Pearls and Irritations

“The killers were often not satisfied with killing; in many cases, the attackers cut off the limbs of their victims before finishing them off. They smash the heads of children and infants on the walls. Women and girls were raped before being killed with axes. Men are sometimes taken out of their homes in groups to be killed in masse in the street with axes and knives. Militias spread terror and killed men, women, children and the elderly without discrimination. They would not distinguish between Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and Palestinians. Some have been hanged, and others have had their stomachs cut out.”

At four o’clock on Thursday, 16 September 1982, trucks carrying hundreds of Lebanese Phalange militias, which Israel had helped to establish, train, arm, and supply with military experts and advisers, arrived at the entrances of the Israeli-controlled Sabra and Shatila camps. The troops opened the way for them to begin killings, raping, and indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in their homes in cold blood for three days. The families in their homes didn’t know what was happening, and some of them were killed as they sat around the dining table. Even hospitals were not spared from the killers. The Palestinian fighters left their families behind in the trust of the United States, which promised to protect them, but betrayed its pledge.

In three consecutive days of slaughter, 3,500 victims were counted, most of them children, women and the elderly, from among the 20,000 who were in the camps on the eve of the massacre, along with hundreds of other individuals and families killed whose bodies were collected by Phalangist forces in trucks and thrown into the sea. Other victims were buried in unknown locations in mass graves and couldn’t be identified.

In his booklet, La fin des mythes, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un massacre, Seuil, Paris, 1982 (“The End of Myths, Sabra and Chatila: Investigation into a Massacre,”), the Israeli investigative journalist Amnon Kapeliouk of Le Monde Diplomatique recounts those who survived the massacre saying,

“The militia were shooting at anyone who moved in the alleys. They broke down the doors of homes, shooting entire families at dinner, and killing some residents in pajamas in their beds. In several apartments, children between the ages of 3 and 4 were found wrapped in blankets covered in blood. The killers were often not satisfied with killing; in many cases, the attackers cut off the limbs of their victims before finishing them off. They smash the heads of children and infants on the walls. Women and girls were raped before being killed with axes. Men are sometimes taken out of their homes in groups to be killed en masse in the street with axes and knives. Militias spread terror and killed men, women, children and the elderly without discrimination. They would not distinguish between Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and Palestinians. Some have been hanged, and others have had their stomachs cut out. Among them is a 29-year-old woman named Zainat, who was eight months pregnant; they had cut open her stomach and placed the fetus on his mother’s arm, and her seven children were also killed. One of her relatives, Wafaa Hammoud, 26, seven months pregnant, was killed along with her four children. In this neighbourhood, several other women were raped before killing them, then their bodies were placed in the form of a cross, and one of the girls who were raped, from the Meqdad family, is seven years old…

“…other eyewitnesses spoke of trucks full of civilians going to unknown destinations… Residents of the villages of Choueifat and Hadath, south of Beirut, say three large trucks and two smaller vehicles, all full of civilians, passed through their village, and no trace of these people was shown.

“…Armed men appeared inside Acre Hospital, south of Shatila, where they killed some patients and finished off the wounded in their beds before killing several people from the medical staff and employees, as well as residents who had taken refuge in the hospital. Intisar Ismail, a 19-year-old Palestinian nurse, was raped ten times in a row. It was difficult to identify her body, which was completely disfigured, to the extent that only her ring enabled her to be identified. The authenticity of the event was confirmed by a Lebanese nurse who was a colleague of the victim…”

Dr Swee Chai Ang, a British Singaporean orthopaedic surgeon, was a volunteer with the British Christian Aid. She worked with the Palestine Red Crescent Society in its Gaza Hospital in Sabra and Shatila camps. She recounted in an article:

“With guns pointing at us we walked along the main road of the camp. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of unarmed camp people — women, old men and children —were rounded up by militia. I remember the terror in their eyes. A desperate young mother passed me her baby so warm and cuddly. At gunpoint she was forced to take him back. Both were killed, together with those rounded up after we were taken away. Homes were bulldozed by large military bulldozers.”

During the days of the massacre, the Israeli army used binoculars to monitor the killings from the rooftops of the buildings overlooking the camps. At night they fired flares to illuminate the murderers’ crime scenes. They could hear the gunshots and bombs fired by the Phalange terrorists. The Israeli forces stationed at the camp’s gates did not allow hundreds of escapees to leave the camps and forced them to go back to meet their fate at the hands of the terrorists.

The victims’ nationalities were categorised as follows: 75% Palestinian, 20% Lebanese, 5% Syrians, Iranians, Bengalis, Turks, Kurds, Egyptians, Algerians, Pakistanis, and others whose nationalities were not determined.

The New York Times uncovered new classified documents likely to involve US actors in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. In an article titled “The Preventable Massacre”, Seth Anziska, an American researcher at Columbia University, found Israeli historical documents dated 17 September 1982 documenting a meeting between then-Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon and the American envoy to the Middle East, Morris Draper. According to the document, Sharon reassured Draper that Israel would not implicate the United States in the crime, saying: “Are you afraid that somebody will think that you were in collusion with us? Deny it. We denied it.” The meeting transcript reveals that the Americans were browbeaten by Sharon’s false insistence that “terrorists” needed “mopping up”.

Israel tried first to delay and evade its responsibility; then it tried to appear as an innocent victim, as expressed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin saying, “Goyim kill Goyim [non-Jews], and they come to hang the Jews.” Israel was unable to wash the blood off its hands, and eventually, it was forced to comply with international pressure. A commission of inquiry formally accused Sharon of responsibility for the massacre, pushing him to resign as defence minister, but he returned a few years later as prime minister. The Sabra and Shatila massacre is one of over a hundred massacres committed by Zionists since their invasion of Palestine and the Arab world.

Now, 42 years later, Israel is still carrying out daily massacres against the Palestinians with American, Australian and Western weapons and complicity.

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