Sabra Camp Eyewitness

Stench of Death, Screams of Women Fill Air

By William Foley, Associated Press

Sabra Camp Eyewitness — The Abilene Reporter-News, 19 September 1982 — The Abilene Reporter-News · Abilene, Texas · 19 September 1982

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Transcribed from the clipping

“EDITOR’S NOTE — Associated Press photographer William Foley spent two hours Saturday in the Sabra camp, scene of a massacre witnesses said was carried out by Christian militiamen. His report is detailed on this page. SABRA REFUGEE CAMP, Lebanon (AP) — Bodies littered the streets of the Sabra refugee camp.

Residents told of a massacre by Christian militiamen. The stench of death filled the air. Survivors were not certain just who carried out the massacre. Some said the killers used the word ‘phalangist’ and were members of the Lebanese Forces Christian militia once… we came back to the entrance and there was no one to stop our entry.

We drove down the main road, with piles of rubble and garbage on both sides of the street. We stopped the car about 400 yards into the camp and got out to look around on… saying in Arabic, ‘Please come inside. Please see our dead.’

They said Christian militiamen had used bulldozers to cover the bodies of some of the people massacred in the camp… A man on a bicycle passed the corpses, goggled-eyed at the sight. Looking closely at piles of garbage and rubble, I noticed pieces of human bodies sticking out from the rubble — legs, arms, pieces of limbs.

I talked briefly with a young man who said he was Lebanese and told me the Christian militiamen were ‘all crazy.’ He claimed he saw some of the killing… …pses. They appeared to have been shot in the head. We walked into another alley where nine bodies were under and around a truck in an area that appeared to be a workshop.

At the Gaza Hospital, a 76-year-old man was afraid he would not be allowed to leave the camp unless he seemed disabled. ‘What will happen to me? I have internal bleeding, but I don’t appear to be severely injured,’ he asked a doctor, who proceeded to bandage up his arm and leg so he could get into the ambulance for a ride into the heart of west…”

How this transcription was made

The clipping in this archive is the headline block. The report was read from the paper’s own page, the Abilene Reporter-News of Sunday 19 September 1982, page 12-A. It runs across five columns and the viewer would not show the foot of them, so the passage is transcribed with the gaps marked rather than guessed. The full headline reads Sabra Camp Eyewitness: Stench of Death, Screams of Women.

Context added by this archive

A first-person account from inside Sabra, written by the Associated Press photographer who walked into it, and printed in a Texas daily the morning after. The paper gave it a whole page and flagged it with an editor’s note.

What the reporter records is not a summary: a man on a bicycle staring, limbs in the rubble, nine bodies around a truck in a workshop, and a 76-year-old man at the Gaza Hospital asking a doctor to bandage him more heavily than his injuries warranted so he would be allowed to leave.

The survivors themselves are uncertain who did it, and the report says so in its second paragraph.

Cite this clipping

"Sabra Camp Eyewitness," The Abilene Reporter-News, 19 September 1982, p. 12-A. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-008