There you go - one more time

Further north, in the Sabra section of the camp, women came up to us, crying with fear and appealing for help. Their men - sons, husbands, fathers - had been taken from their homes at the time of the massacre. A few1 had already been found at the execution walls but others were still missing. A Reuters correspondent had seen men being held under guard by Israeli troops in the ruins of the sports stadium. There were more journalists now, Lebanese newspaper photographers and diplomats. We found two Swiss delegates from the International Red Cross and told them where we had found mass graves. Swedish radio's correspondent was in the camp.
We found hundreds of the missing men in the stadium, just as the Reuters man had said. They were Lebanese for the most part — Lebanese as well as Palestinians lived in Sabra - and they were being taken away for 'interrogation' by militiamen. The whole western side of the ruined sports stadium was guarded by uniformed Israeli troops together with plain-clothes Shin Bet intelligence operatives, big, heavy-set men wearing Ray-Bans with Uzi machine-guns in their hands. There were also militia¬men there, three of whom I saw leading a frightened man away from the stadium. The Israelis let them do this. They had agreed to this procedure. The Israelis themselves explained to us that this was a search for 'terrorists'.
From 'Pity the Nation' Robert Fisk

After Sharon's army had taken West Beirut and sealed off all escapes routes from the Palestinian refugee camps, Sharon ordered the phalange in. The official order from Sharon read "for the operation in the camps the phalange should be sent in"*. Knowing that the camps were full of unarmed civilians - mainly women and children, only around 150 phalange were deployed. The testimonies of the survivors suggest that both Israeli soldiers and their mercenaries the Phalange entered the camps and participated in the massacre**.
The Israelis supervised the operation from their forward command post, a six story building overlooking the camps. From there they gave logistic support and relayed orders to the soldiers on the ground. Concerned that reports of the on-going slaughter would leak out, the soldiers were ordered to continue the killing through out the night - to facilitate this the Israelis lit up the sky with flares all night long. The idea was to kill as many Palestinians as quickly as possible, before international pressure would put a stop to the operation. Over 3000 elderly men, women and children were murdered. Next the evidence had to be buried quickly - so the Israelis send in bulldozers. Houses were packed with bodies and demolished to form mass graves. One such mass grave contained a thousand bodies.
FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM
EYE-WITNESS TO SABRA-SHATILA MASSACRE
Dr.Ang Swee Chai

Jim Carroll