Survivors: Israelis watched massacre

Three say up to 10 soldiers were in the Shatila camp

Scheherazade Faramarzi, Associated Press, Beirut

Survivors: Israelis watched massacre — The Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 December 1982 — The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 22 December 1982

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“BEIRUT, Lebanon — Contradicting official testimony in Israel, some of the survivors of the Palestinian massacre in September say Israeli soldiers were in the Shatila refugee camp during the killings.

Three Palestinian women — Ektefa Shallah; her daughter, Jamila, 16; and their neighbor, Amenah Khalifa — said the Israelis tried to protect women and children during the slaughter Sept.

16-18 by Lebanese Christian militiamen… Informed of the women’s statements, an Israeli military command spokesman in Tel Aviv reiterated the Israelis’ previous statements that no Israeli soldiers were in the Shatila and Sabra camps before, during or after the massacre. Israeli government policy forbids identification of the spokesman… Mrs.

Shallah, 44, said she first saw an Israeli soldier standing with a Phalangist militiaman in a narrow passageway outside her concrete-block house, 175 yards from the western edge of Shatila… Mrs. Shallah and her neighbor said that a few minutes later Mrs.

Khalifa’s husband, two teenage sons and three other men were lined up against a wall and killed by Lebanese militiamen… ‘The other one [the Phalangist militiaman] wanted to kill me. He killed the children standing behind me. He cut a woman’s stomach and took the baby out,’ Mrs.

Shallah said… ‘We were put next to about 30 corpses,’ she said. ‘In front of me, a 2-month-old baby was wrested from his mother’s lap… Those who were shooting [to kill] were Phalangists, but there were Jews among them. I saw them with these eyes.

I am not lying.’… The final death toll in the Shatila-Sabra slaughter remains uncertain. Germanos has said that 328 Palestinians were killed, and 991 people are listed as missing.”… ‘When they [the Israelis and the Lebanese] talked to each other, they spoke in Arabic, but the Jews had a heavy accent,’ Mrs. Khalifa said.

‘The Jews asked a Phalangist man, “What did you do to them?” … The Phalangist man said, “I machine-gunned them, all of them.” … He then told the Jews, “Come on, shoot them. Finish them” — meaning us. One Jew said: “No baby. No madam. You’ve killed their men.

We want to interrogate them.”’ When Jamila, who does not speak Hebrew, was asked how she knew they were Israelis, she replied: ‘How shall I say? They were speaking Hebrew, and who are the Hebrews? They are Israelis.’”

Context added by this archive

The square brackets in the quotations are the Inquirer’s own. The Israeli denial ran in the same column and is here with the testimony.

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"Survivors: Israelis watched massacre," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 December 1982, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-024. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-024

This clipping is read closely in the section below

Sabra and Shatila: from who fired to who knew