Munir’s Story: 28 years after the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila Franklin Lamb,
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp,
Beirut
The untreated psychic wounds are still open. Accountability, justice and basic civil rights for the survivors are still
denied.
Scores of horror testimonies have been shared over the past nearly three decades by survivors of the September 1982
Sabra- Shatila massacre. More come to light only through circumstantial evidence because would be affiants perished
during the slaughter. Other eyewitness are just beginning to emerge from deep trauma or self imposed silence.
Some testimonies will be shared this month by massacre survivors at Shatila camp. They will sit with the every growing
numbers of international visitors who annually come to commemorate one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century.
There are no average massacre testimonies.
Zeina, a handsome bronzed-faced middle-aged woman, an acquaintance of Munir Mohammad’s family, asked a foreigner the
other day: “How can it be 28 years? I think it was just last fall that my husband Hussam and our two daughters, Maya, 8
years old, and Sirham, 9 years old, left our two room home to search for food because the Israeli army had sealed
Shatila camp nearly two days before and few inside Shatila Camp had any. I still pray and wait for them to return.”
In Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and outside Abu Yassir's shelter, the bullet marks still cover the lower half of the
11 “walls of death” where some of the dried blood is mixed and feathered in with the thin mortar. An elderly gentleman
named Abu Samer still has some souvenirs of the American automatic pistols fitted with silencers and a couple of knives
and axes that were strapped to some of the killers belts as they quickly and silently shot, carved and chopped whoever
they came upon starting at around 6 p.m. on Thursday September 16, 1982. These weapons were gifted to Israel by the US
Congress and subsequently issued along with drugs and alcohol and other "policing equipment" by Ariel Sharon to the
killers in his "most moral army."
•Earlier this year, one of the murderers from the Numour al-Ahrar (Tigers of the Liberals) militia, the armed wing of
Lebanon’s right-wing National Liberal Party founded by former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, nonchalantly
confessed, “we sometimes used these implements in order to advance silently through the alleys of Shatila so as not to
cause unnecessary panic during our work.” The Tigers militia, one of five Christian killer units, was assisted inside
Shatila by more than two dozen Israeli Mossad agents, and led in this blitz by none other than Dani Chamoun, son of the
former President.
No plaque or sign notes what happened here.
The world learned of the slaughter at Sabra-Shatila on the morning of Sunday September 19, 1982. Photos, many now
available on the Internet, taken by witnesses such as Ralph Shoneman, Mya Shone, Ryuichi Hirokawa, Ali Hasan Salman,
Ramzi Hardar, Gunther Altenburg, and Gaza and Akka Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) Hospital staff, preserve the
gruesome images deeply etched in the survivors memory. The Israeli Kahan Commission, five months later in its February
7, 1983 Report, substantially whitewashed Israeli responsibility referring more than once to the massacre as “a war.”
Zeina ushered me down a narrow alley from her house arriving at the 3 by 8 meter wall outside her sister’s home,
spraying here and there with an aerosol can as we walked. She apologized for the spray but insisted that she and her
neighbors could even now smell the slaughter that happened there three decades earlier.
For readers unfamiliar with the location of Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut, this particular “wall of death”
is located across from the PRCS Akka Hospital, such as it is, after years without adequate financial or NGO support.
Locating the 11 “walls of death” requires help from the few older Palestinians who still live in this quarter. They are
among those still living at the scene and who still vividly recall the details of the massacre. Some provide personal
history of some of the butchered, seemingly urging the dead to return by making them seem so alive, often describing a
personality trait and the name of their family village in Palestine.
“A sweet boy who adored his older brothers Mutid and Bilal”
Zeina recalls that Munir Mohammad was 12 years old on September 16, 1982, a pupil at the Shatila camp school, named
Jalil (Galilee). Virtually all of the 75 remaining UNRWA schools in Lebanon, like other Palestinian institutions, are
named after villages, towns or cities in occupied Palestine. Often they are named after villages that no longer actually
exist, being among the 531 villages the Zionists colonizers obliterated during and after the 1947-48 Nakba (Catastrophe).
Zeina recalls that it was late on a Thursday afternoon, September 16, that the Israeli shelling had grown intense.
Designed to drive the camp residents into the shelters, almost all of which Israeli intelligence, arriving the previous
day in three white vehicles and posing as "concerned NGO staff" had identified and noted the coordinates on their maps.
Some residents, thinking aid workers had come to help the refugees, actually revealed their secret sanctuaries. Other
refugees, based on their experience in the crowded shelters during the preceding 75 days of indiscriminate, “Peace for
Galilee” Israeli bombing of Shatila, suggested to the "aid workers" that the shelters needed better ventilation and
perhaps the visitors would help provide it.
According to Zeina the Israeli agents quickly sketched the shelter locations, marked them with a red circle and returned
to their HQ which was located less than 70 meters on the raised terrain at the SE corner of Shatila camp still known as
Turf Club Yards. Today, this sandy area still contains three death pits which according to the late American journalist
Janet Stevens is where some of the hundreds of still missing bodies of the more than 3,000 slaughtered are likely
buried. Janet had theorized that there was a second Sabra-Shatila Massacre that occurred on Sunday morning, September
19th, which piggybacked the first and was conducted on the west side of Shatila inside the second Israeli-Phalange HQ,
known as the Cite Sportiff athletic complex. As the Israeli soldiers took custody from the Phalange militia of the
surviving refugees, trucks entered Cite Sportiff loaded with hundreds of camp residents on the back to be taken to
“holding centers”. Family members forced to wait outside heard volleys of gunfire and screams from inside the complex.
Hours later the same flat beds drove away to unknown locations, tarps covering the unseen mounded cargo.
Camp resident, Mrs. Sana Mahmoud Sersawi, one of the 23 complainants in the Belgium case filed against Ariel Sharon on
June 16, 2001, (currently but not fatally sidetracked) explained: “The Israelis who were posted in front of the Kuwaiti
embassy and at the Rihab benzene station at the entrance to Shatila demanded through loudspeakers that we come to them.
That’s how we found ourselves in their hands. They took us to the Cite Sportiff, and the men were marched behind us. But
they took the men’s shirts off and started blindfolding them. The Israelis interrogated the young people and the
Phalange delivered about 200 more people to the Israelis. And that’s how neither my husband nor my sister’s husband ever
came back.”
Journalist Robert Fisk and others who studied these events, concur that more slaughter was done during the 24 hour
period after 8 a.m. Saturday, the hour the Israeli Kahan Commission, which declined to interview any Palestinians, ruled that the
Israelis had stopped all the killing.
Eyewitness testimony also established that the "aid workers" described by Zeina passed the shelter descriptions and
locations to Lebanese Forces operatives Elie Hobeika and Fadi Frem, and their ally, Major Saad Haddad of the
Israeli-allied South Lebanese Army. Thursday evening, Hobeika, de facto commander since the assassination the week
previously of Phalange leader and President-elect Bachir Gemayel, led one of the death squads inside the killing field
of the Horst Tabet area near Abu Yassir's shelter.
It was in 8 of the 11 Israeli-located and marked shelters that the first of the massacre victims were quickly and
methodically slaughtered. There being few perfect crimes, even in massacres, the killers failed to find 3 of the
shelters. One of the overlooked shelters was just 25 meters from Abu Yassir's shelter. Apart from these three
undiscovered hiding places there were practically no Shatila shelter survivors.
American journalist David Lamb wrote about this first night of butchery and the “walls of death”: “Entire families were
slain. Groups consisting of 10-20 people were lined up against walls and sprayed with bullets. Mothers died while
clutching their babies. All men appeared to be shot in the back. Five youths of fighting age were tied to a pickup truck
and dragged through the streets before being shot.”
At around about 8 p.m. on September 18 Munir Mohammad entered the crowded Abu Yassir shelter with his mother Aida and
his sisters and brothers Iman, Fadya, Mufid and Mu’in. Keeping the relatively few camp shelters for the woman and
children while the men took their chances outside was a common practice as the massacre unfolded. But a few men did
enter to help calm their young children.
“If any of you are injured, we’ll take you to the hospital”.
Munir later recalled events that night: “The killers arrived at the door of the shelter and yelled for everyone to come
out. Men who they found were lined up against the wall outside. They were immediately machine gunned.” As Munir watched,
the killers left to kill other groups and then suddenly returned and opened fire on everyone, and all fell to the
ground. Munir lay quietly not knowing if his mother and sisters were dead. Then he heard the killers yelling: “If any of
you are injured, we’ll take you to the hospital. Don’t worry. Get up and you’ll see.” A few did try to get up or moaned
and they were instantly shot in the head.
Munir remembered: “Even though it was light out due to the Israeli flares over Shatila, the killers used bright flash
lights to search the darkened corners. The killers were looking in the shadows”. Suddenly Munir’s mother’s body seemed
to shift in the mound of corpses next to him. Munir thought she might be going to get up since the killers promised to
take anyone still alive to the hospital. Munir whispered to her: “Don’t get up mother, they’re lying”. And Munir stayed
motionless all night barely daring to breath, pretending to be dead.
Munir could not block out the killers words. Years later he would repeat to an interviewer as they passed the Shatila
Burial ground known as Martyrs Square: “After they shot us, we were all down on the ground, and they were going back and forth, and they were saying: ‘If any
of you are still alive, we’ll have mercy and pity and take them to the hospital. Come on, you can tell us.’ If anyone
moaned, or believed them and said they needed an ambulance, they would be rescued with shots and finished off there and
then…What really disturbed me wasn’t just the death all around me. I…didn’t know whether my mother and sisters and
brother had died. I knew most of the people around me had died. And it’s true I was afraid of dying myself. But what
disturbed me so very much was that they were laughing, getting drunk and enjoying themselves all night long. They threw
blankets on us and left us there till morning. All night long [Thursday the 16th) I could hear the voices of the girls
crying and screaming, 'For god’s sake, leave us alone.' I mean…I can’t remember how many girls they raped. The girl’
voice, with their fear and pain, I can’t ever forget them.”
The same kind of dégagé is displayed by the half dozen confessed militia murderers featured in German director Monika Borgmann's 2005 film Massaker, one of whom opined: "With hanging or shooting you just die, but this is double," explaining how he took an old
Palestinian man and held him back against a wall, slicing him open in the shape of a cross. "You die twice since you
also die from the fear," he said nonchalantly describing white flesh and bone as if in a charcuterie waiting to be
served.
The killers also explained how they began a frantic rush to dispose of as many bodies as possible before the media
entered Shatila. One testified how the Israeli army gave them large plastic trash bags to dispose of bodies. Another
confessed that they forced people into army trucks to ferry them to Cite Sportiff where they were killed. And that they
used chemicals to destroy many of the corpses. Several mentioned that Israeli army officers conferred with the militia's
leaders in Beirut on the eve of the massacres.
The venomous hatred persists to this day
To this day, the Hurras al-Arz (Guardians of the Cedars) boasts of its role in the carnage. Less than two weeks before
the massacre the party issued a call for the confiscation of all Palestinian property in Lebanon, the outlawing of home
ownership and the destruction of all refugee camps.
The party statement of September 1, 1982 declared: “Action must be taken to reduce the numbers of Palestinian refugees
in Lebanon, until the day comes when no single Palestinian remains on our soil.”
In 1982 certain political parties referred to Palestinians as “a bacillus which must be exterminated” and graffiti on
walls read: ”The duty of every Lebanese is to kill a Palestinian”--the same hatred commonly expressed today in occupied
Palestine among colonists, extremist Rabbis and politicians.
The ‘Guardians’ call for outlawing Palestinian refugee property ownership was indeed achieved in 2001 by a law drafted
by current Minister of Labor, who pledged on September 1, 2010 that “Parliament will never allow Palestinian refugees
the right to own property.”
The mentality that allowed the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila 1982 is largely unchanged in 2010, as Lebanon still resists the
call of the international community to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila massacre basic civil rights. Some who
have studied the Arabic websites and observed gatherings of the political parties represented at the 1982 massacre,
claim the hate language is actually worse today and is being used to stir up Parliamentary opposition Palestinian civil
rights.
During the month following the 1982 Massacre, British Dr. Paul Morris treated Munir at Gaza Hospital approximately one
kilometer north of Abu Yassir's shelter, and kept the youngster under observation. Dr. Morris reported to researcher
Bayan Nuwayhed al Hout (Sabra and Shatila: September 1982, Pluto Press, London, 2004) that Munir “Will smile once in a while, but he doesn’t react spontaneously like others of
this age, except just occasionally." Then the doctor banged on the table, and said: ‘The lad has to be saved. He has to
leave the camp, if only for a while, to recover himself.”
When Munir was asked by al Hout if one day when he grew up and would be able to carry a weapon would he consider
revenge. The pre-teen replied, replied: “No, No. I’d never think of revenge by killing children. The way they killed us.
What did the children do wrong?”
Munir’s 15 year old brother Mufid was among the first to enter Abu Yassir’s shelter, but he left and later appeared at
Akka Hoppital with a gunshot wound. After being bandaged he left the hospital to seek safety and his family. No one has
seen him since and for a long time Munir could not even mention him.
According to camp residents, Munir’s older brother, Nabil, then 19 years old, being of fighting age would have been shot
on sight by the killers. Aware of this, Nabil’s cousin and his cousin’s wife fled with him as the Israeli shelling
increased and camp residents reported indiscriminate killing. The trio dodged sniper bullets to seek refuge in a nursing
home where his aunt worked. Like Munir, Nabil soon learned that his mother and siblings were all dead.
Postscript
Now in America, both Munir and Nabil are leading relatively ‘normal lives’ considering the horror and lost family they
experienced while escaping death at Sabra-Shatila. Munir and Nabil have become a credit to Shatila camp, to Palestine
and to their adopted country. Residing in the Washington DC area, Munir is married and busy with his career. Nabil is
devoting his life to advocacy for peace and justice in the Middle East, working with an NGO. Both brothers return to
Shatila camp regularly.
Also apparently living ‘normal lives’ are the six “Christian” militia killers featured in Borgmann’s film Massaker. "They are all living ordinary lives. One of them is a taxi driver," Borgmann explains.
As is well known, the massacres at Sabra-Shatila were undeniable war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Each
killing was a violation of international laws enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, International Customary Law and jus cogens. Similar massive crimes have seen charges brought against Rwandan officials, Chile's ex-president, General Augusto
Pinochet, Chad's former president, Hissein Habre, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Liberia’s Taylor and
Sudan’s Bachir.
No one has been punished or even investigated for the Sabra-Shatila massacre. On March 28, 1991 Lebanon’s Parliament
retroactively exempted the killers from criminal responsibility. However, this law has no standing in international law
and the international community remains legally obligated to punish those responsible. The victims and their families of
the Sabra-Shatila massacre as well as virtually all human rights organizations including but not limited to Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, the Humanitarian Law Project, strenuously oppose blanket amnesty for the killers.
They argue that the 1991 violates Lebanon’s constitution, as well as international law and promotes impunity for heinous
crimes.
It was precisely to achieve justice for the victims of crimes such as Sabra- Shatila that the International Criminal
Court was established. The ICC must begin its work without further delay and all people of goodwill must encourage
Lebanon to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre basic civil rights.
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Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon. He can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com