Survivors recount Sabra-Shatila massacre
Three women who lived through the 1982 massacre
at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon remember harrowing killings.
Shatila camp, Lebanon - The fighters began at sunset, meticulously working their way
through the alleys and homes, bodies riddled with bullets and slashed with
machetes left crumpled in their wake.
Between September 16-18, 1982, in the middle of
Lebanon's civil war and a few months after Israel's invasion of the country,
hundreds of members of the Phalange party - a Lebanese Christian militia - in
collaboration with the Israeli army, slaughtered about 2,000 Palestinian
refugees, mostly women, children, and the elderly, in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camp located in Beirut.
The massacre came on the heels of the
assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Phalangists. The Phalangists
wrongly blamed the Palestinians for the assassination, and executed the
massacre as a reprisal attack with the Israeli army, who had invaded Lebanon to
fight the Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause.
Three survivors recounted their stories to Al
Jazeera, 30 years after the massacre.
Siham
Balqis
Siham Balqis, a resident of Shatila, was 26
years old when it happened. "We heard gunshots on Thursday night, but
didn't think anything of it, because it was the war and this was not an unusual
sound for us," she told Al Jazeera. Living at the Shatila end of the two
camps, she said men began in Sabra and worked their way northwards. "They
didn't reach us until Saturday morning."
At 7am, she was confronted by three Phalangists
and an Israeli soldier who ordered them to leave their house.
"One of the Lebanese launched forward to
attack me, but the Israeli pulled him off me, as if to show he was the better
of the two," she remembered.
In the commotion that ensued, a Lebanese
neighbour of hers spoke to the fighters, saying she heard they were
slaughtering people. The fighters dismissed these claims, so she asked them to
help the Palestinians who were holed up in Gaza Hospital, located at the Sabra
end of the camp.
After asking for directions, the fighters
marched those they had rounded up, about 200 people, to the hospital.
Once there, they ordered the doctors and nurses
out of the building, the majority of whom were foreign or Lebanese.
"I remember there was one Palestinian boy
from the Salem family, in his early 20s, who donned a doctor's coat to try and
escape," Balqis said. "The Lebanese caught him, realised he
was Palestinian, and pumped his body full of bullets."
Crawl and die
At one point, the fighters separated the group,
putting the women to one side and the remaining men on the other.
"They would pick on the men at random and
make them crawl on the floor. If they thought they crawled well, they assumed
it was due to some sort of military training, so they took them behind a sand
bank and killed them."
The Lebanese fighters took those they had not
killed and forced them to march over the dead bodies scattered on the streets
toward the large sports stadium on the outskirts of the camp.
"We were made to walk over the dead bodies,
and among cluster bombs," Balqis said. "At one point I
passed a tank, where the body of a baby only a few days old was stuck to the
wheel."
At the stadium, the command changed from
Lebanese to Israeli.
"It was here the Israelis took my brother
Salah, who was 30-years-old, for interrogation," she said.
Inside the stadium the men were interrogated,
tortured, and killed. Few were able to leave alive. The Israelis threatened
them, saying, "If you don't cooperate with us, we will hand you over to
the Phalangists."
Wadha
Sabeq
Wadha Sabeq, 33-years-old at the time, was
living in Bir Hassan, a predominantly Lebanese neighbourhood just outside the
camps.
"On Friday morning, our neighbours told us
we needed to get our IDs stamped next to the Kuwaiti
embassy," outside the Sabra entrance, she told Al
Jazeera. "So we went."
She brought her eight children, ranging from
three years to 19-years-old.
As they walked past Shatila, they were stopped
by the Phalangists. "They took us with others and separated the men from
the women." The fighters took away 15 men from her family, including her
19-year-old son Mohammad, her 15-year-old son Ali, and her 30-year-old brother.
"They lined the men up against the wall,
and told the women to go to the sports stadium. They ordered us to walk in a
single file, and to look neither left nor right." Phalangist fighters
walked next to them to ensure they followed the instructions.
This was the last time she saw her family.
Once at the stadium, they waited. "We still
didn't know what was going on, we still thought they wanted to check our
IDs," she said.
After spending the whole day at the stadium, the
Israelis sent them home.
Covered in blood
The following morning Sabeq headed back to
the stadium to ask about the men.
"A woman came down to the stadium screaming,
telling us to go up to the camp to identify the slaughtered," she said.
They ran up to the camp, and as she saw the
bodies scattered on the ground, Sabeq fainted. "You couldn't look at
the faces of the bodies, they were covered in blood and disfigured," she
said. "You could only identify people by the clothes they were wearing.
"I couldn't find my sons, none of my
family," Sabeq said. "We went to the Red Crescent, to the
hospitals, every day, to ask about them. No one had answers."
"We never found their bodies," she
said, tears running down her cheeks.
Jameel
Khalifa
Jameel Khalifa was 16-years-old and newly
engaged when the massacre took place.
"On Saturday morning, we saw them
[fighters] climbing down the sand bank and heading for the houses," she
told Al Jazeera. "We saw the tanks coming in, on them were Israeli
soldiers and Lebanese fighters, some in civilian clothes, some with masks
on."
As the fighters began pounding on the front
door, most of her family escaped through the back into their neighbour's
shelter. On hearing the soldiers' orders that they would not shoot if they
surrendered, an elderly woman in the shelter ripped up her white scarf, handing
each of them a strip to wave to stop them from being shot at.
"My dad was holding me, telling me not to
leave the shelter, but I told him we should," she said.
The women left the shelter first.
As her mother came out the shelter, a Lebanese
fighter shoved his Kalashnikov in her stomach. "I'm going to kill you,
you, b****!"
An Israeli soldier observing nearby told him in
Hebrew to leave her alone.
"My father was coming out [of] the shelter
behind my mother. As he stepped out, he was killed with a bullet to the head by
an Israeli soldier," Khalifa said.
No one believed us
Like everyone else, the group was forced to move
by the fighters. On the way, Khalifa and a few other children managed to
escape down a little alley toward one of the mosques located further inside the
camp.
"We came across a group of elderly folk
sitting outside the mosque, and told them the Israelis had come and were
killing people. They didn't believe us, called us liars, and told us to leave
them alone," she said.
Khalifa eventually found herself at the
Gaza Hospital, where she was able to reunite with her family. Watching as
people around them were executed, the group plotted to escape and managed to
sneak out through one of the many tiny alleys that make up the camp.
"We were really scared to leave because
we'd seen others try and get killed by
snipers," Khalifa remembered.
They managed to get out of the camp and found
refuge in a school in the Lebanese neighbourhood of Corniche el Mazraa. They
only returned to the camp once they received news the massacre was over.
"We went back to see dead bodies explode as
they were being removed because the Phalangists and Israelis placed mines
underneath them," she said.
"I remember the smell. It was so strong,
and it stayed for a week, even though they sprayed the camp to get rid of
it."
