BEIRUT (AFP) – Forty years after Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian refugees and Lebanese nationals in the country’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the horrors of the tragedy remain seared into survivors’ memories.
Najib al-Khatib, whose father and 10 other family members were killed in the massacre, still remembers the stench of corpses.
It “lingered for more than five or six months. A horrible smell,” the 52-year-old Lebanese survivor said.
“They would spray chemicals every day, but the smell stayed,” he told AFP from the Sabra camp for Palestinian refugees, where he lives with his family.
From September 16 to 18, 1982, Christian militiamen allied with the Zionist regime massacred between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps on Beirut’s outskirts. They also murdered at least 100 Lebanese and some Syrians.
Zionist troops, who had invaded in June that year as Lebanon’s civil war raged, sealed off the camp while the militiamen went on their killing spree, targeting unarmed civilians.
Camp residents have been readying to mark the massacre’s 40th anniversary on Friday.
“Until today, the smell is still in our heads -- the smell of the dead,” Khatib said.
Khatib walked down an alleyway in the impoverished Sabra camp where he witnessed the atrocities four decades earlier.
“This is my grandmother’s house. During the massacre, it was full” of dead bodies, he recalled. “They were piled up here. Horses and corpses, all on top of each other.”
“This area was full of people they killed,” he said.
One of Khatib’s most harrowing memories was finding his father’s body at the door of his house.
“He was shot in his legs,” he said. “They had hit him in the head with a hatchet.”
Despite global outcry, no one has ever been arrested or put on trial for the massacre.
It came just days after the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel -- hated by many in Lebanon for his cooperation with the Zionist regime.
In the Israeli-occupied territories, an inquiry found a number of officials, including then war minister Ariel Sharon, were indirectly responsible.
It laid blame on Elie Hobeika, spy chief of the Lebanese Forces -- a right-wing Christian militia -- for the killings.
The LF, then allied to the Zionist regime, has maintained silence, never responding to the accusations.
A group of survivors tried to launch a lawsuit in Belgium against Sharon, but the court threw out the case in
September 2003.