Sabra and Shatila massacre Totally Explained

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ť This page is related to the 1982 events only. For the 1985–1987 events, see war of the camps.

Sabra and Shatila massacre (or Sabra and Chatila massacre; Arabic: مذبحة صبرا وشاتيلا) was a massacre carried out in September 1982 by the Christian Lebanese Forces militia group.
   Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen were permitted to enter two Palestinian refugee camps, in an area under Israeli army control, and the militia massacred an estimated several hundred to several thousand civilians.
   The Lebanese Forces group stood under the direct command of Elie Hobeika, who later became a long-serving Lebanese Member of Parliament and, in the 1990s, a cabinet minister. The number of victims of the massacre varies according to source: the lowest confirmed estimate is 700; the highest is placed at 3,500 (see below). The term of office of the Israeli military's Chief of Staff, Lt. General Rafael Eitan, expired before the Kahan Commission published its findings, and Ariel Sharon, who was serving as Israel's Defence Minister, resigned after their publication.
   A major international outcry against Israel erupted. The Phalangists, who perpetrated the killings, were spared the brunt of the condemnations for it. Because the Sabra and Shatila camps were externally surrounded by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) throughout the slaughter by Lebanese militia in 1982, some commentators have suggested that the Israeli military may have been involved in the incident to some extent (see below).

Background

From 1975 to 1990, groups in competing alliances with neighboring countries fought against each other in the Lebanese Civil War. The civil war saw many shifting alliances among the main players; the Lebanese Maronite Christians, led by the Phalangist party and militia, were allied initially with Syria then with Israel, which provided them with arms and training to fight against the PLO faction; other factions were allied with Syria, Iran, and other states of the region. In addition, allegedly Israel had been training, arming, supplying and uniforming the Christian South Lebanon Army, led by Saad Haddad, since 1978. Infighting and massacres between these groups claimed several thousands of victims; notable massacres in this period included the Syrian-backed Karantina Massacre (January 1976) by Phalangists against Palestinian refugees, Damour massacre (January 1976) by the PLO against Maronites and the Tel al-Zaatar Massacre (August 1976) by Phalangists against Palestinian refugees. The total death toll in Lebanon for the whole civil war period was up to 1,000,000 victims.
   Sabra is the name of a poor neighborhood in the southern outskirts of West Beirut, which is adjacent to the Shatila UNRWA refugee camp set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949. Over the years the populations of the two areas became ever more mingled, and the loose terminology "Sabra and Shatila camps" has become usual. Their populations had been swelled by Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites from the south fleeing the war.
   The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been using southern Lebanon as a base for attacks on Israel, and Israel had been bombing PLO positions in southern Lebanon. The attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London on June 4 by Abu Nidal's organization became a casus belli for a full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon. On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with 60,000 troops in an act condemned by the UN Security Council. Two months later, under a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire agreement signed in late August, the PLO agreed to leave Lebanon under international supervision, and Israel agreed not to advance further into Beirut.
   On August 23 1982, Bachir Gemayel, who was very popular among Maronites, was elected President of Lebanon by the National Assembly. Israel had relied on Gemayel and his forces as a counterbalance to the PLO, and ties between Israel and Maronite groups had grown stronger.
   On September 1, the expulsion of the PLO fighters from Beirut was completed. Two days later, Israel deployed its armed forces around the refugee camps.
The Israeli Premier Menachem Begin met Gemayel in Nahariya and strongly urged him to sign a peace treaty with Israel. According to some sources, Begin also wanted the continuing presence of the South Lebanon Army in southern Lebanon led by Major Saad Haddad (who supported peaceful relations with Israel) in order to control attacks and violence, and action from Gemayel to move on the PLO fighters which Israel believed remained a hidden threat in Lebanon. However, the Phalangists, who were previously united as reliable Israeli allies, were now split because of developing alliances with Syria, which remained militarily hostile to Israel. As such, Gemayel rejected signing a peace treaty with Israel and didn't authorize operations to root out the remaining PLO militants.
   On September 14 1982, Gemayel was assassinated in a massive explosion which demolished his headquarters. Eventually, the culprit, Habib Tanious Shartouni, who confessed to the crime turned out to be a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and an agent of Syrian intelligence. The Palestinian and Muslim leaders denied any connection.
   Within hours of the assassination, Ariel Sharon, Israeli Defense Minister at the time, and then Prime Minister Menachem Begin, decided to occupy West Beirut, informing only then Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and not consulting the Israeli cabinet. The same night Sharon began preparations for entering the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps. Thus on September 15, the Israeli army reoccupied West Beirut. This Israeli action breached its agreement with the United States not to occupy West Beirut; the US had also given written guarantees that it would ensure the protection of the Muslims of West Beirut. Israel's occupation also violated its peace agreements with Muslim forces in Beirut and with Syria.

Events

By noon of September 15th, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) had completely surrounded the Sabra-Shatila camps, and controlled all entrances and exits by the means of checkpoints. The IDF also occupied a number of multi-story buildings as observation posts. Amongst those was the seven-story Kuwaiti embassy which, according to TIME, had "an unobstructed and panoramic view" of the camps. Hours later, IDF tanks began shelling the camps. met with the Lebanese Phalangist militia units, inviting them to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to clean out terrorist nests. Under the Israeli plan, Israeli soldiers would control the perimeters of the refugee camps and provide logistical support while the Phalangists would enter the camps, find the PLO fighters and hand them over to Israeli forces. The meetings concluded at 3:00 p.m. September 16.
At 11:00 p.m. a report was sent to the IDF headquarters in East Beirut, reporting the killings of 300 people, including civilians. The report was forwarded to headquarters in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where it was seen by more than 20 senior Israeli officers.
The Phalangists didn't exit the camps at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday as ordered. They forced the remaining survivors to march out of the camps, randomly killing individuals, and sending others to the stadium for interrogations; this went on for the entire day. The militia finally left the camps at 8:00 a.m. on September 18. The first foreign journalists allowed into the camps at 9:00 a.m. found hundreds of bodies scattered about the camp, many of them mutilated. The first official news of the massacre was broadcast around noon.

Number of victims

The number of victims of the massacre is disputed. There is general agreement that the exact numbers are very hard to pin down, due to the chaotic conditions during and after the massacre, burials and initial victim-counting, as well as the fact that it has been an extremely politically sensitive issue even to the present day. The killings came on top of an estimated 95,000 deaths that had occurred during the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1982. It is thought that at least a quarter of the victims were Lebanese, the rest Palestinians. Here follow the main estimates that have circulated, ordered by number of deaths:

A letter from the head of the Red Cross delegation to the Lebanese Minister of Defense, cited in the Kahan Commission report as "exhibit 153", stated that Red Cross representatives had counted 328 bodies; but the commission noted that "this figure, however, doesn't include all the bodies..."
The Kahan Commission said that, according to "a document which reached us (exhibit 151), the total number of victims whose bodies were found from 18.9.82 to 30.9.82 is 460", stating further that this figure consists of "the dead counted by the Lebanese Red Cross, the International Red Cross, the Lebanese Civil Defense, the medical corps of the Lebanese army, and by relatives of the victims." Thirty-five women and children were among the dead according to this account.
Israeli figures, based on IDF intelligence, cite a figure of 700–800. In the Kahan Commission's view, "this may well be the number most closely corresponding with reality."
According to the BBC, "at least 800" Palestinians died
Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout in her Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 gives a minimum consisting of 1,300 named victims based on detailed comparison of 17 victim lists and other supporting evidence, and estimates an even higher total
Robert Fisk, one of the first journalists to visit the scene, quotes (without endorsing) unnamed Phalangist officers as saying "that 2,000 Palestinians - women as well as men - had been killed in Chatila." The Palestinian Red Crescent put the number killed at over 2,000.
In his book published soon after the massacre, the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk of Le Monde Diplomatique, arrived at about 2,000 bodies disposed of after the massacre from official and Red Cross sources and "very roughly" estimated 1,000 - 1,500 other victims disposed of by the Phalangists themselves. His total of 3,000-3,500 is frequently quoted by Palestinians.

No action, national or international, was ever taken against Phalangist commander Elie Hobeika, who was killed by a bomb in Beirut in 2002; some speculated he was preparing to testify in the Belgian war-crimes tribunal investigating the massacre, though others doubted he intended to testify at all.

Controversies

Genocide label

On December 16 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide. Paragraph 2, which "resolved that the massacre was an act of genocide", was adopted by ninety-eight votes to nineteen, with twenty-three abstentions: All Western democracies abstained from voting.
According to William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, "the term genocide (…) had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision”.

Israeli role in the massacre

Media and public reactions

The massacre received much attention from the world media. According to Bernard Lewis:

Characteristic features were the suspension of critical thinking by journalists who normally exercise a salutary skepticism; unhesitating acceptance and publication of what soon proved to be self-evident propaganda from partisan sources. Most striking and revealing, was the frequent usage of language evocative of the Nazis... Such words as "blitzkrieg", "lebensraum", "genocide", and "final solution" were freely used to reinforce the comparison, sometimes stated and often implied, between Israelis in Lebanon and the Nazis in conquered and occupied Europe... Most reports concentrated their whole attack on the Israelis who, as was known from the start, hadn't actually participated in the massacre and whose negligence or complicity hadn't yet been established, and almost failed to mention the Lebanese Christian militias who actually did the deed. The careless reader or viewer could have got the impression that this was a massacre unique in the modern history of the Middle East, and that it was perpetrated directly by the Israelis. Neither was true.

In Europe news of the massacre resulted in a backlash against Jews and Israel. In Italy, airport workers boycotted the Israeli airline El-Al, badges were distributed with the star of David and swastika intertwined, and the slogan "Nazisrael" came to be used. Bombs were exploded in synagogues in Milan and Rome — the latter resulting in the death of a two-year-old boy and the wounding of 34 other people. At the demands of labor unions, a Milan hotel cancelled a scheduled bar mitzvah reception. In France, on September 21, a group of teachers at Lycée Voltaire, one of the leading French high schools, stopped all classes between 10 a.m. and midday. They drafted two letters, one to the French president, demanding the breaking of all diplomatic and economic relations with Israel and official recognition of the PLO; the other to the Israeli embassy in Paris, demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. The letters were read to the students of the school assembled in the courtyard.
Bernard Lewis argues that the response to the massacre was so overwhelming because the event presented an opportunity to blame Jews: "There is no evidence that the teachers of [theLycée Voltaire] had ever been moved to such action by events in Poland or Uganda, Central America or Afghanistan, South Africa and Southeast Asia, or for that matter in the Middle East where the massacre of Sabra and Shatila... lacked neither precedents nor parallels". He contrasts the reactions to the Sabra and Shatila massacre with those to the Hama massacre which was perpetrated in the same year by the Syrian army and in which tens of thousands were killed, but on which, according to Lewis, "not a dog barked".

Kahan commission report

In its initial statements, the Israeli government declared that those critics who regarded the IDF as having responsibility for the events at Sabra and Shatila were guilty of "a blood libel against the Jewish state and its Government." However, as the news of the massacre spread around the world, the controversy grew, and on September 25, 300,000 Israelis—roughly one-tenth of the country's population at the time—demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding answers. The protest, known in Israel as the "400,000 protest" (the number of protesters was first exaggerated) was the biggest protest in Israel's history.
On September 28, the Israeli Government resolved to establish a Commission of Inquiry, which was led by former Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan. The report included evidence from Israeli army personnel, as well as political figures and Phalangist officers. In the report, published in the spring of 1983, the Kahan Commission stated that there was no evidence that Israeli units took direct part in the massacre and that it was the "direct responsibility of Phalangists." However, the Commission recorded that Israeli military personnel were aware that a massacre was in progress without taking serious steps to stop it, and that reports of a massacre in progress were made to senior Israeli officers and even to an Israeli cabinet minister; it therefore regarded Israel as bearing part of the "indirect responsibility."
The Kahan commission found that Ariel Sharon "bears personal responsibility" and recommended his dismissal from the post of Defense Minister, stating that:

It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of defense for having disregarded the prospect of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps and for having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the chances of a massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps...

The Kahan commission also recommended the dismissal of Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy, and the effective promotion freeze of Division Commander Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron for at least three years.
   At first, Sharon refused to resign, and Begin refused to fire him. It was only after the death of Emil Grunzweig after a grenade was tossed into the dispersing crowd of a Peace Now protest march, which also injured ten others, that a compromise was reached: Sharon would resign as Defense minister, but remain in the Cabinet as a minister without portfolio. Even though the Kahan Commission concluded that Sharon shouldn't hold public office again, he'd later become Prime Minister of Israel. Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, have claimed that Israel could have predicted that a massacre by Phalange fighters who entered the camps might have taken place. In particular, such commentators don't believe it's possible that there were "2000 PLO terrorists" remaining in the camps, because (1) the Kahan Commission documents that the Israeli army allowed only 150 Phalangist fighters into the camps and (2) the Phalangists suffered only two casualties; an improbable outcome of a supposedly 36-hour battle of 150 militants against 2000 experienced "PLO terrorists" [FT].
   However, other commentators point out that Israel never asserted that all of the PLO members (as opposed to Fatah militants) were armed or tried to organize a defense.
Moreover, on several previous occasions, the Phalangists successfully assisted the Israeli army to filter out PLO fighters from the rest of the Lebanese civilian population. Israel points out that the Phalangist field commander, Elie Hobeika, was at that time already maintaining contacts with Syria (he openly switched allegiance to Syria at a later date), suggesting that he may have orchestrated the massacres as a political provocation against his Israeli allies. Finally, Israel never issued an order to kill unarmed civilians in Sabra and Shatila.
   Robert Maroun Hatem, Elie Hobeika's bodyguard, stated in his book From Israel to Damascus that Hobeika ordered the massacre of civilians in defiance of Israeli instructions to behave like a "dignified" army.
   Ariel Sharon sued Time magazine for libel in American and Israeli courts in a $50 million libel suit, after Time published a story in its February 21 1983, issue, implying that Sharon had "reportedly discussed with the Gemayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge" for Bashir's assassination. Time won the suit in the U.S. court because Sharon's defense failed to establish that Time had "acted out of malice," as required under the U.S. libel law, although the jury had earlier found the article false and defamatory.
   Pierre Rehov, a documentary filmmaker who worked on the case with former Lebanese soldiers, while making his film Holy Land: Christians in Peril, came to the conclusion that Hubeika was definitely responsible for the massacre, despite the orders he'd received from Ariel Sharon to behave humanely. Benny Morris, in Israel's Secret Wars, stated that Israeli forces provided the bulldozers used to bury the massacred Palestinians. In the 2005 Swiss-French-German-Lebanese co-produced documentary Massaker six former Forces Libanaises soldiers who participated personally in the massacre stated there was direct Israeli participation. One of them said that he saw Israeli soldiers driving bulldozers into inhabited houses inside the camp. Another said that Israeli soldiers provided the Forces Libanaises soldiers with material to dispose of the corpses lying around in the streets. Several of the soldiers said that they'd received training in Israel.

Belgian court proceedings

After Sharon's 2001 election to the post of Prime Minister of Israel, a lawsuit was filed by relatives of the victims of the massacre in Belgium alleging his personal responsibility for the massacres, under a 1993 law first used against people implicated in the Rwandan Genocide. The Belgian Supreme Court ruled on February 12 2003, that Sharon (and others involved, such as Israeli General Yaron) could be indicted under this accusation. Israel maintained that the lawsuit was initiated for political reasons. Elie Hobeika, the Phalangist commander at the time of the massacre never stood trial and held a post of a minister in Lebanese government in the 1990s. He was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut on January 24 2002; some speculated he was preparing to testify in the Belgian war-crimes tribunal investigating the massacre, though others doubted he intended to testify at all.
On September 24 2003, Belgium's highest court dismissed the war crimes complaints against Ariel Sharon, ruling there was no longer a legal basis for the lawsuit.

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