Sabra and Shatila Massacre 1982: Killings in Beirut's Camps

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the killing of civilians in the Shatila refugee camp and the adjoining Sabra district of West Beirut between 16 and 18 September 1982. It was carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen who had been allowed into the area by the Israeli army, which then controlled the surrounding streets.

The massacre, which took place during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the long Lebanese Civil War, caused international outrage and the largest protest in Israel’s history up to that time. An Israeli inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found Defence Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the risk of revenge killings.

Background

Shatila was set up in 1949 to house Palestinians who had fled or been expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. By 1982 it and the poor neighbourhood of Sabra next to it were crowded with Palestinian refugees and with Lebanese and other residents, many of them Shia Muslims from the south.

On 6 June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had used southern Lebanon as a base. Israeli forces besieged West Beirut through the summer. Under an agreement brokered by the United States envoy Philip Habib, PLO fighters were evacuated by sea between 21 August and 1 September, protected by a multinational force of American, French and Italian troops. Washington gave assurances about the safety of the civilians left behind. The multinational force then left Beirut early, by 13 September.

On 23 August Bachir Gemayel, commander of the Phalangist militia (the Lebanese Forces) and an ally of Israel, was elected president of Lebanon. On 14 September, before he could take office, he was killed with more than twenty others by a bomb at the Phalange headquarters in the Ashrafieh district. The bomber was later identified as a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

What happened

The day after Gemayel’s death, 15 September, the Israeli army moved into West Beirut, saying it wished to prevent disorder. It surrounded Sabra and Shatila and set up a command post on the roof of a building overlooking the camps. Israeli commanders, with the approval of Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, agreed that Phalangist units would enter the camps to search for PLO fighters they claimed were still there.

At about 6 p.m. on 16 September, some 150 militiamen under the direction of Elie Hobeika, the Phalange intelligence chief, entered Shatila. Through the night Israeli forces fired illumination flares over the area. The killing of men, women, children and elderly people began almost at once and continued through 17 September. Victims were shot, knifed or killed in their homes and in the alleys; some bodies were piled up or bulldozed into rubble, and others were taken away in trucks.

Reports of killings reached Israeli officers on the night of 16 September and during the next day, but the militia was not ordered out until the following morning. The Phalangists left on the morning of 18 September. Journalists, aid workers and diplomats who entered the camps that day found the bodies lying in the streets.

Death toll

The number of victims has never been settled. Israeli military intelligence, whose figure was cited by the Kahan Commission, estimated 700 to 800 dead. Figures compiled by the Lebanese authorities from bodies recovered were lower, while Palestinian and some independent researchers put the toll much higher, from around 2,000 to 3,500, counting the missing and those buried in mass graves. Most of the dead were Palestinians, but a substantial number were Lebanese, along with some Syrians and others.

The Kahan Commission

Public anger in Israel was intense. On 25 September 1982 a rally in Tel Aviv, organised by the Peace Now movement, drew a crowd often estimated at several hundred thousand, demanding an inquiry. The government of Menachem Begin established a state commission of inquiry headed by Yitzhak Kahan, President of the Supreme Court.

The commission’s report, published in February 1983, found that the killings were carried out by the Phalangists and that no Israeli had taken part directly. It found, however, that Israel bore indirect responsibility, because its leaders should have foreseen the danger of a massacre after Gemayel’s murder. It held Sharon personally responsible for disregarding that danger and recommended that he resign or be dismissed. Sharon left the defence ministry but remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio; he later became prime minister in 2001. The report also criticised Eitan, Begin and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and recommended that the director of military intelligence be removed.

Aftermath

The multinational force returned to Beirut in late September 1982. On 16 December 1982 the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and described it as an act of genocide, a characterisation that was disputed by several member states. No one was ever prosecuted. Lebanon’s 1991 amnesty law covered most crimes of the civil war, and Hobeika became a government minister in the 1990s; he was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in January 2002. A complaint filed against Sharon in Belgium in 2001 was dropped after Belgium narrowed its universal jurisdiction law in 2003.

Timeline

• 1982, 6 June: Israel invades Lebanon.
• 1982, 21 August – 1 September: PLO fighters are evacuated from Beirut.
• 1982, 14 September: President-elect Bachir Gemayel is assassinated.
• 1982, 15 September: Israeli forces enter West Beirut and surround the camps.
• 1982, 16 September, evening: Phalangist militiamen enter Shatila and the killings begin.
• 1982, 18 September, morning: The militia leaves; the dead are discovered.
• 1982, 25 September: Mass protest in Tel Aviv demands an inquiry.
• 1983, February: The Kahan Commission report is published; Sharon leaves the defence ministry.

Why it matters

Sabra and Shatila became one of the most painful memories in modern Palestinian history and a defining event of the 1982 Lebanon war. It raised enduring questions about the responsibility of an occupying army for violence committed by allied forces, and the Kahan report remains a much-cited example of a state investigating its own leaders’ conduct in wartime.