31 Years After the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
Here is another article addressing Sabra and Shatila.
"Each year, during the third week of September, Lebanon and this region, as well as international supporters, pause to reflect upon and commemorate the victims one of the twentieth century’s most horrific and cynical crimes perpetrated by a member state of the United Nations. The Sabra-Shatila massacre took place September 16-19th*in Beirut, a well-documented 48 hours of slaughter that saw the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp surrounded and sealed off by the occupying Israeli army, whose intent was to block and force back inside the killing field anyone seeking to escape the predicted orgy of butchery*(see Bayan al Hout, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, Pluto Press). Under a sky illuminated by night flares, and within close earshot of the screams emerging from the horror, IDF commanders sat perched above the camp watching through binoculars as if at a coliseum sporting event, looking down, occasionally pointing, monitoring the killers through line- of-sight as well as by radio contact. The victims were a defenseless civilian population. The instrument used to kill them? A drug, alcohol, and hate-filled militia which had been provided abundant aid and assistance, including a bulldozer to bury evidence of its crimes. Israel, whose continued occupation of Palestine is possible only because of arms, funding and diplomatic cover from the United States, and despite its accelerating pariah status, has largely escaped international legal accountability for its crimes at Sabra-Shatila, even though universally condemned for the carnage it organized and oversaw there."
And the article addresses an annual march in Lebanon, from Ghobeiry Municipality Cultural Center, located across from Shatila camp, to the cemetery off Rue Sabra where nearly 1100 Sabra-Shatila massacre martyrs were hastily buried on Sunday, September 20, 1982. As witnessed and reported by the late American journalist Janet Lee Stevens, the corpses, of mainly women and children, were in a state of rapid decomposition due to the hot weather and piled into a mass grave. The site later became a garbage dump, and then a football field, until the Hezbollah led Ghobeiry Municipality insisted on its sanctity, cleaning up the area and planting some shrubs, while Europeans donated a rose ga
Positive developments are also discussed in this article, as it is pointed out that the culture and era of international sanctions to dismantle the apartheid Zionist regime is rapidly spreading and gaining momentum. Two initiatives we see are the BDS movement and the EU sanctions. Now, that is something to smile about, every day takes us one day closer to the end of the Zionist Regime carrying out her atrocities in Palestine.
31 Years After the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
