Sabra and Shatila Massacre

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the slaughter of between 762 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite Muslim civilians, by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia assisted by the Israel Defense Forces, in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon between September 16 and September 18, 1982.

The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party. It was wrongly assumed that Palestinian militants had carried out the assassination, which is now generally attributed to native, pro-Syrian militants.

Israel invaded Lebanon with the intention of rooting out the PLO. Under the supervision of the Multinational Force the PLO withdrew from Lebanon following weeks of battles in West Beirut and shortly before the massacre took place. Various forces — Israeli, Phalangist and possibly also of the SLA — were in the vicinity of the camps at the time of the slaughter, taking advantage of the fact that the multinational forces had removed barracks and mines that encircled Beirut's Muslim neighborhoods and kept the Israelis at bay. The actual killers were "the Young Men", a gang recruited by Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese Forces intelligence chief, from men who had been expelled from the Lebanese Forces for insubordination or criminal activities. The killings are widely believed to have taken place under Hobeika's direct orders. Hobeika's family and fiancée had been murdered by Palestinian militiamen, and their Lebanese allies, at the Damour massacre of 1976, itself a response to a previous massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims at the hands of Christian militants. Hobeika later became a long-serving Member of the Parliament of Lebanon and served in several ministerial roles.

The Israel Defense Forces surrounded the camps and at the Phalangists' request, fired illuminating flares at night. In 1982, a UN commission chaired by Sean MacBride concluded that Israel bore responsibility for the violence.In 1983, the Israeli Kahan Commission, appointed to investigate the incident, found that Israeli military personnel, aware that a massacre was in progress, had failed to take serious steps to stop it. Thus Israel was indirectly responsible, while Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, bore personal responsibility, forcing him to resign.

In 2010, As'ad Shaftari, a former intelligence officer and top aide of Hobeika, apologized for ordering prisoners to be killed and tortured, as well as personally shooting people, believing that he was defending Lebanon in the wake of growing Christian-Muslim tensions.