Summary
The massacre of unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut on 16-18 September 1982 by Phalange and Haddad militias, in Rose’s account (following Chomsky) carried out while the camps were sealed off and under direct observation by the Israeli Defence Forces, and after the United States peacekeeping force — committed to guaranteeing the safety of Palestinian non-combatants left in Beirut — had withdrawn early (Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, lines 620-644).
Details
- On Thursday 16 September 1982 truckloads of Christian Lebanese Phalange and Haddad troops, armed by the Israelis, entered the camps; the camps had been sealed off by the IDF so that no one could move in or out, and were under direct observation from nearby command posts (lines 620-624).
- Throughout Thursday night Israeli flares lighted the camps while the militias methodically slaughtered the inhabitants; the massacre continued until Saturday under the observation of the Israeli military a few hundred yards away, and bulldozers were used to scoop up bodies and cart them away or bury them under the rubble (lines 626-630).
- On Friday afternoon Chief of Staff Eitan and Generals Drori and Yaron met the Phalangist command; Eitan congratulated them on having carried out good work, offered them a bulldozer with IDF markers removed and authorised them to remain in the camps for another 12 hours; at 5 a.m. Saturday morning the murderers began to leave, and after 36 hours the slaughter ended (lines 630-632).
- Journalists reported the massacre as it happened: a Haddad militiaman told James Pringle of Newsweek cheerfully that they were slaughtering them, and Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post described six Israelis watching from the army’s main observation post as people were brought to a mass grave, shot and dumped in it (lines 632-636).
- The Israeli army said between 700 and 800 had been killed; the Lebanese government said 762 bodies were actually recovered and 1,200 more were buried privately by relatives; most of the Palestinians killed — at least a quarter were Lebanese Shiite Moslems — had come as refugees from Israel’s Upper Galilee and Jaffa in 1948 (lines 636-638).
- The Israeli government at first tried to claim it knew nothing about the massacre (lines 632-634).
- The United States stood alone with Israel at the United Nations in refusing to condemn the massacre; the American peacekeeping force had withdrawn after the PLO fighters had gone, two weeks before its original mandate ran out, effectively ending the multinational commitment to protect Palestinian civilians, and shortly after this the IDF moved into Beirut and the massacre began (lines 638-644).
Related pages
Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, Lebanon invasion 1982, Phalange, Palestine Liberation Organization, State Terrorism