Summary
The East Beirut Palestinian refugee camp whose 1976 siege by right-wing, predominantly Christian militias Parkinson’s interlocutors treat as the emblematic touchstone of the Palestinian struggle in Lebanon and a harbinger of later attacks on the camps, and whose survivors’ shared siege experience overrode factional affiliation in their later mobilization (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.66).
Details
- The camp and neighbouring Jisr al-Basha were centres of leftist labour and political organizing, strategically located near major industrial zones on the main highway between Beirut and the Christian heartland in the Metn; in January 1976 Maronite militias laid siege to both with heavy artillery, and overran Dbayeh camp and expelled and massacred hundreds in the Maslakh-Karantina district in the same month (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.65).
- Survivors’ memories centre on malnutrition, snipers, constant shelling and medical shortages — the camp was left without antibiotics, anesthesia or plasma supplies, with widespread gangrene — and on severe dehydration, alongside inability to leave for fear of torture, rape or murder (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.66).
- Zahra, a survivor, told Parkinson the siege “canceled all affiliations” and that people stuck together “because of the siege”, not because of shared political affiliations (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.66).
- A military cordon was established in January 1976; the camp’s last shipment of preserved food, hygienic supplies and medicines arrived on April 24, 1976; the Tigers under Dany Chamoun escalated the assault on June 20, when, as Y. Sayigh is quoted, “up to 5,000 shells landed on the camps, damaging up to 70 per cent of their housing”; Jisr al-Basha fell on June 24 (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.66-67).
- Syria switched its support to the Lebanese Front and provided artillery fire against the camp; the supply chain via the Beirut River was severed, near-starvation followed, and a July Assad-Arafat ceasefire collapsed in early August (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.67).
- The camp fell on August 12, 1976; between 9,000 and 12,000 civilians fled, Lebanese Front militias executed between 1,000 and 2,000 people as they evacuated, and approximately 4,000 people died over the course of the siege; members of the Lebanese Front immediately bulldozed the entire community (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.67).
- The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine opened the first clinic in the camp in the 1970s; the camp’s branch of the General Union of Palestinian Women and its scouting organizations figure in interlocutors’ accounts of pre-siege life (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.66, p.69, p.73).
- Some fighters who survived the siege were still in West Beirut in 1982 and kept their personal weapons for self-defence after the PLO evacuation (Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, PDF p.90).
Related pages
Beyond the Lines — Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon, Sabra and Shatila massacre, War of the Camps, Fateh, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine