Tel Al-Zaatar Massacre - The Massacre and Its Aftermath

The Massacre and Its Aftermath

On August 12 the camp finally fell, following an on-and-off siege of several months. During the last two months, the siege had tightened. Heavy artillery shelling damaged much of the camp and killed a number of inhabitants. John Bulloch, The Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beirut at the time wrote, "In their bitterness the Palestinian commanders ordered their artillery to open up on the fringes of the camp with the ostensible objective of hampering the attackers and helping those inside; instead the shells were landing among the hundreds who had got through the perimeter and were trying to escape. When they were told of this, the Palestinians made no attempt to lift their fire: they wanted martyrs".

Robert Fisk wrote in his biographical profile of Yasser Arafat, The Broken Revolutionary, "When Arafat needed martyrs in 1976, he called for a truce around the besieged refugee camp of Tel el-Zaatar, then ordered his commanders in the camp to fire at their right-wing Lebanese Christian enemies. When, as a result, the Phalangists and "Tigers" militia slaughtered their way into Tel el-Zaatar, Arafat opened a "martyrs' village" for camp widows in the sacked Christian village of Damour. On his first visit, the widows pelted him with stones and rotten fruit. Journalists were ordered away at gunpoint."

In an L.A. Weekly interview published May 30, 2002, Fisk recalls "Arafat is a very immoral person, or maybe very amoral. A very cynical man. I remember when the Tal-al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut had to surrender to Christian forces in the very brutal Lebanese civil war. They were given permission to surrender with a cease-fire. But at the last moment, Arafat told his men to open fire on the Christian forces who were coming to accept the surrender. I think Arafat wanted more Palestinian "martyrs" in order to publicize the Palestinian position in the war. That was in 1976. Believe me that Arafat is not a changed man."

The massacre is said to have contributed to the mounting Sunni Muslim dissent within Alawi-ruled Syria. As a result, Syria broke off its offensive on the PLO and the LNM, and agreed to an Arab League summit which temporarily ended the Civil War.

The PLO used the former Christian town of Damour to house survivors of the Tel al-Zaatar massacre. Damour, a Christian town on the main highway south of Beirut, had been the site of a massacre by PLO military units on January 20, 1976. The populace not killed in the massacre had been forced to flee the town.

The split in the PLO leadership was ended when the Syrian backed As-Sa'iqa movement was expelled from the PLO, leaving Fatah as the dominant party.

Hafez al-Assad received strong criticism and pressure from across the Arab world for his involvement in the massacre - this criticism, as well as the internal dissent it caused as an Alawite ruler in a majority Sunni country, led to a cease-fire in his war on the Palestinian militia forces.