Buildings Burn and Corpses Rot In What Remains of Tal Zaatar

By JOE ALEX MORRIS Jr.

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TAL ZAATAR CAMP, Lebanon — The corpses lie bloating under the burning Mediterranean sun. Many families died together as they attempted to flee. Dead mothers hold dead children in their arms. Many are disfigured beyond recognition, heads half blasted away or torn completely from their bodies.

Those who dropped on the roads remain there, flattened by the vehicles of the Christian conquerors. No effort was made to clear the bodies away before the vehicles rolled over them. THIS WAS Tal Zaatar Friday. Once a bustling Palestinian refugee camp of some 30,000 souls, it is now a dead town, with hardly a building intact and many still burning.

The littered streets were patrolled by Christian fighters in black shirts. Among them was a 17-year-old girl named Eliane. She carried a Kalashnikov submachine gun and she was helping to root out the last resistance. Scattered shooting was still going on but it was not enough to deter the looters already moving in to salvage what had not been destroyed.

Many of them were Christian fighters. As Danny Chamoun, military leader of his father’s Christian militants, “The Tigers,” put it: “These people are fighting without pay. What they loot is all the pay they get.” ONE OF them, a man with a gun in one hand and a sack of loot in the other, said: “You see Tal Zaatar? This the most bad people.

The Palestinians.” The final three-day battle, capping a two-month siege of the camp, was the bloodiest in 16 months of civil war here. Chamoun estimated that there were 1,500 corpses rotting in the sun here, and the over-all death toll could be 2,500.

It was the climax of the Christian drive to eliminate all pockets of resistance within territory they claim as their own. The battle started in the spring with the cleanup of the Karantina slum district near the port. From there, Moslem and Palestinian fighters had attempted to isolate Christian eastern Beirut from the Christian hinterland.

The Karantina has now been partly bulldozed flat and the same is scheduled to happen here, according to Beshir Gemayel, son of Christian Falange boss Pierre Gemayel and leader of the Falange military. Tal Zaatar will be renamed William Hawi Hill, after the Falange military leader who was shot dead by a sniper last month as he tried to arrange an evacuation from Tal Zaatar.

“Tal Zaatar will not exist any more,” Beshir said. At the same time, he rendered homage to “the great heroism and sacrifice” of Tal Zaatar’s Palestinian defenders. CERTAINLY there is little left of Tal Zaatar worth trying to salvage. Hardly a hut, house, or factory remains intact, and the mosque is a riddled ruin.

The hospital is one of the few buildings still standing. Its operating room in the cellar, equipped with a Chinese operating table, was one of the few relatively clean rooms anywhere.

Nearby was the ruins of a munitions factory, where the Christians said the Palestinians were making rocket-propelled grenades under the supervision of foreign technicians, presumably from Communist countries. These technicians have not been captured, and Chamoun said they probably escaped.

“We will try to help the Palestinians establish themselves any place else,” said Beshir Gemayel. “But we will never again allow a belt around Beirut.” The refugees are in fact establishing themselves around west Beirut, moving into empty apartments long since deserted by the well-to-do who fled to safer climes.

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"Buildings Burn and Corpses Rot In What Remains of Tal Zaatar," The Miami Herald, 14 August 1976, p. 4-A. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1976-036. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1976-036