Daily News · 13 August 1976
CP-1976-030
An Epic Ends as Tal Zaatar Falls
Transcribed from the clipping
Beirut, Lebanon, Aug 12 (AP)—The Palestinian camp of Tal Zaatar fell to Christian forces today after a fierce seven-week siege. Thousands of wailing refugees poured out to safety. Palestinian sources claimed that a handful of holdouts were still fighting hand-to-hand with right-wing gunmen who stormed into the camp.
But they admitted that Tal Zaatar had, in effect, been conquered. A weeping old man just out of the camp said of the remaining defenders: “There can’t be more than seven of them in any one spot . . . The boys who were fighting, may God rest their souls, were all killed.”
Palestinian spokesman charged that their fighters were “tricked early today when Red Cross trucks approached Tal Zaatar accompanied by Christian gunmen. The guerrilllas held their fire, thinking it was an evacuation mission, the Palestinian spokesmen said, but then the Christians launched a surprise attack as the trucks drove away.
The collapse of Tal Zaatar — reduced to rubble by thousands of artillery rounds — clears Christian-held east Beirut of the last significant stronghold of the alliance of Palestinians and leftist Moslems and reinforces the virtual partition of Lebanon. The fall gave the right-wing Christian leadership perhaps its greatest victory in 16 months of civil war.
Palestinian chieftains had vowed to defend Tal Zaatar to the bitter end. The residents of Tal Zaatar began fleeing as it became apparent that the victorious Christian forces were holding their fire in an undeclared truce.
Estimates of the number of people inside the devastated hovels of Tal Zaatar has ranged as high as 30,000, including Lebanese Moslems, but this was never certain because residents filtered out over the months of fighting. A nurse evacuated from the camp last week said as many as 2,000 may have been killed during the seige.
Cite this clipping
"An Epic Ends as Tal Zaatar Falls," Daily News, 13 August 1976. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1976-030. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1976-030
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1976-030.
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