On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, in reaction to the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador Argov in London on June 4. On the same day, the Israeli secret services attributed the attempted assassination to a dissident Palestinian organisation commandeered by the Iraqi government, which was then concerned with deflecting attention from its recent setback in the Iran-Iraq war. The long-prepared Israeli operation was christened “Peace in the Galilee”.

Initially, the Israeli government had announced its intention to penetrate 40km into Lebanese territory. The military commander, under the orders of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, had meanwhile decided to execute a more ambitious project that Mr Sharon had prepared several months previously. After having occupied the south of the country and destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese residences there, simultaneously committing a series of violations against the civilian population , the Israeli troops penetrated as far as Beirut, and by 18 June 1982 they had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s armed forces in the west side of the town.

According to Lebanese statistics, the Israeli offensive, particularly the intensive shelling against Beirut, caused 18,000 deaths and 30,000 injuries, mostly among civilians.

After two months of fighting, a ceasefire was negotiated through the intermediary of United States Envoy Philip Habib. It was agreed that the PLO would evacuate Beirut, under the supervision of a multinational force deployed in the evacuated part of the town. The Habib Accords envisaged that West Beirut would subsequently be invested by the Lebanese army, and the Palestinian leadership were given American guarantees for the security of civilians in the camps after their departure.

The evacuation of the PLO ended on 1 September 1982.

On 10 September 1982, the multinational forces left Beirut. The next day, Mr Ariel Sharon announced that “2,000 terrorists” had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, after the previous day’s assassination of President-elect Basher Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, “surrounding and sealing” the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by an entirely civilian Lebanese and Palestinian population, the entirety of armed resistors (more than 14,000 people) having evacuated Beirut and its suburbs.

Historians and journalists agree that it was probably during a meeting between Ariel Sharon and Bashir Gemayel in Bikfaya on 12 September that an agreement was concluded to authorise the “Lebanese forces” to “mop up” these Palestinian camps. The intention to send the Phalangist forces into West Beirut had already been announced by Mr Sharon on 9 July 1982 , and in his biography he confirms having negotiated the operation during his meeting with Bikfaya.

According to Ariel Sharon’s 22 September 1982 declarations in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps of Beirut was decided on Wednesday 15 September 1982 at 15.30. Also according to General Sharon, the Israeli commandant had received the following instruction: “The Tsahal forces are forbidden to enter the refugee camps. The “mopping-up” of the camps will be carried out by the Phalanges or the Lebanese army.”

From dawn on 15 September 1982, Israeli fighter-bombers were flying low over West Beirut and Israeli troops had secured their entry. From 9am, General Sharon was present to personally direct the Israeli penetration, installing himself in the general army area at the Kuwait embassy junction situated at the edge of Shatila. From the roof of this six-storey building, it was possible to clearly observe the town and the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

From midday, the camps of Sabra and Shatila – in reality a single zone of refugee camps in the south of West Beirut – were surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who had installed checkpoints all around the camps permitting the surveillance of the entrances and exits. During the late afternoon and evening, the camps were bombarded with shells.

By Thursday 16 September 1982, the Israeli army controlled West Beirut. In a release, the military spokesperson declared, “Tsahal controls all the strategic points of Beirut. The refugee camps, including the concentrations of terrorists, are surrounded and closed.” In the morning of 16 September, the following order was issued by the army high command: “The searching and mopping up of the camps will be done by the Phalangists/Lebanese army.”

During the morning, shells were fired down towards the camps from high locations and Israeli snipers were shooting down at people in the streets. At about midday, the Israeli military command gave the Phalangist militia green light to enter the refugee camps. Shortly after 5 o’clock pm, a unit of approximately 150 Phalangists entered Shatila camp from the south and southwest.

At that point, General Drori telephoned Ariel Sharon and announced, “Our friends are advancing into the camps. We have coordinated their entry.” Sharon replied, “Congratulations! Our friends’ operation is approved.”

For the next 40 hours inside the “surrounded and sealed” camps, the Phalangist militia raped, killed and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and old people. These actions were accompanied or followed by systematic roundups, backed or reinforced by the Israeli army, resulting in dozens of disappearances.

Until the morning of Saturday 18 September 1982, the Israeli army, which knew perfectly well what was going on in the camps, and whose leaders were in permanent contact with the militia leaders who perpetrated the massacre, did not intervene. Instead, they prevented civilians from escaping the camps and organised for the camps to be lit up throughout the night by flares sent into the sky from helicopters and mortars.

The count of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) and 3,500 (notably in the inquiry launched by the Israeli journalist Kapeliouk). The exact figure will never be determined because in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the ICRC or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried under bulldozed buildings by the militia themselves. Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return.

The victims and survivors of the massacres have never received any judicial instruction, whether in Lebanon, Israel or elsewhere. After 400,000 people took to the streets in protest, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) named a commission of inquiry presided over by Mr Yitzhak Kahan in September 1982. In spite of the limitations of the commission’s mandate (it was a political and not a judicial mandate) and the total absence of the voices and demands of the victims, the Commission concluded that the Minster of Defence was personally responsible for the massacres.

Upon the insistence of the Commission, and the demonstrations that followed its report, Mr Sharon resigned from his post of Minister of Defence but remained in the government as Minister Without Portfolio. It is worth noting that, during the ‘Peace Now’ demonstration immediately prior to Sharon’s ‘resignation’, demonstrators were attacked with grenades, resulting in the death of a young demonstrator.

Several non-official inquiries and reports including those of MacBride and of the Nordic Commission, based mainly on the testimony of eyewitnesses, as well as other pieces of journalistic and historical research, have brought together vital pieces of information. These texts, in part or in full, are annexed to this file.

In spite of the evidence of what the UN Security Council described as a ‘criminal massacre,’ and the sad ranking of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in humankind’s collective memory as among the great crimes of the 20th Century, the man found “personally responsible”, his associates and the people who carried out the massacres have never been pursued or punished. In 1984, the Israeli journalists Schiff and Yaari concluded their chapter on the massacre with this reflection: “If there is a moral to the painful episode of Sabra and Shatila, it has yet to be acknowledged.” This reality of impunity remains true to this day.

The United Nations Security Council condemned the massacre with Resolution 521 (19 September 1982). This condemnation was followed by a 16 December 1982 General Assembly resolution qualifying the massacre as an “act of genocide.”

B. IN PARTICULAR

B1. Plaintiffs, survivors of Sabra and Shatila.

In annex to the present charges, the plaintiffs submit a statement of their personal suffering. The originals are in Arabic; each statement has been translated into French [and now English]. These statements are very telling and convincing:

1. Samiha Abbas Hijazi:

On the Thursday, there was shelling when the Israelis came, then it got worse so we went down into the shelter. (…) We learnt on the Friday that there had been a massacre. I went to my neighbours’ house. I saw our neighbour Mustapha Al Habarat; he was injured and lying in a bath of his own blood. His wife and children were dead. We took him to the Gaza hospital and then we fled. When things had calmed down, I came back and searched for my daughter and my husband for four days. I spent four days looked for them through all the dead bodies. I found Zeinab dead, her face burnt. Her husband had been cut in two and had no head. I took them and buried them.

Madame Abbas Hijazi lost her daughter, her son-in-law, her daughter’s godmother and other loved ones.

2. Abdel Nasser Alameh:

On the night of the carnage, we were at home and we heard that there was a massacre at Shatila. (…) We kept watch on the road all night, taking turns to sleep a few hours, until daybreak when some people managed to escape. I thought my brother had gone ahead of us to West Beirut. We waited for him but he didn’t come. In fact my brother was one of the ones they took away, and we never even found his body.

Mr Alameh lost his brother, who was 19 years old.

3. Wadha Hassan Al Sabeq:

We were at home on Friday 17 September; the neighbours came and they started to say: Israel has come in, go to the Israelis, they are taking papers and stamping them. We went out to see the Israelis. When we got there, the tanks and the Israeli soldiers were there, but we were surprised to see that they had Lebanese forces with them. They took the men and left us women and children together. When they took the children and all the men from me, they said to us, “Go to the Sports Centre,” and they took us there. They left us there until 7pm, then they told us, “Go to Fakhani and don’t go back to your house,” then they started firing shells and bullets at us.

On one side there were some men who had been arrested; they took them and we have never found out what happened to them. To this day we know nothing about what happened to them; they just disappeared.

Mrs Al Sabeq lost two sons (aged 16 and 19), a brother and about 15 other relatives.

4. Mahmoud Younis:

I was 11 years old. It was night and we could hear shelling and gunfire. (…) We took refuge in the bedroom and stayed there. As soon as they arrived, they went straight to the living room, and they tore down the photos from the walls, including the one of my brother who was killed in “Black September.” They ransacked the living room, cursing and swearing. After having looked for us without finding us, they went up to the roof and stayed there all night long. We spent that night in terror in our hiding place, listening to the shooting and people screaming, while Israel fired flares to light the sky until sunrise.

The next morning they started saying, “give yourself up and your life will be spared.” My nephew was 18 months old. He was hungry and we were far from the kitchen. My sister wanted him to quieten down, and she put her hand over his mouth for fear that they would hear. Her husband decided that we would have to give ourselves up, adding that each person’s fate was anyway preordained by God. The women went out first, my brothers, my father, my brother-in-law and other members of the family followed. My brother was ill. As soon as they heard our voices, they shot in our direction and came straight back inside the house. They asked us where we had been the day before when they had come in and not found anyone there. Then they ordered the women and children to go out. My brother-in-law started kissing his little girl as if he were saying goodbye. An armed man came towards my niece, tied a rope around her neck and threatened to strangle her if her father didn’t let go of her. He let go of her and gave her to me. They wanted to take me too but my mother told them I was a girl. They made my mother and the women walk to the Sports Centre. While I was walking I saw my aunt’s husband, Abu Nayef, killed near our house with blows of an axe to his head. The dead bodies were disfigured. While I was carrying my niece, I bumped into a dead body that had been hit with an axe and I fell over. They knew then that I was a boy, and one of them put me up against the wall; he wanted to fire a bullet into my head. My mother begged him and kissed his feet so that he would let me go. He pushed her away. When he did that, he heard the clinking of some money she had hidden next to her chest. He asked her what that meant. She replied that he could have all the money he wanted but he had to let me stay with her. In this way we carried on our way and we arrived at the Sports Centre. The Israeli bulldozers were busy digging large trenches. We were told that we all had to get in because they wanted to bury us all alive. My mother started begging him again, and then she asked for a mouthful of water before dying.

At the Sports Centre, I saw the Israeli military, as well as tanks, bulldozers and artillery, all Israeli. We also saw groups of Phalangists with the Israelis.

The Sports Centre was packed with women and children. We stayed there until sunset. An Israeli came then and he said, “Everyone go to the Cola region, whoever comes back to the camp will die.” We left, as they fired shots in our direction.

Mr Younis lost his father, three brothers, his maternal uncle, his maternal cousin, two paternal cousins and other members of his family.

5.    Fadia Ali Al Doukhi:

When the shelling started and we knew that Israel had surrounded the camp, my father told us to escape. We asked him to come with us, but he refused because he wanted to protect the house. We escaped, leaving him in the house. Later, we found out that a massacre had taken place. We found out that my father was dead and we saw his picture in the newspaper. His foot had been cut off. Our neighbour in the house where my father had sheltered told us how they killed him.

Mrs Al Doukhi, who was 11 years old at the time, lost her father.

6. Amina Hasan Mohsen:

We were at home the Thursday when the shelling started. I didn’t know what was going on outside. When the shelling intensified, I tried to go out to save myself and the children. When we went out, the dead bodies were spread out over the street. My children were afraid. An Israeli told us to go out. Then we saw someone speaking Lebanese. When we went out under cover of the Israelis, they started shouting at us. At that moment I counted my children and I saw that Samir was missing; when he saw the dead people on the ground he got scared and ran away. At that moment I didn’t have the presence of mind to go looking for him because the whole area was full of Israeli and Lebanese troops. We escaped, and when the massacre was over I looked for Samir, but the corpses were so mutilated I couldn’t recognise him among them.

Mrs Mohsen lost her 16-year-old son.

7.    Sana Mahmoud Sersawi:

We lived in the Said area of Sabra, and when the shelling started we sought refuge at my parents’ house in Shatila. This happened on the Wednesday. At about midnight, some women who came from the western quarter said that there was killing. We escaped once again, towards the interior of the camp. Then, when daybreak came, we hid ourselves in the shelter of the rest home. I was pregnant at the time, and I had two daughters who were still taking milk. We stayed in the rest home for two days, until Saturday. We didn’t have any more milk. My husband went out to get some for the girls. That night was so long, and the Israelis were firing flares to illuminate the sky. It was like this when my husband went to Sabra. The Israelis had come as far as the Gaza hospital. After that, I went out to look for him, and my sister went to look for her husband. We arrived at the entrance to Shatila. There, they had put the men on one side and the women on the other side. I started looking among all the men. I saw him, and I said to him, “You know, these are Phalangists.” He replied, “What happened at Tel al Zaater will happen to us.” The armed men ordered us to walk in front, and the men behind. We walked like this until we arrived at the communal grave. There, the bulldozer had started digging. Among us was a man who was wearing a white nurse’s shirt; they called him and filled him with bullets in front of everyone. The women started screaming. The Israelis posted in front of the Kuwait embassy and in front of the Rihab station requested through loudspeakers that we be delivered to them.

That’s how we found ourselves in their hands. They took us to the Sports Centre, and the men were supposed to walk behind us. But they took the men’s shirts off and started blindfolding them with them. In that wA. IN GENERAL

On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, in reaction to the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador Argov in London on June 4. On the same day, the Israeli secret services attributed the attempted assassination to a dissident Palestinian organisation commandeered by the Iraqi government, which was then concerned with deflecting attention from its recent setback in the Iran-Iraq war. The long-prepared Israeli operation was christened “Peace in the Galilee”.

Initially, the Israeli government had announced its intention to penetrate 40km into Lebanese territory. The military commander, under the orders of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, had meanwhile decided to execute a more ambitious project that Mr Sharon had prepared several months previously. After having occupied the south of the country and destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese residences there, simultaneously committing a series of violations against the civilian population , the Israeli troops penetrated as far as Beirut, and by 18 June 1982 they had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s armed forces in the west side of the town.

According to Lebanese statistics, the Israeli offensive, particularly the intensive shelling against Beirut, caused 18,000 deaths and 30,000 injuries, mostly among civilians.

After two months of fighting, a ceasefire was negotiated through the intermediary of United States Envoy Philip Habib. It was agreed that the PLO would evacuate Beirut, under the supervision of a multinational force deployed in the evacuated part of the town. The Habib Accords envisaged that West Beirut would subsequently be invested by the Lebanese army, and the Palestinian leadership were given American guarantees for the security of civilians in the camps after their departure.

The evacuation of the PLO ended on 1 September 1982.

On 10 September 1982, the multinational forces left Beirut. The next day, Mr Ariel Sharon announced that “2,000 terrorists” had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, after the previous day’s assassination of President-elect Basher Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, “surrounding and sealing” the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by an entirely civilian Lebanese and Palestinian population, the entirety of armed resistors (more than 14,000 people) having evacuated Beirut and its suburbs.

Historians and journalists agree that it was probably during a meeting between Ariel Sharon and Bashir Gemayel in Bikfaya on 12 September that an agreement was concluded to authorise the “Lebanese forces” to “mop up” these Palestinian camps. The intention to send the Phalangist forces into West Beirut had already been announced by Mr Sharon on 9 July 1982 , and in his biography he confirms having negotiated the operation during his meeting with Bikfaya.

According to Ariel Sharon’s 22 September 1982 declarations in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps of Beirut was decided on Wednesday 15 September 1982 at 15.30. Also according to General Sharon, the Israeli commandant had received the following instruction: “The Tsahal forces are forbidden to enter the refugee camps. The “mopping-up” of the camps will be carried out by the Phalanges or the Lebanese army.”

From dawn on 15 September 1982, Israeli fighter-bombers were flying low over West Beirut and Israeli troops had secured their entry. From 9am, General Sharon was present to personally direct the Israeli penetration, installing himself in the general army area at the Kuwait embassy junction situated at the edge of Shatila. From the roof of this six-storey building, it was possible to clearly observe the town and the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

From midday, the camps of Sabra and Shatila – in reality a single zone of refugee camps in the south of West Beirut – were surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who had installed checkpoints all around the camps permitting the surveillance of the entrances and exits. During the late afternoon and evening, the camps were bombarded with shells.

By Thursday 16 September 1982, the Israeli army controlled West Beirut. In a release, the military spokesperson declared, “Tsahal controls all the strategic points of Beirut. The refugee camps, including the concentrations of terrorists, are surrounded and closed.” In the morning of 16 September, the following order was issued by the army high command: “The searching and mopping up of the camps will be done by the Phalangists/Lebanese army.”

During the morning, shells were fired down towards the camps from high locations and Israeli snipers were shooting down at people in the streets. At about midday, the Israeli military command gave the Phalangist militia green light to enter the refugee camps. Shortly after 5 o’clock pm, a unit of approximately 150 Phalangists entered Shatila camp from the south and southwest.

At that point, General Drori telephoned Ariel Sharon and announced, “Our friends are advancing into the camps. We have coordinated their entry.” Sharon replied, “Congratulations! Our friends’ operation is approved.”

For the next 40 hours inside the “surrounded and sealed” camps, the Phalangist militia raped, killed and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and old people. These actions were accompanied or followed by systematic roundups, backed or reinforced by the Israeli army, resulting in dozens of disappearances.

Until the morning of Saturday 18 September 1982, the Israeli army, which knew perfectly well what was going on in the camps, and whose leaders were in permanent contact with the militia leaders who perpetrated the massacre, did not intervene. Instead, they prevented civilians from escaping the camps and organised for the camps to be lit up throughout the night by flares sent into the sky from helicopters and mortars.

The count of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) and 3,500 (notably in the inquiry launched by the Israeli journalist Kapeliouk). The exact figure will never be determined because in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the ICRC or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried under bulldozed buildings by the militia themselves. Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return.

The victims and survivors of the massacres have never received any judicial instruction, whether in Lebanon, Israel or elsewhere. After 400,000 people took to the streets in protest, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) named a commission of inquiry presided over by Mr Yitzhak Kahan in September 1982. In spite of the limitations of the commission’s mandate (it was a political and not a judicial mandate) and the total absence of the voices and demands of the victims, the Commission concluded that the Minster of Defence was personally responsible for the massacres.

Upon the insistence of the Commission, and the demonstrations that followed its report, Mr Sharon resigned from his post of Minister of Defence but remained in the government as Minister Without Portfolio. It is worth noting that, during the ‘Peace Now’ demonstration immediately prior to Sharon’s ‘resignation’, demonstrators were attacked with grenades, resulting in the death of a young demonstrator.

Several non-official inquiries and reports including those of MacBride and of the Nordic Commission, based mainly on the testimony of eyewitnesses, as well as other pieces of journalistic and historical research, have brought together vital pieces of information. These texts, in part or in full, are annexed to this file.

In spite of the evidence of what the UN Security Council described as a ‘criminal massacre,’ and the sad ranking of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in humankind’s collective memory as among the great crimes of the 20th Century, the man found “personally responsible”, his associates and the people who carried out the massacres have never been pursued or punished. In 1984, the Israeli journalists Schiff and Yaari concluded their chapter on the massacre with this reflection: “If there is a moral to the painful episode of Sabra and Shatila, it has yet to be acknowledged.” This reality of impunity remains true to this day.

The United Nations Security Council condemned the massacre with Resolution 521 (19 September 1982). This condemnation was followed by a 16 December 1982 General Assembly resolution qualifying the massacre as an “act of genocide.”

B. IN PARTICULAR

B1. Plaintiffs, survivors of Sabra and Shatila.

In annex to the present charges, the plaintiffs submit a statement of their personal suffering. The originals are in Arabic; each statement has been translated into French [and now English]. These statements are very telling and convincing:

1. Samiha Abbas Hijazi:

On the Thursday, there was shelling when the Israelis came, then it got worse so we went down into the shelter. (…) We learnt on the Friday that there had been a massacre. I went to my neighbours’ house. I saw our neighbour Mustapha Al Habarat; he was injured and lying in a bath of his own blood. His wife and children were dead. We took him to the Gaza hospital and then we fled. When things had calmed down, I came back and searched for my daughter and my husband for four days. I spent four days looked for them through all the dead bodies. I found Zeinab dead, her face burnt. Her husband had been cut in two and had no head. I took them and buried them.

Madame Abbas Hijazi lost her daughter, her son-in-law, her daughter’s godmother and other loved ones.

2. Abdel Nasser Alameh:

On the night of the carnage, we were at home and we heard that there was a massacre at Shatila. (…) We kept watch on the road all night, taking turns to sleep a few hours, until daybreak when some people managed to escape. I thought my brother had gone ahead of us to West Beirut. We waited for him but he didn’t come. In fact my brother was one of the ones they took away, and we never even found his body.

Mr Alameh lost his brother, who was 19 years old.

3. Wadha Hassan Al Sabeq:

We were at home on Friday 17 September; the neighbours came and they started to say: Israel has come in, go to the Israelis, they are taking papers and stamping them. We went out to see the Israelis. When we got there, the tanks and the Israeli soldiers were there, but we were surprised to see that they had Lebanese forces with them. They took the men and left us women and children together. When they took the children and all the men from me, they said to us, “Go to the Sports Centre,” and they took us there. They left us there until 7pm, then they told us, “Go to Fakhani and don’t go back to your house,” then they started firing shells and bullets at us.

On one side there were some men who had been arrested; they took them and we have never found out what happened to them. To this day we know nothing about what happened to them; they just disappeared.

Mrs Al Sabeq lost two sons (aged 16 and 19), a brother and about 15 other relatives.

4. Mahmoud Younis:

I was 11 years old. It was night and we could hear shelling and gunfire. (…) We took refuge in the bedroom and stayed there. As soon as they arrived, they went straight to the living room, and they tore down the photos from the walls, including the one of my brother who was killed in “Black September.” They ransacked the living room, cursing and swearing. After having looked for us without finding us, they went up to the roof and stayed there all night long. We spent that night in terror in our hiding place, listening to the shooting and people screaming, while Israel fired flares to light the sky until sunrise.

The next morning they started saying, “give yourself up and your life will be spared.” My nephew was 18 months old. He was hungry and we were far from the kitchen. My sister wanted him to quieten down, and she put her hand over his mouth for fear that they would hear. Her husband decided that we would have to give ourselves up, adding that each person’s fate was anyway preordained by God. The women went out first, my brothers, my father, my brother-in-law and other members of the family followed. My brother was ill. As soon as they heard our voices, they shot in our direction and came straight back inside the house. They asked us where we had been the day before when they had come in and not found anyone there. Then they ordered the women and children to go out. My brother-in-law started kissing his little girl as if he were saying goodbye. An armed man came towards my niece, tied a rope around her neck and threatened to strangle her if her father didn’t let go of her. He let go of her and gave her to me. They wanted to take me too but my mother told them I was a girl. They made my mother and the women walk to the Sports Centre. While I was walking I saw my aunt’s husband, Abu Nayef, killed near our house with blows of an axe to his head. The dead bodies were disfigured. While I was carrying my niece, I bumped into a dead body that had been hit with an axe and I fell over. They knew then that I was a boy, and one of them put me up against the wall; he wanted to fire a bullet into my head. My mother begged him and kissed his feet so that he would let me go. He pushed her away. When he did that, he heard the clinking of some money she had hidden next to her chest. He asked her what that meant. She replied that he could have all the money he wanted but he had to let me stay with her. In this way we carried on our way and we arrived at the Sports Centre. The Israeli bulldozers were busy digging large trenches. We were told that we all had to get in because they wanted to bury us all alive. My mother started begging him again, and then she asked for a mouthful of water before dying.

At the Sports Centre, I saw the Israeli military, as well as tanks, bulldozers and artillery, all Israeli. We also saw groups of Phalangists with the Israelis.

The Sports Centre was packed with women and children. We stayed there until sunset. An Israeli came then and he said, “Everyone go to the Cola region, whoever comes back to the camp will die.” We left, as they fired shots in our direction.

Mr Younis lost his father, three brothers, his maternal uncle, his maternal cousin, two paternal cousins and other members of his family.

5.    Fadia Ali Al Doukhi:

When the shelling started and we knew that Israel had surrounded the camp, my father told us to escape. We asked him to come with us, but he refused because he wanted to protect the house. We escaped, leaving him in the house. Later, we found out that a massacre had taken place. We found out that my father was dead and we saw his picture in the newspaper. His foot had been cut off. Our neighbour in the house where my father had sheltered told us how they killed him.

Mrs Al Doukhi, who was 11 years old at the time, lost her father.

6. Amina Hasan Mohsen:

We were at home the Thursday when the shelling started. I didn’t know what was going on outside. When the shelling intensified, I tried to go out to save myself and the children. When we went out, the dead bodies were spread out over the street. My children were afraid. An Israeli told us to go out. Then we saw someone speaking Lebanese. When we went out under cover of the Israelis, they started shouting at us. At that moment I counted my children and I saw that Samir was missing; when he saw the dead people on the ground he got scared and ran away. At that moment I didn’t have the presence of mind to go looking for him because the whole area was full of Israeli and Lebanese troops. We escaped, and when the massacre was over I looked for Samir, but the corpses were so mutilated I couldn’t recognise him among them.

Mrs Mohsen lost her 16-year-old son.

7.    Sana Mahmoud Sersawi:

We lived in the Said area of Sabra, and when the shelling started we sought refuge at my parents’ house in Shatila. This happened on the Wednesday. At about midnight, some women who came from the western quarter said that there was killing. We escaped once again, towards the interior of the camp. Then, when daybreak came, we hid ourselves in the shelter of the rest home. I was pregnant at the time, and I had two daughters who were still taking milk. We stayed in the rest home for two days, until Saturday. We didn’t have any more milk. My husband went out to get some for the girls. That night was so long, and the Israelis were firing flares to illuminate the sky. It was like this when my husband went to Sabra. The Israelis had come as far as the Gaza hospital. After that, I went out to look for him, and my sister went to look for her husband. We arrived at the entrance to Shatila. There, they had put the men on one side and the women on the other side. I started looking among all the men. I saw him, and I said to him, “You know, these are Phalangists.” He replied, “What happened at Tel al Zaater will happen to us.” The armed men ordered us to walk in front, and the men behind. We walked like this until we arrived at the communal grave. There, the bulldozer had started digging. Among us was a man who was wearing a white nurse’s shirt; they called him and filled him with bullets in front of everyone. The women started screaming. The Israelis posted in front of the Kuwait embassy and in front of the Rihab station requested through loudspeakers that we be delivered to them.

That’s how we found ourselves in their hands. They took us to the Sports Centre, and the men were supposed to walk behind us. But they took the men’s shirts off and started blindfolding them with them.