TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82oh

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                ╧═╦                                                      ╬««"God-Oh, My God!"

October 4, 1982

The bloodbath in the Palestinian camps:  "Butchery the mind cannot
comprehend"

There were only the sounds of mourning and the bodies, sprawling
heaps of corpses:  men, women and children.  Some had been shot in
the head at pointblank range.  Others had had their throats cut.
Some had their hands tied behind their backs; one young man had been
castrated.  Middle-aged women and girls as young as three, their arms
and legs grotesquely splayed, were draped across piles of rubble.
Portions of their heads were blown away.  One woman was found
clutching an infant to her body; the same bullet that tore through
her chest had also killed the baby.  Said a Lebanese Army office:
"There is so much butchery the mind cannot comprehend it."

One by one, the bodies were lifted from the agonized postures of
sudden death and shrouded in brown blankets by volunteer civil
defense and Red Cross workers, wearing gas masks against the stench
and rubber gloves to fend off the toxins from the decaying flesh.
Frantic clusters of Palestinians gathered around the rigid, pathetic
bundles.  From time to time, one of the onlookers would shriek in
horror, catching sight of the distorted features of a friend or
family member.  As one point, a woman torn by grief stood over one of
the bloated corpses waving a scarf and handful of personal letters.
"Yi, yi, are you my husband?"  she screamed.  "My God, who will help
me?  All my sons are gone.  My husband is gone.  What am I going to
do?  God--oh, my God!"  Those who could recognize their murdered
relatives were allowed to carry them away for private burial; the
remainder of the bodies, sprinkled with lime, were consigned to mass
graves.

By the end of the week, Red Cross officials listed 320 confirmed dead
thus far in the adjoining refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila.
Hundreds of others are listed as missing, and the toll is estimated
to be at least 800, if it is ever known precisely.  Many of the
victims, who also included Lebanese residents of the camps, lay
buried in a hastily bulldozed site that was dug by the killers near
the Shatila entrance as they finished up their murderous spree.
Rescue workers decided against reopening the grave.  Other victims
presumably still remain in houses that were dynamited in a crude
attempt to cover up the extent of the atrocity.

As the world discovered the enormity of the Shatila-Sabra massacre,
details of what actually took place slowly began to emerge from the
confused accounts of survivors and other witnesses to the tragedy.
But one fact that was starkly clear was that the residents of Shatila
and Sabra were in no way prepared for the bloody attack that began
only 24 hours after the Israeli army moved into West Beirut.  No
serious resistance to the Israeli advance was being planned in the
camps:  the number of armed Palestinians in the area was small.  Said
one resident:  "We lived through a long war.  We were not going to
get ourselves killed trying to fight the Israeli army."

In fact, a worse fate was in an advanced stage of preparation for the
refugees, some of whom had moved into the area more than 30 years
ago.  Although the districts were still called "camps," they had
become sprawling residential area, honeycombed with underground air-
raid shelters and arms depots, inhabited by both Palestinians and
Lebanese.  The Israelis had encircled the camps on three sides.  But
the southern approach had been left open, awaiting the arrival of
Christian militiamen.

The evening before the massacre began, on Wednesday, Sept. 15, camp
residents went to sleep, as they had for weeks, to the sounds of war
in the center of Beirut, two miles away.  There was the customary
rumble of shellfire but military action in the camp area was
sporadic.  Next morning, a few Palestinians went to the Gaza
Hospital, located near the borderline between Shatila and Sabra, for
treatment of shrapnel wounds.  But by 2 p.m. on Thursday, intense
Israeli shellfire was hitting the south end of Shatila.  Abdul Haddi
Achmed Hashmen, a Palestinian housewife whose home was in the
southwest corner of the camp, recalled that she, her husband and
their children tried to wait out the barrage, huddling on the ground
floor of their small house.  Finally, at around 5 p.m., they decided
to flee.  The family made it safely to the main street of Shatila.
Just before 6 p.m., Mrs. Hashmen's husband went back to their house
to fetch powdered milk for the children.  He never returned and was
later found shot dead in the house.

Traveling in convoy from their staging area near the Beirut airport,
the Christian militiamen had arrived at the camps.  Two young
Palestinians, Taleb Al Oukli, 26, and his brother Fawzi, 22,
remembered when the killing began.  They were in a house about half a
mile from the southern entrance to Shatila, taking shelter from the
Israeli shelling and drinking tea with friends.  At about 6:30 p.m.
they began to hear "lot of shooting everywhere," Taleb recalls.  It
was small-arms fire rather than the artillery explosions that had
come earlier in the afternoon.  Two members of the group went outside
and returned to report that they had seen what they thought were
soldiers of the Christian militia that is headed by Major Sa'ad
Haddad and stationed in southern Lebanon.  The group fled to Gaza
Hospital, where they spent the night along with hundreds of other
Palestinians seeking refuge.  Outside the southern perimeter of
Shatila, another 500 to 600 sought shelter at the Acca Hospital.

The militiamen spent the night at slaughter, calling on the Israeli
army to send up hundreds of flares and star shells over the camps to
illuminate their bloody work.  "Thursday night was an inferno,"
recalls a medical worker at Gaza Hospital.  "The sky was never dark.
The shooting never stopped.  The people screamed."  Not content with
merely shooting people, the assailants used ropes and hatchets; many
of the victims were bound together and mutilated.  Some people were
killed in their homes, while others were dragged outside to be
murdered.  Judging from the debris that was left, some of the
soldiers had leaned against a house to enjoy snacks and smoke
cigarettes in the midst of their work.  Scattered about were the
discarded cardboard boxes of field rations, some of them made in the
U.S.  They had English labels--"turkey and dumplings"--written on the
side.  Other boxes had Hebrew lettering.

Some of the Palestinians began to fight back with small arms and a
few rocket-propelled grenades.  Their resistance may have had some
effect:  Friday morning, the militiamen had begun to fall back from
their northernmost penetration of the camps.  At 9 a.m., the two
Oukli brothers were able to return to some parts of Shatila from the
Gaza Hospital area without encountering any of the killers.  When the
Ouklis reached their home, they found a pile of 15 dead, mostly their
relatives, outside the door.

By that time, word of the massacre had spread and panic swept through
the camps.  The throngs of refugees who had gathered at Gaza Hospital
took off on foot to find shelter farther north.  Along with them went
45 patients from the hospital, who fled their beds and joined the
exodus.  For a time, said a European staffer who remained behind, "it
was deadly, deadly silent."  Some survivors, meanwhile, later
recalled seeing Christian militiamen operating a roadblock near the
southern entrance to the camps, while hundreds of Israeli soldiers
stood by.

As the bloodletting temporarily slowed in the camps, the militiamen
turned their attention to Acca Hospital.  Early Friday morning, after
refugees who stayed the night had fled, four doctors tried to leave
the institution under a white flag.  A hand grenade was thrown at
them; three were killed.  A few hours later, a group of militiamen
entered the hospital and threatened the staff.  A Palestinian nurse
was repeatedly raped, then shot to death.  Two Palestinian doctors
were later taken away from Acca by the militia to an unknown fate.

As the day wore on, the sounds of violence from the camps became more
sporadic.  In the afternoon, the militiamen began covering up their
handiwork.  Around 3 p.m., a European diplomat saw a bulldozer
backing down a side street of Shatila.  Its scoop was filled with
bodies.  Hours later, members of a Red Cross convoy that had reached
Acca noticed a hastily arranged heap of up to 90 bodies piled near
the entrance to Shatila.  They were mixed with sand and dirt and had
apparently been moved there by bulldozers.  The militiamen also began
knocking down houses.  In some parts of Shatila, residents who had
survived the horrors of the previous night were crushed as their
houses caved in around them.

About 4 p.m. some 500 people set out from the area north of Gaza
Hospital in an attempt to seek refuge in downtown West Beirut.  They
soon encountered a group of Israeli soldiers.  They were ordered to
go back, and one of them lowered his gun on the group.  The panic-
stricken refugees sent a man forward to talk to the Israelis, while
the others waited in the street.  The emissary shouted that Sa'ad
Haddad's men were killing people in the camps and that the crowd
wanted to seek shelter.  "I cannot do anything," came the soldier's
response.  "If you stay here for more than ten minutes, I will shoot
you."  A tank was rolled around and began moving toward the crowd.
The refugees fell back and abandoned their plan.

Still more carnage was to come.  On Saturday morning, the militiamen
advanced into the heavily populated camp of Sabra, bordering Shatila
on the north.  Using bullhorns, they announced to terrified residents
that they were Israelis, and demanded that the Palestinians assemble
in the street.  Some heeded the call, while others were forced from
their homes at gunpoint.  The wailing, screaming throng was in a
state of collective hysteria.  Said one man who survived the ordeal:
"We knew what they had been doing in Shatila.  We were sure our time
had come."  The militiamen fired into the air several times in an
attempt to restore order; at one point, they also ordered the crowd
to clap hands in unison to halt the wailing.

Casual acts of murder were still taking place as the roundup
progressed.  One man, who had hid in a partly bombed building, later
related how he had peered through a small shrapnel hold while
militiamen barged into a small shop across the street.  The gunmen
cut the throat of the proprietor, who was hiding inside, and then
guzzled a bottle of whisky.  At Gaza Hospital the staff of 22 doctors
and nurses, mostly Europeans, were rounded up and marched away.  As
the medics passed a group of lounging militiamen, a Palestinian
male nurse was pulled out of the group, taken around a corner and
shot.  Later, the killers identified another male nurse as a
Palestinian.  He too was shot.  Recalled one of the medics:  "I
thought to myself, `My God, they are just getting all the foreigners
out so they can kill these people.'"

The remaining hospital staff was taken out of the camp and after an
interrogation was turned over to Israeli soldiers across the street
from Shatila.  Soon the Palestinian civilians who had been rounded up
in Sabra began following them.  But these had one last ordeal to
face.  As the crowd of several hundred panicky refugees approached
the southern gate of Shatila, the militiamen segregated them by sex.
The men were ordered to march past a parked Land Rover.  From inside
the vehicle, a man pointed out those who should be separated from the
rest.  The selected ones were led away.  Their fate is unknown.

The remainder of the civilians were led off by the militiamen in the
direction of Beirut's nearby sports stadium.  As they approached the
bomb-damaged structure, an explosion attracted the attention of
Israeli army officers.  The Israelis quickly took charge of the
captives, sent the women and children back into the camp and
eventually released the men.  At one point, an Israeli officer asked
through a bullhorn if any of the group were from Shatila.  He was
told yes, and was told what had happened there.  When he heard, the
officer tore his peaked cap from his head and threw it to the ground
with a violent curse.

By then the ordeal of Shatila was over.  The camps now were quiet,
except for the mourning of those who had discovered the bodies of
their relatives among the dead.  The first Lebanese Army soldiers,
handkerchiefs over their mouths, entered Shatila to see what had gone
on.  One soldier looked up an alleyway where many bodies lay and ran
back, vomiting.

On Monday morning, as the cleanup of the massacre began, one final
moment of panic swept the camps.  While volunteer civil defense
workers dug a huge pit near the entrance of Shatila to bury the dead,
word spread that the militiamen were returning.  Thousands of
screaming Palestinians poured out of the camps and ran toward
downtown Beirut.  It is one thing to have escaped a massacre.  It is
quite another to escape the memory of it.

--By George Russell.
  Reported by Roberto Suro/Beirut