Sabra and Shatila: 25 Years on

Commentary by Khalid Amayreh

"......Nobody knows the exact number of the victims, but according to various accounts, the number ranged between 2000 and 3500.

The utter Nazi-like nature of the atrocities was as numbing as it was conspicuous. Human corpses were in every corner, every street, every home, everywhere. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the electricity shocks that had convulsed their bodies, with the electric cables still tied around their lifeless limbs. Body parts ripped from their small torsos scattered here and there. Women horribly raped, with their legs shamelessly ripped apart, even without a cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.

Many women were gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. A headless baby-boy in diapers was lying next to two murdered women. Slaughtered babies piled, their bodies blackened as they began to decompose, children with their throats slashed, and mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat. Entire families executed or axed to death, with their blood splashed on the walls of their homes. It was Auschwitz re-enacted, with helpless Palestinian as victims, and insolent Jews as victimizers.....

And when some distraught refugees tried to escape, appealing to whatever shred of humanity they thought the Israeli occupation army might have had, they were turned back at gunpoint to face ultimate brutal death at the hands of Israel’s dogs......

The massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila were not a thunder on clear day. They were meticulously planned and supervised by the Israeli army, especially Ariel Sharon, who probably was the main mastermind of the massacre. Other Israeli officers, like Amos Yaron, also played key roles in effecting the massacre. Sharon is now in a deep comma for nearly two years. Maybe God is punishing him for the tens of thousands of innocent lives he killed in the name of fulfilling Jewish nationalism. Eli Hobeika, the Phalangist commander who directly supervised the brutal slaughter, in league with Sharon and Yaron, was assassinated a few years ago in Beirut. But Yaron and many other war criminals remain outside the reach of justice. May they all rot in hell......

Israel wanted then as it does now to tell the Palestinians that it would not hesitate to outmatch and outperform the Gestapo, SS and wehrmacht in order to achieve its goals of ethnic cleansing and territorial aggrandizement......

And a word to the Palestinian people. Don’t take your physical survival for granted. The world that kept silent and did nothing to save the screaming women and children from the Nazis of our time will not hasten to save you when the next slaughter-time approaches. Rely on yourselves and don’t trust the criminal American government and mendacious Europe . Didn’t the Regan administration promise to protect the refugees following the negotiated withdrawal of PLO forces from Beirut ?

Nor should you rely on official Arab regimes. They are America’s cheap slaves."