"It was the Christians": Massacre at Chatila Refugee Camp

Robert Fisk
September 20, 1982
The Times

They were everywhere, in the road, in laneways, in backyards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. The murderers - the Christian militiamen whom Israel had let rip into the camp to "flush out terrorists" fourteen hours before - had only just left. In some cases the blood was still wet on the ground. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting.

Even twenty-four hours after the massacre of the Palestinians at Chatila had ended, no one was sure how many had been killed there. Down every alleyway there were corpses - women, young men, babies and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death.

Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at a Palestine hospital simply disappeared after gunmen ordered doctors to leave. There were signs of hastily dug mass graves. Perhaps a thousand people were butchered here, perhaps half that number again.

The full story of what happened in Chatila on Friday night and Saturday morning may never be known, for most of the witnesses are either dead or would never wish to reveal their guilt.

What is quite certain is that at six o'clock on Friday nigh, truckloads of gunmen in uniform - and wearing the badges - of the right-wing Christian Phalange militia and Major Saad Haddad's renegade army from Southern Lebanon were seen by reporters entering the southern gate of the camp.

There were bonfires inside and the sound of heavy gunfire. Israeli troops and armour were standing round the perimeter of the camp and made no attempt to stop the gunmen - who have been their allies since their invasion of Lebanon - going in.

 A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry was to say later that the militias had been sent into Chatila to hunt down some of the 2000 Palestinian "terrorists" whom the Israelis alleged were still in the camp. Correspondents were forbidden to enter.

What we found inside the camps at ten o'clock next morning did not quite beggar description, although it would perhaps be easier to retell in a work of fiction or in the cold prose of a medical report.

But the details should be told for - this being Lebanon - the facts will change over the coming weeks as militias and armies and governments blame each other for the horrors committed upon the Palestinian civilians.

Just inside the southern gates of the camp, there used to be a number of single-storey concrete-walled houses. When we walked across the muddy entrance of Chatila, we found that these building had been dynamited to the ground. There were cartridge cases across the main road and clouds of flies swarmed across the rubble. Down a laneway to our right, not more than fifty yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses.

There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had become entangled with each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the right or left cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated. Their eyes were open, and the flies had only begun to gather. The youngest was perhaps only twelve or thirteen years old.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the rubble, we found bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged, and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open, and the head of a little girl em??rging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair and her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.

To the right of us there was what appeared to be a small barricade of concrete and mud. But as we approached it we found a human elbow visible on the surface. A large stone turned out to be part of a torso. It was as if the bodies had been bulldozed to the side of the laneway, as indeed they had. A bulldozer - its driver's seat empty - stood guiltily just down the road.

Beyond this rampart of earth and bodies there was a pile of what might have been sacks in front of a low redstone wall. We had to cross the barricade to reach it and tried to and tried hard not to step on the bodies beneath.

Below the wall a line of young men and boys lay prostrated. They had been shot in the back against the wall in a ritual execution, and they lay, at once pathetic and terrible, where they had fallen. The execution wall and its huddle of corpses was somehow reminiscent of something seen before, and only afterwards did we realize how similar it all was to those old photographs of executions in Occupied Europe during the Second World War. There may have been twelve or twenty bodies there. Some lay beneath others ???

It was always the same. I found a small undamaged house with a brown metal gate leading to small courtyard. Something instinctive made me push it open. The murders had just left. On the ground there lay a young women. She lay on her back as if she was sunbathing in the heat and the blood running from her back was still wet. She lay, feet together, arms outspread, as if she had seen her saviour in her last moments. Her face was peaceful, eyes closed, almost like a madonna. Only the small hole in her chest and the stain across the yard told of her death ???

There had been fighting inside the camp. The road was slippery with cartridge cases and ammunition clips near the Sabra mosque and some of the equipment was of the Soviet type used by the Palestinians.

There have clearly been guerrillas here. In the middle of this part of the road, however, there lay - incredibly - a perfectly carved scale-model wooden Kalashnikov rifle, its barrel snapped in two. It had been a toy ???

Across Chatila came the disembodied voice of an Israeli officer broadcasting through a Tannoy from atop an armoured personnel carrier. "Stay off the streets," he shouted. "We are only looking for terrorists. Stay off the streets. We will shoot."

An hour later, at Galerie Semaan - far from Chatila - someone did open fire at the soldiers and I threw myself into a ditch beside an Israeli Major. The Israelis fired shoals of bullets into a ruined building beside the road, blowing pieces of it into the air like confetti. The Major and I lay huddled in our ditch for fifteen minutes. He asked about Chatila and I told him all I had seen.

The he said, "I tell you this. The Haddad men were supposed to go in with us. We had to shoot two of them yesterday. We killed one and wounded another. Two more we took away. They were doing a bad thing. That is all I will tell you." Was this at Chatila? I asked. Had he been there himself? He would say no more.

Then his young radio operator, who had been lying behind us in the mud, crawled up next to me. He was a young man. He pointed to his chest. "We Israelis don't do that sort of thing," he said. "It was the Christians."