The 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, most of whom were Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, will not be held accountable before international courts.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which began on September 16, 1982 and claimed the lives of about 3,500 civilians, most of them Palestinians, in one of the most heinous massacres in the country's history.
As every year, the Palestinian camps and many Lebanese cities witness events that recall the enormity of the massacre and demand that the perpetrators be tried before international courts and punished.
The massacre took place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, west of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and lasted between 16 and 18 September 1982, at a time when the country was witnessing a civil war (1975-1990).
At that time, Beirut, in which these two camps were located, was suffering under the weight of an Israeli invasion that facilitated Lebanese Christian militias to commit the massacre, which also killed hundreds of Lebanese and Syrians.
According to the International Human Rights Watch, in a 2014 report, “among the dead in the massacre were infants, children, pregnant women, the elderly and the elderly, and the bodies of some of them were mutilated,” and “the killings that took place constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
And it quotes an Israeli commission of inquiry called the "Kahan Committee" that "Ariel Sharon, in his capacity as the Israeli defense minister at the time, allowed the Lebanese (Phalange) militias to enter the two camps, where they spread terror and panic among the residents for three days."
The organization notes that "Sharon, who died in 2014, did not face justice for his role in the massacre, despite efforts to prosecute him in Belgium based on a lawsuit filed by survivors, calling for Sharon to be prosecuted under the Belgian law of universal jurisdiction."
Two days before the massacre, the newly elected President of the Lebanese Republic, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated on September 14, 1982.
The area of the Sabra and Shatila camps is about one square kilometer, and their population is estimated today at about 12,000 people (an unofficial number), and they are among the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with a total population of about 200,000.
The Palestinians began to seek refuge in Lebanon after the "Nakba", a term they call their displacement from their lands by "armed Zionist gangs" in 1948, the year in which the State of Israel was established on occupied Palestinian lands.
According to the Kahan Committee, "the two camps were stormed by a group of the (Phalange) militia led by the Lebanese Elie Hobeika," who was elected in the early 1990s as a member of Parliament, and then held several ministerial positions.
As for “Hobeika, who was assassinated in 2002 by a car bomb explosion near Beirut, his crimes, especially his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, were not investigated at all, whether in Lebanon or anywhere else,” according to a second Human Rights Watch report in 2015.
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