The unparalleled barbarism of the Israeli-trained and Israeli-supported Christian Phalange in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila some 26 years ago (16 – 18 September 1982) is grim evidence of an unleashed evil rarely seen.

Sabra and Shatila is nothing compared to the horrific acts and crimes that palestinians have committed against Lebanese citizens and especially the christians! so every action there;s a reaction… Palestinians decided they want to make Lebanon theirs and the PLO was getting more powerful each day and attacking the Christians! What? we sit and watch? while a terrorist organisation takes over? Sorry that won’t happen! and the only reason Lebanon is corrupted is because of the Palestinians…. Lebanon should never have allowed them in !

The “Lebanese Forces” was created as a result of excruciating circumstances in Lebanon in late seventies when the Lebanese Christian community felt the need to defend itself against impending internal and external dangers and threats. These dangers were amplified by the fact that the government with its entire infrastructure proved to be impotent in containing the Palestinian military presence in Lebanon, which threatened Lebanon’ sovereignty and independence. The resistance forces consisted of several separate factions: the Phalangists, The National Liberal Party, Al-Tanzeem Party and the Guardians of The Cedars, who took a multi-lateral decision on August 1976 to consolidate the war efforts and to establish a unified resistance military council under the command of the late Lebanese president “Bashir Gemayel”.
Their goal was to liberate the Lebanese Territory from all foreign troops.

The PLO. Palestinian Liberation organization (Terrorists)
seized many areas of Lebanon, where it brutalized the population and usurped Lebanese government authority.
The torture that they implied on Christians was indescribable. They performed many massacres .. and by performing I don’t mean just killing! They used to get the mothers and daughters and rape them in front of the husband/father .. chop them into pieces and throw them. They used to bring a child , tie on leg to the father and the other to the mother and pull the parents till the child came apart. And every time they would murder a person, they would stab him with a wooden cross in the stomach and say “let your cross save you now”. These included the Damour massacre in which Palestinians massacred Christian inhabitants of the coastal town 20 miles south of Beirut, so the christians retaliated and the massacred around 3,000 Palestinian civilians and refugees during three days with Israeli forces’ knowledge and logistic help

STOP TRYING TO GET SYMPATHY… THIS IS ALL YOU ARE KNOWN FOR. WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND! PLESTINIANS!

What a powerful statement and report! Very accurate and very much appreciated. ( two points: no Napalm was used by Israel in ’82 although white phosphorus was used and some understandably confused the two…..also no bomb toy dolls were dropped by Israel….again, confusion over three types of cluster bombs used which children ( out of a total of 8 types the Israelis dropped) thought might be toys so they picked them up etc-especially the blu 63/b (called by some ‘the birdie’ due to its ‘wings’ and the cbu 58/b bomblet which is round like a baseball and Janet and I actually saw children in 1982 playing catch with them–not realizing they could detonate at any time!

I have been swamped with the Laptop Initiative we organized for the 26th Anniversary event (please see out website http://www.sabrashatila.org) but I will try to finish Part II of the piece this morning and will include information on the point you raise regarding the absence of social services provided to the victims and the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre.

I want to contact today Bayan al-Hout on the point you raise. Her book Sabra-Shatila 1982 is the most recent and best on the subject. It was published in English in 2004 by Pluto Press in London.

Very best wishes and please continue your work……….perhaps the most support the survivors and victims families receive these is meeting people including Americans who care and will never forget……It seems you are one of these.

Franklin

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_____________________________
Franklin P. Lamb, PhD
Director, Americans Concerned for
Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut
Acting Chair, the Sabra-Shatila Memorial Scholarship Program Laptop Initiative
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp
Beirut Mobile: +961-70-164-648
gro.alitahSarbaSnull@bmalpf

FOR YOUR INFORMATION PLEASE:
The Price We Pay: A Quarter Century of Israel’s use of American Weapons against Lebanon (1978-2006) is available at Amazon.com.uk or Lebanese Bookstores The Revised and Arabic Edition was released on 8/12/08. The Farsi and French Editions are expected this Fall.
And in the USA, the title is available at http://www.LebaneseBooks.com, and currently enjoys Free Standard Shipping.

It was, if one compares the gruesome modus operandi, almost a replay of the atrocities carried out by Jewish terrorists against the unarmed civilians of Deir Yassin in 1948.

Ariel Sharon knew that the PLO had left Lebanon. Israel had agreed to the PLO’s departure, yet he declared that there were 2,000 “armed terrorists” in the refugee camps. An outright lie, of course, because he was in Lebanon, commanding the Israeli forces (and presumably the Christian Phalange), and he was fully aware that the PLO had departed under the protection of a multi-national force consisting of soldiers from the US, France, and Italy, an exodus that concluded on 3 September 1982.

Then US President, Ronald Reagan, promised the PLO men that their families would be taken care of, that no harm would come to them. He lied.

On the 16 of September 1982, the Phalange moved inside the camps, (which were surrounded by Israeli soldiers who provided food, light from flares, etc., and who ensured that no one entered or left the terror zone) and commenced their two days of killing, raping, brutalizing, showing a complete disregard for women, children, infants, youth, the elderly (even animals were slaughtered); they ignored the fact that the refugees were unarmed civilians and not an “armed terrorist” anywhere. It was “mopping up”, (a move that had been planned for some time, and which Ariel Sharon knew about and approved) just as it was “mopping up” in Deir Yassin,

A civilian population was left to the mercy of such savagery that the human mind cannot ever begin to comprehend it. We will never know the exact numbers of the murdered because then, as now, the ever present Israeli bulldozer was brought into play to scoop up the bodies of the dead and dying before the media or anyone from the outside had an opportunity to assess the horror.

The figure of between 3,000 to 3,500 is one that has been used most often, and one that is perhaps closest to the truth. When we add up the number of those bodies found and buried (782 according to sources within the Lebanese government); the number of bodies buried by their families (figures from the Lebanese government and the Red Cross are 1,200); the hundreds of dead whose bodies were dumped in mass graves that were forbidden to be opened; likewise, the hundreds buried underneath the rubble, combined with the hundreds that were carted off in lorries, never to be heard from again, and the figure of between 3,000 to 3,500 is very credible.

It is a grim reflection on humankind that the governments of the world and the UN saw fit to do absolutely nothing about this massacre. It is a grim reflection on the people of the world that they remained essentially silent in the face of such evil against their fellow human beings.

Twenty six years later and what has been done to help the survivors? What compensation did they receive? What help were they given by way of counseling to assist them in coming to terms with the horrors they witnessed and lived through? And what about the walking wounded, the thousands who escaped death but were left with unspeakable injuries?

I hope that Franklin Lamb will address those issues in his article.

While we pause to remember the dead of Sabra and Shatila, we must never forget that this was not the sum total of dead as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Some 17,000 to 30,000 (depending on what one reads) Lebanon civilians died during this Israeli siege, one of the most brutal sieges in modern history, lasting for 70 days. They died from an Israeli onslaught by sea, air, land; they died from the Israeli use of cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, Fuel Air bombs, and napalm. The Israeli forces even sank to the depraved state of dropping booby-trapped toys.

Schools, orphanages, hospitals, apartment buildings were targeted and bombed in what could only have been a conscious effort to kill as many civilians as possible. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, and Beirut was a virtual ruin.

The outside world stood by and did absolutely nothing.

It was following this illegal invasion, and large scale death and destruction, that an organization, which we know today as Hizbollah, was formed.

Never again must invaders have a free rein; never again must the Lebanese people be at the mercy of such unprecedented evil with no one to defend them.