I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later,
they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours." Dr. Amal Shamaa of the Barbir hospital, after Israeli phosphorus shells had been fired into West Beirut, 29 July, 1982.48
During the slaughter at Qana, the occupying Israeli forces considered even sleeping babies enemies and killed them unhesitatingly.
UNFORGETTABLE PHOTOGRAPHS These photographs of the slaughter that occurred in Qana reflect the true face of the cruelty experienced in Palestine.
The Zionist terrorist operations to intimidate Palestinians and drive them off their land following WWII resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent
people. But Israel''s attack on the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 will go down in history as one of the worst acts of Zionist genocide ever committed. During the attack by Lebanon''s Christian Phalangist groups, with the support and direction of Israeli soldiers, more than 3,000 people, most of them women and children, were murdered. Subsequent research and investigation showed that Ariel Sharon, at that time Israel''s defense
minister and now prime minister, was responsible for the operation. Due to this bloody attack, he is still known as "The Butcher of Lebanon."
The horrible massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps was carried out under the orders and instructions of then-Defense Minister and current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk reported on the horrifying scenes he saw immediately after the attack in an article written after Sharon was elected prime minister:
For everyone who stood in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut on 18 September 1982, his (Ariel Sharon''s) name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder... Even when I walk these fetid streets today, more than 18 years after… the ghosts haunt me still. Over there, on the side of the road leading to the Sabra mosque, lay Mr Nouri, 90 years old, grey-bearded, in pyjamas with a small woollen hat still on his head and a stick by his side. I found him on a pile of garbage, on his back… Just up the lane, I came across two women sitting upright with their brains blown out, next to a cooking pot... One of the women appeared to have had her stomach slit open. A few metres away, I discovered the first babies, already black with decomposition, scattered across the road like rubbish… The flies racing between the reeking bodies and our faces, between dried blood and reporter''s notebook, the hands of watches still ticking on dead wrists. I clambered up a rampart of earth - an abandoned bulldozer stood guiltily nearby - only to find, once I was atop the mound, that it swayed beneath me. And I looked down to find faces, elbows, mouths, a woman''s legs protruding through the soil. I had to hold on to these body parts to climb down the other side. Then there was the pretty girl, her head surrounded by a halo of clothes pegs, her blood still running from a hole in her back.49
In another article, Fisk describes what he saw while touring the hospitals where the injured were being treated: "What we saw here we would not easily forget. Visiting the Barbir hospital was to see what gunfire does to flesh."50
SABRA AND SHATILLA MASSACRE
RONG>
The brutality that these pitiful and innocent people were subjected to should serve as a warning of the Israeli leadership''s ideology. Most of the murdered women had been raped. Pregnant women had been sliced open so that their babies could be ripped out. Children barely 3 or 4 years old had been murdered in front of their parents. Many of the men had had their ears and noses cut off before being shot execution-style.
A news report about the massacres appeared in the French Le Monde newspaper on February 13, 2001. Nihad Hamad, a now-42-year-old survivor, describes what happened:
The Israeli Armed Forces spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning surrounding the camp. They wanted to seal off the east side. Our mujaheddin had left. Around here there was no one left but some boys of 15 or 16… On Thursday night, the bombing got twice as intense. We realized our light weaponry wouldn''t be of any use. Everyone in the shelters was a refugee. Everyone was afraid. The elders of the group, those that people listened to, decided to go to the Israelis and tell them that the camp would surrender. With white flags in their hands they got in the car and headed out. They never came back. Some young men left with weapons and went in the same direction. They never came back either, nor the ones who went looking for them. Then we realized much better that we had to get out of here right away… Hundreds of people were fleeing to the same common salon in the northern part of the camp. There were so many of us that we almost suffocated. At daybreak there was the silence of death everywhere; this place was a ghost town now. The bombing had stopped. Every once in a while we could hear single shots being fired. Then, from the direction of the mosque, a woman''s screams pierced the silence.
Her hair was a tangled mess, her tattered clothes covered in blood. She had the manner of someone who had lost her mind. At her feet were children whose throats had been slit... They behaved brutally, and they used their knives and other incisive tools to carry out the murders in silence. After the militias finished their work at the camps, they finished their dirty work at the Gaza Hospital. They dragged the doctors, nurses, and wounded out of the hospitals and killed them. Along with those who were missing, we learned that between 3,000 and 3,500 people had been killed .51
Sharon is known by Arabs and throughout the world as "The Butcher of Lebanon," and displays his ruthlessness at every opportunity.
This frightful scene was the work of Ariel Sharon, known for such remarks as "The Arabs know me, and I know them" and for describing the Arabs in such disparaging terms as "bugs."52 Following the 1967 War, Sharon caused 160,000 Palestinians to leave East Jerusalem and become refugees. His punishment techniques include bombing houses, bulldozing refugee camps, and arresting hundreds of youths for no reason and subjecting them to torture. When Sharon was responsible for security in the Gaza Strip, hundreds of Palestinians were assassinated, thousands were arrested and deported, and in Gaza alone 2,000 homes were destroyed and 16,000 people were exiled for the second time. Aside from the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, 14,000 people (including 13,000 unarmed civilians) died within the space of a few weeks, and about half a million people were made homeless.
The cruelty and brutality described here has occurred continuously on Palestinian soil for the past 50 years. Moreover, the examples cited above are merely those massacres during which many Palestinians lost their lives on a single day. Similar events, among many others, are as follows: 8 people in al-Sammou, 1966; 9 people in Aitharoun and 16 people in Kawnin, 1975; 20 people in Hanin and 23 in Bint Jbeil, 1976; 7 people in Adloun, 1978; 80 people in Abbasieh, 1979; and 20 people in S