been massacred near our house, without any distinction made as to whether they were Lebanese or Palestinian. They didn't spare anyone; they killed everyone they came across. In the home of our neighbour Ali Salim Fayad, they had killed his wife and children. "My God, what can I say? What can I tell you? They had demolished the shops in Sabra road and dug large ditches where they had buried the victims. I saw about 400 children's corpses. They upturned the earth and buried them." Jamila Mohamed Khalife: "The Israelis and the Phalangists came back a short while later with a loudspeaker, through which they asked us to give ourselves up, promising that our lives would be spared if we came out of the shelter. We waved a white flag, but when we came out of the shelter my father said that our lives would not be spared and that they were going to kill us. I told him not to be scared and to come with us. They dragged us all along; women, children and men; my father tried to escape and they killed him in front of my mother and my little sister. "They made us all walk; our injured neighbour was with us, carrying her intestines and haemorrhaging. She and I escaped to the interior of Shatila camp, and from there we sought refuge in Gaza hospital. When they arrived near Gaza hospital, we ran away once again... When the massacre was over, we went back and saw the corpses of the dead, including our neighbours' son Samir, murdered. And under the corpses, they had placed bombs as booby-traps." The news horrified many people around the world. Even in Israel, right after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, as many as 400,000 people – almost one in ten Israelis – gathered in Tel Aviv to protest against it. A hand grenade thrown into the crowd exasperated a political crisis that led to the establishment of the Knesset commission which came to a conclusion that the massacre was the work of the Phalangists alone, but that Sharon and other officers failed to prevent it. That commission held that Sharon bore "personal responsibility", and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was "indirectly responsible" for not looking into Sharon's negligence. Just after the massacre, a crushing majority in the UN General Assembly voted to condemn it as a case of genocide. The U.S. was one of 20 Western and other countries abstaining, and Washington put out a statement objecting to that characterization as "a serious and reckless misuse of language" since the word "genocide" implies intent, whereas what happened should be considered a "tragedy" – as if it were a traffic accident where no one was really responsible. When twenty years later, a Belgian court prepared to try the Israelis Sharon and Yanon and the Phalangist Hobeika for the massacre, Hobeika said that in his own defence he would testify that the Israelis knew and approved of everything. He was killed by a car bomb. The case was dismissed at the U.S.'s insistence.