"God - Oh, My God!"

By George Russell

The bloodbath in the Palestinian camps: "Butchery the mind cannot comprehend"

There were only the sounds of mourning and the bodies, sprawling heaps of corpses: men, women and children. Some had been shot in the head at pointblank range. Others had had their throats cut. Some had their hands tied behind their backs; one young man had been castrated. Middle-aged women and girls as young as three, their arms and legs grotesquely splayed, were draped across piles of rubble. Portions of their heads were blown away. One woman was found clutching an infant to her body; the same bullet that tore through her chest had also killed the baby. Said a Lebanese Army officer: "There is so much butchery the mind cannot comprehend it."

One by one, the bodies were lifted from the agonized postures of sudden death and shrouded in brown blankets by volunteer civil defense and Red Cross workers, wearing gas masks against the stench and rubber gloves to fend off the toxins from the decaying flesh. Frantic clusters of Palestinians gathered around the rigid, pathetic bundles. From time to time, one of the onlookers would shriek in horror, catching sight of the distorted features of a friend or family member. At one point, a woman torn by grief stood over one of the bloated corpses waving a scarf and a handful of personal letters. "Yi, yi, are you my husband?" she screamed. "My God, who will help me? All my sons are gone. My husband is gone. What am I going to do? God--oh, my God!" Those who could recognize their murdered relatives were allowed to carry them away for private burial; the remainder of the bodies, sprinkled with lime, were consigned to mass graves.

By the end of the week, Red Cross officials listed 320 confirmed dead thus far in the adjoining refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of others are listed as missing, and the toll is estimated to be at least 800, if it is ever known precisely. Many of the victims, who also included Lebanese residents of the camps, lay buried in a hastily bulldozed site that was dug by the killers near the Shatila entrance as they finished up their murderous spree. Rescue workers decided against reopening the grave. Other victims presumably still remain in houses that were dynamited in a crude attempt to cover up the extent of the atrocity.

As the world discovered the enormity of the Shatila-Sabra massacre, details of what actually took place slowly began to emerge from the confused accounts of survivors and other witnesses to the tragedy. But one fact that was starkly clear was that the residents of Shatila and Sabra were in no way prepared for the bloody attack that began only 24 hours after the Israeli army moved into West Beirut. No serious resistance to the Israeli advance was being planned in the camps: the number of armed Palestinians in the area was small. Said one resident: "We lived through a long war. We were not going to get ourselves killed trying to fight the Israeli army."

In fact, a worse fate was in an advanced stage of preparation for the refugees, some of whom had moved into the area more than 30 years ago. Although the districts were still called "camps," they had become sprawling residential areas, honeycombed with underground air-raid shelters and arms depots, inhabited by both Palestinians and Lebanese. The Israelis had encircled the camps on three sides. But the southern approach had been left open, awaiting the arrival of Christian militiamen.

The evening before the massacre began, on Wednesday, Sept. 15, camp residents went to sleep, as they had for weeks, to the sounds of war in the center of Beirut, two miles away. There was the customary rumble of shellfire but military action in the camp area was sporadic. Next morning, a few Palestinians went to the Gaza Hospital, located near the borderline between Shatila and Sabra, for treatment of shrapnel wounds. But by 2 p.m. on Thursday, intense Israeli shellfire was hitting the south end of Shatila. Abdul Haddi Achmed Hashmen, a Palestinian housewife whose home was in the southwest corner of the camp, recalled that she, her husband and their children tried to wait out the barrage, huddling on the ground floor of their small house. Finally, at around 5 p.m., they decided to flee. The family made it safely to the main street of Shatila. Just before 6 p.m., Mrs. Hashmen's husband went back to their house to fetch powdered milk for the children. He never returned and was later found shot dead in the house.

Traveling in convoy from their staging area near the Beirut airport, the Christian militiamen had arrived at the camps. Two young Palestinians, Taleb Al Oukli, 26, and his brother Fawzi, 22, remembered when the killing began. They were in a house about half a mile from the southern entrance to Shatila, taking shelter from the Israeli shelling and drinking tea with friends. At about 6:30 p.m. they began to hear "lots of shooting everywhere," Taleb recalls. It was small-arms fire rather than the artillery explosions that had come earlier in the afternoon. Two members of the group went outside and returned to report that they had seen what they thought were soldiers of the Christian militia that is headed by Major Sa'ad Haddad and stationed in southern Lebanon. The group fled to Gaza Hospital, where they spent the night along with hundreds of other Palestinians seeking refuge. Outside the southern perimeter of Shatila, another 500 to 600 sought shelter at the Acca Hospital.

The militiamen spent the night at slaughter, calling on the Israeli army to send up hundreds of flares and star shells over the camps to illuminate their bloody work. "Thursday night was an inferno," recalls a medical worker at Gaza Hospital. "The sky was never dark. The shooting never stopped. The people screamed." Not content with merely shooting people, the assailants used ropes and hatchets; many of the victims were bound together and mutilated. Some people were killed in their homes, while others were dragged outside to be murdered. Judging from the debris that was left, some of the soldiers had leaned against a house to enjoy snacks and smoke cigarettes in the midst of their work. Scattered about were the discarded cardboard boxes of field rations, some of them made in the U.S. They had English labels--"turkey and dumplings"--written on the side. Other boxes had Hebrew lettering.

Some of the Palestinians began to fight back with small arms and a few rocket-propelled grenades. Their resistance may have had some effect: Friday morning, the militiamen had begun to fall back from their northernmost penetration of the camps. At 9 a.m., the two Oukli brothers were able to return to some parts of Shatila from the Gaza Hospital area without encountering any of the killers. When the Ouklis reached their home, they found a pile of 15 dead, mostly their relatives, outside the door.

By that time, word of the massacre had spread and panic swept through the camps. The throngs of refugees who had gathered at Gaza Hospital took off on foot to find shelter farther north. Along with them went 45 patients from the hospital, who fled their beds and joined the exodus. For a time, said a European staffer who remained behind, "it was deadly, deadly silent." Some survivors, meanwhile, later recalled seeing Christian militiamen operating a roadblock near the southern entrance to the camps, while hundreds of Israeli soldiers stood by.

As the bloodletting temporarily slowed in the camps, the militiamen turned their attention to Acca Hospital. Early Friday morning, after refugees who stayed the night had fled, four doctors tried to leave the institution under a white flag. A hand grenade was thrown at them; three were killed. A few hours later, a group of militiamen entered the hospital and threatened the staff. A Palestinian nurse was repeatedly raped, then shot to death. Two Palestinian doctors were later taken away from Acca by the militia to an unknown fate.

As the day wore on, the sounds of violence from the camps became more sporadic. In the afternoon, the militiamen began covering up their handiwork. Around 3 p.m., a European diplomat saw a bulldozer backing down a side street of Shatila. Its scoop was filled with bodies.

Hours later, members of a Red convoy that had reached hastily arranged bodies piled near the entrance to Shatila. They were mixed with sand and dirt and had apparently been moved there by bulldozers. The militiamen also began knocking down houses. In some parts of Shatila, residents who had survived the horrors of the previous night were crushed as their houses caved in around them.

About 4 p.m. some 500 people set out from the area north of Gaza Hospital in an attempt to seek refuge in downtown West Beirut. They soon encountered a group of Israeli soldiers. They were ordered to go back, and one of them lowered his gun on the group. The panic-stricken refugees sent a man forward to talk to the Israelis, while the others waited in the street. The emissary shouted that Sa'ad Haddad's men were killing people in the camps and that the crowd wanted to seek shelter. "I cannot do anything," came the soldier's response. "If you stay here for more than ten minutes, I will shoot you." A tank was rolled around and began moving toward the crowd. The refugees fell back and abandoned their plan.

Still more carnage was to come. On Saturday morning, the militiamen advanced into the heavily populated camp of Sabra, bordering Shatila on the north. Using bullhorns, they announced to terrified residents that they were Israelis, and demanded that the Palestinians assemble in the street. Some heeded the call, while others were forced from their homes at gunpoint. The wailing, screaming throng was in a state of collective hysteria. Said one man who survived the ordeal: "We knew what they had been doing in Shatila. We were sure our time had come." The militiamen fired into the air several times in an attempt to restore order; at one point, they also ordered the crowd to clap hands in unison to halt the wailing.

Casual acts of murder were still taking place as the roundup progressed. One man, who had hid in a partly bombed building, later related how he had peered through a small shrapnel hole while militiamen barged into a small shop across the street. The gunmen cut the throat of the proprietor, who was hiding inside, and then guzzled a bottle of whisky. At Gaza Hospital the staff of 22 doctors and nurses, mostly Europeans, were rounded up and marched away. As the medics passed a group of lounging militiamen, a Palestinian male nurse was pulled out of the group, taken around a corner and shot. Later, the killers identified another male nurse as a Palestinian. He too was shot. Recalled one of the medics: "I thought to myself, 'My God, they are just getting all the foreigners out so they can kill these people.'

The remaining hospital staff was taken out of the camp and after an interrogation was turned over to Israeli soldiers across the street from Shatila. Soon the Palestinian civilians who had been rounded up in Sabra began following them. But these had one last ordeal to face. As the crowd of several hundred panicky refugees approached the southern gate of Shatila, the militiamen segregated them by sex. The men were ordered to march past a parked Land Rover. From inside the vehicle, a man pointed out those who should be separated from the rest. The selected ones were led away. Their fate is unknown.

The remainder of the civilians were led off by the militiamen in the direction of Beirut's nearby sports stadium. As they approached the bomb-damaged structure, an explosion attracted the attention of Israeli army officers. The Israelis quickly took charge of the captives, sent the women and children back into the camp and eventually released the men. At one point, an Israeli officer asked through a bullhorn if any of the group were from Shatila. He was told yes, and was told what had happened there. When he heard, the officer tore his peaked cap from his head and threw it to the ground with a violent curse.

By then the ordeal of Shatila was over. The camps now were quiet, except for the mourning of those who had discovered the bodies of their relatives among the dead. The first Lebanese Army soldiers, handkerchiefs over their mouths, entered Shatila to see what had gone on. One soldier looked up an alleyway where many bodies lay and ran back, vomiting.

On Monday morning, as the cleanup of the massacre began, one final moment of panic swept the camps. While volunteer civil defense workers dug a huge pit near the entrance of Shatila to bury the dead, word spread that the militiamen were returning. Thousands of screaming Palestinians poured out of the camps and ran toward downtown Beirut. It is one thing to have escaped a massacre. It is quite another to escape the memory of it. --By George Russell. Reported by Roberto Suro/Beirut

With reporting by Roberto Suro

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.