The Daily Progress · Charlottesville, VA · 15 August 1976

CP-1976-037

Witnesses Report Mass Executions, Atrocities

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEIRUT, Lebanon (UPI) — Witnesses Saturday reported mass executions and other atrocities in the fall of the Tal Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp to Christian soldiers. Heavy fighting erupted at dusk in what Lebanese predicted would be new Christian onslaughts.

Artillery duels broke out across battlelines in Beirut and heavy fighting was also reported in the countryside, the mountains east of Beirut and in northern Lebanon.

The fighting came at the end of a day of quiet on most fronts but Lebanese predicted the Christians would follow their capture of Tal Zaatar with new attacks to capture more territory from the Palestinian and Moslem forces.

International Red Cross mission chief Jean Hoefliger, whose team has been searching the ruins of the Tal Zaatar camp for wounded victims, refused to confirm any specific massacre reports, saying “the page has been turned on Tal Zaatar.” But he spoke bitterly of “regrettable incidents.”

Western witnesses reported they had seen “dozens” of Palestinian men taken prisoner by Christian militiamen being lined up and machine-gunned to death at Dikwaneh, a suburb near the camp. Some of the refugees who made it safely to Moslem-held west Beirut described mass executions of whole families and other atrocities.

Their reports could not be confirmed by other sources. Hoefliger said the Red Cross knew nothing of the fate of more than 100 men taken by the Christians at the end of the 56-day siege of Tal Zaatar. “We are asking to visit the prisoners and ensure their repatriation,” he said.

“We have been told (by Christian leaders) that there are about 100 prisoners, but there were surely many more.” Among those who escaped death at the camp was Mohammed Salim Kanaan, a frail, white-bearded Lebanese Moslem who said he was 111 years old.

Kanaan, who left the camp Friday huddled in the back of his son-in-law’s van, said he and his wife hid in their basement during the final Christian attack. “But now we can’t find my wife,” he said in a feeble voice. “I don’t know where she’s gone.”

Red Cross officials searching for remaining wounded said they found only corpses and that Kanaan apparently was the last man out alive. Lebanese sources predicted an escalation of the war in the wake of the bloody Christian takeover of the Tal Zaatar camp.

“The rightists are ready to press their military advantage wherever they can, and the Palestinians and leftists are bent on avenging Tal Zaatar,” one Lebanese source, who did not want to be named, said.

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Mass executions reported in Palestinian refugee campThe State Journal-Register15 August 1976CP-1976-038

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.