Although many have suggested that the massacres were a direct result of the murder of President Bachir Gemayel of the Lebanon and leader of the Phalangists, it was not a spontaneous act of vengeance, but a well planned operation. The Israelis were keen to motivate a mass exodus of Palestinians from Beirut and other parts of the Lebanon by means of mass terror. They had used this tactic before in a previous number of massacres, and it was a disturbing pattern of political struggle directed against innocent civilians – women, children and the aged population.
Initially, the Israeli government announced that its intention was to only penetrate as far as 40 km (25 miles) into the Lebanese territory. However, this was just a ruse, as Sharon had already planned a more ambitious project some months earlier. Having already committed a serious of violations against the civilian population in the south of the country, the Israelis proceeded to penetrate as far as Beirut. By 18 June, 1982, the Israelis had surrounded the PLO armed forces in the western part of the capital. The intensive shelling of Beirut resulted in the deaths of 18,000 people and a further 30,000 injuries, the majority of which were civilians.
The fighting went on for a period of two months, after which a ceasefire was negotiated via the US Envoy, Philip Habib. Under the terms of the ceasefire, the PLO was to evacuate Beirut under the watchful eye of a multinational force. The USA told the Palestinians that they would take control of the security of the civilians in the camps after the evacuation was completed on 1 September, 1982, but no such supervision was ever put into operation.
The decision to move to West Beirut was taken by the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin and Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, even though it violated the ceasefire and broke Israel’s promise to US President Reagan, not to enter Beirut after the PLO’s evacuation. On 10 September, the multinational forces evacuated Beirut and the next day, Ariel Sharon announced that 2,000 ‘terrorists’ had stayed inside the refugee camps around Beirut.
On the evening of 14 September, Ariel Sharon and Israel’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, had a meeting in which plans were made to have the Phalange forces storm the two refugee camps. By dawn, on 15 September, Israel stormed West Beirut and cordoned off the Sabra and Shatila camps.
The following day a high-level meeting was held and the job of carrying out the operation was assigned to a major security official in the Lebanese forces, Eli Haqiba. Also present were the Supreme Commander of the Northern Forces, General Amir Dawri and Fadi Afram, Commander of the Lebanese forces.
The attack on the camps by the Phalangists militiamen started just before sunset on Thursday, 16 September, under the watchful eye of their Israeli allies. The Israeli army surrounded the camps, providing the Phalangists with the necessary support to carry out their heinous crime. They gave them bulldozers and a maps of the insides of the camps. Fired by the death of their Christian president, Bachir Gemayel, and the years of brutality they had suffered at the hands of the Palestinians during the PLO occupation of Lebanon, the Phalangists set about their three-day orgy of rape and slaughter. To give them more light, the Christian militia set off incandescent bombs into the air so that none of the Palestinians would be able to escape. Those who did try to escape the killing and rape – women, children and the elderly – were quickly brought back to the camps by the waiting Israeli soldiers. By Saturday morning, 18 September, the massacre had reached its peak and thousands of Sabra and Shatila camp refugees had been slaughtered.
By the end of the third day, there were bodies everywhere and it was a nauseating scene. Many of the victims had been mutilated by axes or knives; others had their heads smashed, their eyes removed, their throats cut, and the skin had literally been stripped from their body. Severed limbs lay strewn around the floor and others had been disembowelled. It was one of the most indecent acts of genocide that the world had ever witnessed.
News of the massacre started to spread quickly after a number of women and children had successfully escaped to the Gaza Hospital in the Shatila camp. They told the doctors there exactly what was happening, and before long foreign media had got hold of the news. Journalists who went into the camps after the massacre were nauseated by what they saw. Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post described the scene:
The scene at the Shatila camp when foreign observers entered Saturday morning was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under the hot sun, and the streets were littered with thousands of spent cartridges. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, many with the inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys and streets, apparently shot as they tried to escape. Each little dirt alley through the deserted buildings, where Palestinians have lived since fleeting Palestine when Israel was created in 1948, told its own horror story.
The exact number of victims may never be fully ascertained. At the time the international Red Cross counted 1,500 bodies, but by 22 September, this number had risen to 2,400. The following day a further 350 bodies were uncovered, but because the Lebanese authorities forbade the opening of mass graves, the true number will probably never be known. Realistically, the number of victims is somewhere around 3,000 to 3,500, one quarter of whom were Lebanese, while the remainder were Palestinians.
The Israeli public were sickened when they discovered what had taken place, and on 25 September a huge demonstration of 300,000 Israelis was held in Tel Aviv, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon. They also demanded the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate the circumstances of the massacre.
Even though Sharon insisted that he could not have known that the Phalangists were going to commit the atrocities in the Sabra and Shatila camps, he was still forced to resign his post as Defence Minister. Sharon’s reputation worldwide deteriorated to such a degree that it nearly ended his political career.
The Phalangist leader, Elie Hobeika, who was held directly responsible for carrying out the massacres, was under investigation for several years before his sudden death in 1985. Apart from his involvement in the massacres, Hobeika was also linked to several other crimes, including the 1978 assassination of Zghorta MP, Tony Franjieh, and a 1985 car bomb attack that severely injured Sidon MP, Mustafa Saad and killed his daughter, Natasha. It is believed that the Syrians discovered Hobeika’s involvement with the CIA and arranged for his death in a part of Beirut that was heavily patrolled by Lebanese security forces. He was killed in a bomb blast on 24 January, 2002, just one day after he said he was ready to testify in a case brought by Palestinians in Belgium accusing Ariel Sharon of sanctioning the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
The secrets of the Palestinian camp atrocities have probably gone to the grave with the death of Hobeika. A Belgian court has now postponed a decision over whether to indict Ariel Sharon for his role, while lawyers for the survivors try to gather more evidence. However, as two more Phalangist militia have been mysteriously murdered since the death of Hobeika, there is major concern that the true events may never be uncovered as the death list continues to grow.