Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem, Sr
On September 16, 1982, the Nazi army, in control of West Beirut, sealed off the 2 Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, and fired shells at them. Later, the Nazi military command at the direction of senior members of the Nazi regime gave the Nazi-allied Lebanese Nazi Phalangist militia the green light to enter the refugee camps and at 5:00 p.m. on the 16th, the Nazi Phalangist militia entered the camps. For the next 40 hours, the Nazi Phalangist militia raped, shot, hacked, stomped, dragged, bulldozed and burned to death possibly as many as 3,500 unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people, and demolished hundreds of their homes inside the encircled and sealed Sabra and Shatila camps.
The Nazi supervised the operation from their forward command post, a six story building overlooking the camps. From there they gave logistic support and relayed orders to the Nazi soldiers on the ground. Concerned that reports of the on-going Nazi slaughter would leak out, the Nazi soldiers were ordered to continue the killing throughout the night. During the massacre, the Nazi army prevented civilians from escaping and illuminated the camps throughout the night by flares launched into the sky from helicopters and mortars.
The Nazi’ and the Nazi Phalangists’ intention was to so terrorize the 500,000 Palestinians in Lebanon – already refugees from Nazi occupied Galilee in 1948 – that they would flee the country.
