Sabra and Shatila Massacre Mural by Dia al‑Azzawi, 1982–83 Al-Azzawi was moved by French writer, playwright, and political activist Jean Genet’s Four Hours in Shatila, an eyewitness account of the massacre which he wrote after visiting the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
The work is made of ink and wax crayon on paper mounted on canvas where the cubist influenced imagery is visceral, revealing the horror of the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Christian militias with Israeli complicity. It offers no hero or triumph, its anti-war message lies in it demand that we stand witness to the endless cycle of violence.
A period of time I try not to forget is the bloody days from September 16 through to 18, 1982, when up to 3,500 Palestinian defenceless refugees mostly women, children and the elderly in Shatila camp and Sabra neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon were slaughtered at the hands of Phalangist militiamen, encircled, trained and supported by Israeli occupation forces who had besieged West Beirut for 88 days.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had invaded Lebanon in June 1982 with the goal of pushing out the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). After newly-elected President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated on September 14th, the IDF invaded West Beirut, which included the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila refugee camp, which predominately housed Muslim refugees. The IDF ordered their allies in Lebanon, the Kataeb Party (also called the Phalange), a right-wing Maronite Christian party, to clear the area of PLO militants to facilitate the IDF advance.days before launching a full-scale occupation-day period, members of the Lebanese Christian militias.
Almost immediately after the killing began, Israeli soldiers surrounding Sabra and Shatila became aware that civilians were being murdered but did nothing to stop it. Instead, the Israeli military fired flares into the night sky to illuminate the darkness for the Phalangists, allowed more Phalangist fighters to enter the area on the second day.
The Phalangists finally left Sabra and Shatila on the morning of September 18, taking many of the surviving men with them for interrogation at a soccer stadium. The interrogations were carried out with Israeli intelligence agents, who handed many of the captives back to the Phalange. Some of the men returned to the Phalange were later found executed.
Exactly how many were actually killed remains unknown as the real number is hard to determine because bodies were buried quickly in mass graves or never found and many men were marched out of the camp and “disappeared.”
Their only "crime" was that they were Palestinians or, in the case of many poor Lebanese Shiite refugees from South Lebanon, thought to be Palestinians. Before the massacres, the two camps on the southwestern fringes of Beirut were home for some thirty thousand refugees from northern Palestine. Most had lived there since 1948 when the camps were established by the UNRWA on land leased from two large Beiruti families, the Shatilas and the Sabras.
Israel actually supplied the bulldozers to bury the dead and later tanks entered the camps and ran over the whole area, destroying houses and clearing any signs of crime.
Shortly before the massacres, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was evacuated from Lebanon as a result of an agreement reached after the Israeli invasion of the country. That meant the residents of Sabra and Shatila no longer had protection, despite promises made to them by Philip Habib, an envoy for then US President Ronald Reagan, that their security would be guaranteed.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Germavel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party. It was wrongly assumed that Palestinians militants had carried out the assassination. The incident would cause outrage and condemnation across the world.
On the 18th of September, after about forty hours of killing, the first images of the massacre showing civilian victims appeared on TV. They provoked worldwide indignation and compassion. Foreign journalists and diplomats entered the camps in the aftermath of the massacre after the IDF had withdrawn from the entrances. Their reports and photographs all expressed despair and brutality.
Loren Jenkins, from the Washington Post, wrote on September the 23th: “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 thousand 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”.
Israel for a while denied it had conspired in the massacre, yet as a result of international condemnation it launched an inquiry in 1983, known as the Kahan Commission http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/kahan.html set up in 1983 in response to widespread international pressure, concluded that that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent the massacre .
Sadly the Sabra and Shatila crimes were not the first crimes against the Palestinian people and would not be the last. Over three decades later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as one of the most notorious chapters in modern Middle Eastern history.
Today, not a single person (Israeli or Lebanese) has been charged with involvement in the crime. The amnesty law that came into affect after Lebanon’s Civil Wars ended in 1991 let many of those involved in the massacre off the hook.
Sharon was received with great affection by former US President George Bush, a man also drenched in the blood of innocents. Sharon died in January 2014 without any trial or accountability.
Sabra and Shatila is quite simply one of the greatest human tragedies that we should never simply forget.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel continues and the Israeli military itself continues to commit war crimes with impunity, as evidenced by Israel's repeated attacks on the tiny besieged Gaza Strip over the past decade, which have killed thousands of innocent Palestinians with disproportionate and indiscriminate force.
Today there are more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, most barred from owning property and earing decent wages. They make up part of the nearly 5 million Palestinians refugees living in the West Bank, Gaza and throughout the Middle East, descendants of the 750,000 displaced after the establishment of the Israeli State.
Israel's years of dispossession and half-century of military rule still ongoing and is supported by unconditional American military aid and diplomatic backing. International bodies like the UN Security Council have repeatedly made note of Israel's human rights violations. Injustices continue to this day through land confiscations, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, collective displacement, racist discrimination, assassination and killing.
The conscience of the world was terribly wounded on this day and we cannot, should not and will not ever forget or forgive.With sorrow and with struggle, we must remember Sabra and Shatila and pledge to continue to work for justice.
The international community is obliged to remedy its moral responsibility to the victims of the massacre by working to end Israel's occupation and other abuses of Palestinian rights.For the Palestinians, the tragedy of Sabra and Shatila remains a powerful reminder of their endless cycle of displacement.
On the 44th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, we remember that this massacre was not an anomaly; it was a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, from the Nakba to Gaza today.
While the deep wounds inflicted by the massacre remain fresh in the memories of Palestinians, Israel's attacks on Gaza, which began on Oct. 7, 2023, continue unabated. The situation in the West Bank and Gaza and for the Palestinians living in refugee camps in countries neighboring Israel could not be more dark and grim. The constant arrests, house demolitions and killing of unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank and the regular bombing of blockaded Gaza are rarely reported in the mainstream media anymore.
The six million refugees living outside historic Palestine are all but forgotten. Many of us have allowed them to fade in our consciousness. Yet every Palestinian killed—whether by Israeli bombardment of Gaza or the 2,022 killed, including 526 children, in Operation Protective Edge in 2014; the 1,400 deaths, including 300 children, in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9; or in the Great March of Return cannot be forgotten.
These deaths wrench out the hearts of their family and those who love them, leaving large gaping wounds which have not healed.Their blood cries out for justice, and we will not be silent. No amount of normalization will erase the collective memories of peoples, so long as we keep on remembering.
There is no healing as the violence against the Palestinians is ongoing. There is only ongoing traumatic onslaughts and wounding of their bodies and souls.
On this important commemoration of those who were brutally murdered in Shatila refugee camp, we take inspiration from the strength of the victims and survivors. We must commit to continue our efforts towards making a better future where all Palestinians can realise their full rights to health and dignity, and demand accountability, sanctions on Israel, and an end to U.S. complicity in these atrocities.
Events like these underscore the ongoing suffering and struggles faced by the Palestinian people. It's essential to strive for peace, justice, and a resolution to the conflicts that have plagued this region for decades and to a free Palestine.
The following is a powerful, moving poem from the pen of the late great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Sabra and Shatila by Mahmoud Darwish
The men left
War slept for two short nights,
Beirut obeyed and became the capital…
A long night
Observing the dreams in Sabra,
Sabra is sleeping.
Sabra — the remains of a dead body
She bid farewell to her horsemen and time
And surrendered to sleep out of tiredness.. and the Arabs who threw her behind them.
Sabra — and what the soldiers Departing from Galilee forgot
She doesn’t buy and sell anything but her silence
To buy flowers to put on her braided hair.
Sabra — sings her lost half, between the sea and the last war:
Why do you go?
And leave your wives in the middle of a hard night?
Why do you go?
And hang your night
Over the camp and the national anthem?
Sabra — covering her naked breasts with a farewell song
Counts her palms and gets it wrong
While she can’t find the arm:
How many times will you travel?
And for how long?
And for what dream?
If you return one day
for which exile shall you return,
which exile brought you back?
Sabra — tearing open her chest:
How many times
does the flower bloom?
How many times
will the revolution travel?
Sabra — afraid of the night. Puts it on her knees
covers it with her eyes’ mascara. Cries to distract it:
They left without saying
anything about their return
Withered and tended
from the rose’s flame!
Returned without returning
to the beginning of their journey
Age is like children
running away from a kiss.
No, I do not have an exile
To say: I have a home
God, oh time ..!
Sabra — sleeps. And the fascist’s knife wakes up
Sabra calls who she calls
All of this night is for me, and night is salt
the fascist cuts her breasts — the night reduced —
he then dances around his knife and licks it. Singing an ode to a victory of the cedars,
And erases
Quietly .. Her flesh from her bones
and spreads her organs over the table
and the fascist continues dancing and laughs for the tilted eyes
and goes crazy for joy, Sabra is no longer a body:
He rides her as his instincts suggest, and his will manifests.
And steals a ring from her flesh and blood and goes back to his mirror
And be — Sea
And be — Land
And be — Clouds
And be — Blood
And be — Night
And be — Killing
And be — Saturday
and she be — Sabra.
Sabra — the intersection of two streets on a body
Sabra, the descent of a Spirit down a Stone
And Sabra — is no one
Sabra — is the identity of our time, forever.
(translation by Saad El Kurdi)
And here is the film 'Children of Shatila' from 1998 where Palestinian filmmaker Masri interviews Palestinian children Farah and Issa, two streetwise kids living in Beirut's camps, they use their imaginations and creativity to come to terms with the realities of growing up in a refugee camp that survived the most horrific massacre, siege, and starvation at the hands of the Phalangists, and assisted Israel's and Yanks.
The Portrait above by Mark Vallen was created in the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
The masked Palestinian is deliberately unarmed. Vallen explained that the keffiyeh was used as a symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity; the work, he stressed, was “never intended as a call to arms.”
The poster was associated with Shock Battalion, Vallen's Los Angeles political-art collective, which produced anti-war and internationalist silkscreen prints during the 1980s.
More than forty years later, those eyes remain incredibly arresting. Not an image of surrender, but of a people seen, remembered, and refusing to disappear.
