Site of wartime massacre has yet to recover<
snip>
"Twenty-six years ago Monday the massacre in Sabra and Chatila began. Three-and-a-half days later, hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children had been murdered by Christian militiamen who worked by day and under Israeli flares at night. Hundreds more from the Sabra and Chatila camps and the surrounding neighborhoods in Beirut's southern suburbs had gone missing.
Following the assassination of President-elect Bachir Gemayel, Israeli troops moved into West Beirut in violation of the pact US envoy special Philip Habib had hammered out between the Israeli Army, the Lebanese government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The agreement had facilitated the evacuation of 11,000 PLO fighters from Lebanon, and the US government had promised to protect the remaining Palestinian population.
After reported shelling and sniper fire, the Israeli Army - under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan - surrounded Sabra and Chatila on September 15. The next day, Christian militiamen, many of them Israeli-trained and supplied, entered the camps. What ensued was a campaign of butchery, rape and murder.
The final death toll remains unknown - some estimates are in the low hundreds, while others are in the thousands. But the piles of bodies with slit throats and execution-style bullet wounds were reported widely by the press.
Following a popular outcry in Israel and an investigative commission led by Supreme Court President Yitzak Kahan, Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was perhaps the darkest chapter in a campaign of reciprocal violence between Lebanese Christian militias and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee population during the 1975-1990 Civil War.
Today, despite modest revitalizations, Sabra and Chatila still bear the scars of serial bombing raids and the massacre. Amid concrete apartment blocks, street-side vendors and remaining rubble, there is an open field memorial for the dead."
more