Keep ignoring what the Palestinian savages did to the Christians in Lebanon. I didn't know that the Lebanese Christian were "occupying" ancient Palestinian lands?
The
Damour massacre took place on January 20, 1976, during the 1975–1990
Lebanese Civil War.
Damour, a
Maronite town on the main highway south of
Beirut, was attacked by the
Palestine Liberation Organisationunits. Part of its population died in battle or in the
massacre that followed, and the remainder were forced to flee.
The
Phalangist militia based in
Damour and
Dayr al Nama had been blocking the coastal road. The Damour massacre was a response to the
Karantina massacre of January 18, 1976, in which Phalangists killed from 1000 up to 5000 people.
It occurred as part of a series of events during the
Lebanese Civil War, in which
Palestinians joined the Muslim forces, in the context of the Christian-Muslim divide, and soon
Beirut was divided along the
Green Line, with Christian enclaves to the east and Muslims to the west.
Twenty Phalangist militiamen were executed, and then civilians were lined up against a wall and sprayed with
machine-gun fire. None of the remaining inhabitants survived.
[10] An estimated 582 civilians died. Among the killed were family members of
Elie Hobeika and his fiancée. Following the
Battle of Tel al-Zaatar later the same year, the PLO resettled
Palestinian refugees in Damour. After the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the
Zaatar refugees were expelled from Damour, and the original inhabitants brought back.
According to
Thomas L. Friedman, the Phalangist
Damouri Brigade, which carried out the
Sabra and Shatila massacre during the
1982 Lebanon War sought revenge not only for the assassination of
Bashir Gemayel, but also for what he describes as past tribal killings of their own people by Palestinians, including those at Damour.
According to an eyewitness, the attack took place from the mountain behind the town. "It was an apocalypse," said Father Mansour Labaky, a Christian Maronite priest who survived the massacre. "They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting 'Allahu Akbar! (God is great!) Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad!', and they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children."
Perpetrators
The attack and subsequent massacre was carried out by a mixed crew of Palestinian militiamen.
According to journalist and author
Robert Fisk, the attack was led by Colonel
Abu Musa, a senior commander of the PLO and
Fatah, and later leader of the anti-
Arafat Fatah Uprising faction.
Cedarland.org names
Zuheir Mohsen, leader of
as-Sa'iqa, a
Damascus-based Palestinian faction operating directly on Syrian orders, and claims that he was known in Lebanon as the "Butcher from Damour".
The bulk of the attacking forces seems to have been composed of brigades from the
Palestinian Liberation Army and
as-Sa'iqa, as well as other militias, including Fatah. Some sources also mention the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Muslim Lebanese
al-Murabitun militia among the attackers. There are reports that PLO forces were additionally joined by militiamen from
Syria,
Jordan,
Libya,
Iran,
Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and possibly even
Japanese Red Army terrorists who were then undergoing training by the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon.
