List of Massacres Commited by the Zionists Options

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Sabra and Shatilla Massacres

On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in what it described as 'retaliation' for the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Argov in London on 4 June. The invasion, soon dubbed "Operation Peace for Galilee," progressed rapidly. By 18 June 1982, Israel had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) armed forces in the western part of the Lebanese capital. A cease-fire, mediated by United States Envoy Philip Habib, resulted in the PLO evacuation of Beirut on 1 September 1982.

On 11 September 1982, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the invasion, announced that "2,000 terrorists" had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, the day after the assassination of Israeli-allied Phalangist militia leader and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, "encircling and sealing" the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. By mid-day on 15 September 1982, the refugee camps were entirely surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who installed checkpoints at strategic locations and crossroads around the camps in order to monitor the entry or exit of any person. During the late afternoon and evening of that day, the camps were shelled.

Around mid-day on Thursday 16 September 1982, a unit of approximately 150 Israeli-allied Phalangists entered the first camp. For the next 40 hours members of the Phalangist militia raped, killed, and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people inside the encircled and sealed camps. The estimate of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) to 3,500. The victims and survivors of the massacres have never been deemed entitled to a formal investigation of the tragedy, since Israel's Kahan Commission did not have a judicial mandate and was not backed up by legal force.


Testimony and Eyewitness Accounts


Samiha Abbas Hijazi
On Thursday, there was shelling when the Israelis came, then it got worse so we went down into the shelter. (...) We learned on Friday that there had been a massacre. I went to my neighboursأ¢â‚¬â„¢ house. I saw our neighbour Mustapha Al Habarat; he was injured and lying in a bath of his own blood. His wife and children were dead. We took him to the Gaza hospital and then we fled. When things had calmed down, I came back and searched for my daughter and my husband for four days. I spent four days looking for them through all the dead bodies. I found Zeinab dead, her face burnt. Her husband had been cut in two and had no head. I took them and buried them.

Mrs. Abbas Hijazi lost her daughter, her son-in-law, her daughterأ¢â‚¬â„¢s godmother and other loved ones.




Abdel Nasser Alameh

On the night of the carnage, we were at home and we heard that there was a massacre at Shatila(....) We kept watch on the road all night, taking turns to sleep a few hours, until daybreak when some people managed to escape. I thought my brother had gone ahead of us to West Beirut. We waited for him but he didnأ¢â‚¬â„¢t come. In fact my brother was one of the ones they took away, and we never even found his body.

Mr Alameh lost his brother, who was 19 years old.




Wadha Hassan Al Sabeq

We were at home on Friday 17 September; the neighbours came and they started to say: أ¢â‚¬ثœأ¢â‚¬ثœIsrael has come in, go to the Israelis, they are taking papers and stamping them.أ¢â‚¬â„¢أ¢â‚¬â„¢ We went out to surrender ourselves to the Israelis. When we got there, the tanks and the Israeli soldiers were there, but we were surprised to see that they had Lebanese forces with them. They took the men and left us women and children together. When they took the children and all the men from me, they said to us, أ¢â‚¬إ“Go to the Sports Centre,أ¢â‚¬? and they took us there. They left us there until 7pm, then they told us, أ¢â‚¬إ“Go to Fakhani and donأ¢â‚¬â„¢t go back to your house,أ¢â‚¬? then they started firing shells and bullets at us.

On one side there were some men who had been arrested; they took them and we have never found out what happened to them. To this day we know nothing about what happened to them; they just disappeared.

Mrs Al Sabeq lost two sons (aged 16 and 19), a brother and about 15 other relatives.




Mahmoud Younis

I was 11 years old. It was night and we could hear shelling and gunfire. (...) We took refuge in the bedroom and stayed there. As soon as they arrived, they went straight to the living room, and they shot at the photos on the walls, especially the one of my brother who was killed in أ¢â‚¬إ“Black September.أ¢â‚¬? They ransacked the living room, cursing and swearing. After having looked for us in vain, they went up to the roof and stayed there all night long. We spent that night in terror in our hiding place, listening to the shooting and people screaming, while Israel fired flares to light the sky until dawn.

The next morning they started saying, أ¢â‚¬إ“Give yourself up and your life will be spared.أ¢â‚¬? My nephew was 18 months old. He was hungry and we were far from the kitchen. My sister wanted him to quieten down, and she put her hand over his mouth, fearing that they would hear his cries. Her husband decided that we would have to give ourselves up, adding that each personأ¢â‚¬â„¢s fate was preordained by God anyway. The women went out first, my brothers, my father, my brother-in-law and other members of the family followed. My brother was ill. As soon as they heard our voices, they shot in our direction and came straight back inside the house. They asked us where we had been the day before when they had come in and not found anyone there. Then they ordered the women and children to go out. My brother-in-law started kissing his little girl as if he were saying goodbye. An armed man came towards my niece, tied a rope around her neck and threatened to strangle her if her father didnأ¢â‚¬â„¢t let go of her. He let go of her and gave her to me. They wanted to take me too but my mother told them I was a girl. They made my mother and the women walk to the Sports Centre. While I was walking I saw my auntأ¢â‚¬â„¢s husband, Abu Nayef, being murdered near his house with blows of an axe to his head. The dead bodies were disfigured. While I was carrying my niece, I bumped into a dead body that had been hit with an axe and I fell over. They knew then that I was a boy, and one of them put me up against the wall; he wanted to fire a bullet into my head. My mother begged him and kissed his feet so that he would let me go. He pushed her away. When he did that, he heard the clinking of some money she had hidden in her clothes. He asked her what that meant. She replied that he could have all the money he wanted but he had to let me stay with her. In this way we carried on our way and we arrived at the Sports Centre. The Israeli bulldozers were busy digging large trenches. We were told that we all had to get in because they wanted to bury us all alive. My mother started begging him again, and then she asked for a mouthful of water before dying.

At the Sports Centre, I saw the Israeli military, as well as tanks, bulldozers and artillery, all Israeli. We also saw groups of Phalangists with the Israelis.

The Sports Centre was packed with women and children. We stayed there until sunset. An Israeli then came and he said, أ¢â‚¬إ“Everyone go to the Cola region, whoever comes back to the camp will die.أ¢â‚¬? We left, as they fired shots in our direction.

Mr Younis lost his father, three brothers, his maternal uncle, his maternal cousin, two paternal cousins and other members of his family.

More Eyewitness Testimonies

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Jenin

A British forensic expert who has gained access to the West Bank city of Jenin says evidence points to a massacre by Israeli forces.
Prof Derrick Pounder, who is part of an Amnesty International team granted access to Jenin, said he has seen bodies lying in the streets and received eyewitness accounts of civilian deaths.

The Dundee University expert said the Amnesty investigation has only just begun but Palestinian claims of a massacre were gaining foundation as the team continued its analysis.

He said: "The truth will come out, as it has come out in Bosnia and Kosovo, as it has in other places where we've had these kinds of allegations.

"I must say that the evidence before us at the moment doesn't lead us to believe that the allegations are anything other than truthful and that therefore there are large numbers of civilian dead underneath these bulldozed and bombed ruins that we see."

The professor said recovering the bodies would be difficult because many buildings collapsed during bombardment.

He said: "We know there are families who were there and killed and buried.

"We were on the ruins yesterday and two elderly men came forward, each of them pointed to where their houses had been and one of them told us that 10 members of his family were buried under the rubble."

'Beyond belief'

He said post mortems on two bodies had "given cause for suspicion" and there was "extensive damage" to Jenin.

An area of the town the size of several football pitches has been flattened.

Prof Pounder was speaking as Israeli forces began to pull out of Jenin and the town of Nablus.

A United Nations special envoy described the the devastation as "horrific beyond belief".

Terje Roed-Larsen, who visited the Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, criticised Israel for not allowing rescue teams in after the battle with Palestinian gunmen.

Israeli officials reversed a ban on the Amnesty team entering the Jenin refugee camp and government hospital on Wednesday.

Amnesty had considered legal action against the Israeli Government over the ban.

Israel 'fighting for its life'

Israeli forces moved into the Jenin camp on 3 April, saying it was a hotbed of Palestinian militancy and declaring it a closed military zone.

Zalmon Shoval, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, defended Israel's actions, saying it was fighting for its life.

"Mr Larsen has no business whatsoever to tell us what is right or wrong," he told the BBC.

Palestinians claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath the rubble, but Mr Shoval said only about 65 bodies had been recovered, of which five were civilians.

Israel's large-scale military operations across the West Bank were launched following a spate of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel.

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Evidence of Massacre in Jenin

The following is an initial report issued by a fact-finding delegation dispatched to the West Bank and Gaza that includes legal and public health experts and human rights activists.

The delegation is investigating the conditions of the Palestinian people living under harsh Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The delegation was organized by the International A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition - Act Now to Stop War & End Racism.

JENIN: On May 23, the A.N.S.W.E.R. delegation entered Jenin, a densely populated civilian refugee camp, and found undisputed evidence of a massacre.

The delegation interviewed and took testimony from witnesses and survivors of the devastation and slaughter perpetrated by the Israeli military in its recent invasion of the West Bank, including the Jenin refugee camp.

In Jenin this testimony confirmed the indiscriminate and vicious nature of the recent Sharon directed military attack against the Jenin refugee camp. "The coordinator for health services in the camp reported that as of now they have found and identified 55 bodies, and held funerals for those people. Of these, 5 were members of the Palestinian security forces and 12 were from various factions who defended the residents of Jenin against the Israeli invasion.
The other thirty-eight rest were non-combatants, including children, elderly and disabled persons. Rescue workers believe there may be 10 to 40 others who are still buried in the rubble or who will never be found, leading sources in Jenin to estimate that there have been about 90 deaths," reported Dr. Hillel Cohen, a public health doctor and epidemiologist and member of delegation.

"Many of the houses that were destroyed by tank shells and missiles were then bulldozed flat by the Israelis. If any bodies were inside those, they may never be found. At the spot we were talking, a neighbor saw a shell explode the house of a disabled man. The building collapsed on top of him and his body has not yet been found."

Approximately 5,000 persons have been rendered homeless, as the Israeli Defense Forces methodically destroyed residential areas by attacking first with tanks and missiles, and completing the destruction of homes and neighborhoods through the use of bulldozers. There are wide swaths of land that have been clear cut of houses and inhabitants that were previously occupied by scores of homes separated by narrow pathways only a few meters wide.

Many Palestinians still struggle to live in the rubble of partially destroyed homes with walls and roofs torn away and living areas exposed to the elements, and the number of persons displaced or rendered homeless is expected to increase as additional property are declared to be uninhabitable or structurally unsound.

"There can be no doubt, based on the undisputed number of civilians killed by Sharon's military, the obvious use of indiscriminate forms of violence and weaponry, in addition to the testimony of eyewitnesses to war crimes and countless instances and human cruelty unjustified by any conceivable necessity, that there has been a massacre in Jenin," stated Carl Messineo, human rights attorney and member of the delegation. "The evidence of a massacre here is apparent. The only basis on which one could state that there was no massacre here is a political one."

Yet, the mainstream media have declared Jenin to not be a massacre, most frequently citing a recent report by Human Rights Watch that while admitting the civilian slaughter, and the frequency of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Jenin, declared that the indiscriminate killings did not constitute a massacre. That report, which was announced at the same time that the U.N. bowed to Israeli wishes and withdrew its request to investigate Jenin, has been used to legitimize the Israeli and U.N. decision from growing worldwide criticism.

Based on the intensity of the shelling, Jenin residents initially guessed that there might have been hundreds or thousands killed. The numbers were much lower since many fled their homes, despite the curfew, at the first sounds of gunfire. The media contrasted these early, unconfirmed rumors to the confirmed body count of 55 to discredit the Palestinians and to scoff at the use of the word massacre.

Yet in the dictionary, massacre is defined as "savage and indiscriminate killing" clearly an apt description of what took place. Some of the most well-known, historic massacres had fewer or similar numbers killed. In the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770) , British troops shot into a crowd of protestors who were throwing rocks and ice-balls at the troops, killing 5 and wounding 6. Among the five killed was Crispus Attucks, an African-American, considered the first to die in the American Revolution. In the Paoli Massacre (Sept. 20-21, 1777), also during the American Revolutionary war British troops killed 53 Americans, all soldiers. At the Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914), 20 coal miners and family members were killed by National Guard during a strike by the United Mine Workers of America. The Sharpesville Massacre (March 21, 1960) is one of the most famous political massacres of the recent era, Apartheid troops fired into a crowd of African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180. The demonstrators were protesting the pass laws that restricted the movement of Africans, not unlike the restrictions now imposed by Israel on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Sharpesville killings were followed by massive arrests of activists - a pattern followed by the Israelis in Jenin and throughout the West Bank.

Messineo explained, "The decision to reject the apparent evidence of massacre is a political decision, a mischaracterization used to immunize Ariel Sharon, the Israeli government and its U.S. backer, from responsibility for this unconscionable and indiscriminate military attack against Palestinian civilians. Even the killings of so-called Palestinian fighters cannot be justified under any standard of international humanitarian law, which recognizes the inherent right of people to self defense. When an invading army invades your homeland, fighting in self defense is justified to protect your self, your family and your people."

As the world knows, this is not Ariel Sharon's first massacre. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led his Unit 101 into Qibya, a civilian village, to execute Israel's official policy of collective retaliatory punishment, ostensibly because there had been a recent killing of three Israelis. When Sharon left Qibya, sixty seven civilians had been killed by Israel's military operation, between one half and two thirds of whom were women and children. Fifty six houses, the village Masjid, school and water tank were destroyed. There has never been any dispute among historians as to whether Qibya - which has parallels to the scope of indiscriminate killing in Jenin - was a massacre.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who directed the Jenin massacre, has been found responsible even by the Israeli government for the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Lebanon in which up to 2,000 civilians were killed.

The delegation includes Richard Becker, West Coast Coordinator of the International Action Center and member of the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition steering committee; Carl Messineo, attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice and member of the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition steering committee; Sara Flounders, Co-Director of the International Action Center; Dr. Hillel Cohen, doctor of public health and epidemiologist and delegate of 1199 National Health and Human Services Employees Union.


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