September 18, 2024

Stand with Lebanese Resistance

Condemn Israeli Zionist Terrorism in Lebanon

Beirut, first responders rush to aid of victims of Zionist terror, September 17, 2024.

• Resistance Movement Condemns Zionist Cyber Terrorist Attack

• Anniversary of 1982 U.S./Zionist Massacre in Sabra and Shatila

Stand with Lebanese Resistance

Resistance Movement Condemns Zionist Cyber Terrorist Attack

Lebanese security forces said the explosion on September 17 of pagers used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon was the largest cyber security breach that Hezbollah has been exposed to in years. Media reports indicate that at least eleven people were killed and about 4,000 were wounded, 400 of whom are in critical condition. According to the reports, those targeted were primarily Hezbollah personnel, although many civilians and several children were among the killed and wounded. The official Lebanese National News Agency indicated that the pagers exploded simultaneously in the southern suburbs of Beirut, in various towns in the Marjeyoun district in southern Lebanon, as well as in the Hermel area in the Bekaa in eastern Lebanon.

The Resistance Movements condemned the cyber attack as Israeli terrorism against an entire nation. “This is not a security targeting of one, two, or three people. This is a targeting of an entire nation,” senior Hezbollah official Hussein Khalil said. Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed newspaper quoted a source in Hezbollah as saying, “What happened was a dangerous breach, and it is being investigated.”

“This terrorist act is part of the Zionist enemy’s larger aggression on the region,” Hamas said. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad said, “The treacherous operation carried out by the Zionist entity’s devices through the explosion of dual-use communication equipment is a documented war crime. It inflicted severe damage on a large number of innocent civilians inside their homes with premeditated malice.” “Although the enemy’s resort to this option is intended within the framework of psychological and intellectual warfare, it indicates the level of frustration and the narrow options they now have after the blows they have received from multiple fronts supporting the Palestinian people,” the statement issued by Palestinian Islamic Jihad added.

The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement said: “We strongly condemn the criminal and terrorist blasts that targeted Lebanese communication networks, resulting in the martyrdom of many and the injury of hundreds of our brothers and sisters in Lebanon.” It added: “The enemy will not succeed in their attempts through their cowardly and treacherous crimes to break the will of resistance in our nation or deter the fighters in Hezbollah and Lebanon from continuing their support for the Gaza Strip.”

Yemen’s Ansarullah spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam said, “We condemn the Israeli security attack on Lebanon, which targeted many civilians, which is a flagrant crime and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.” “We are certain that Lebanon is capable of facing all challenges and has a resistance capable of deterring the Zionist enemy and making it pay a heavy cost for any escalation it may undertake against Lebanon,” Ansarullah’s spokesman added.

Israeli government officials instructed to speak to the matter on Israel’s Channel 12 cited the head of Knesset stating: “We made great efforts to find a non-military solution in the north and we reached a point where we said enough is enough.”

The reference to a “military solution” versus a “non-military solution” relates to the visit of U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein to Israel the previous day, September 16. According to the Jerusalem Post, the visit was an effort “to secure a diplomatic resolution to the constrained IDF[Israel Defense Forces]-Hezbollah war, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant appeared to pivot toward a military solution.” The Washington Post reported that State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, speaking to reporters on September 17, said that “the U.S. was not involved in it [the pager attack]. The U.S. was not aware of this incident in advance.” “We would urge Iran not to take advantage of any incident, any instability to further increase tensions in the region,” he said. He did not condemn the attack, nor did he hold Israel responsible for it.

Editor’s Note

A second attack involving exploding handheld radios has now killed at least 14 people and injured another 450. Israel is doing everything in its power to provoke the Resistance forces into responding according to Israel’s game plan which they are not likely to do. On the contrary, they will keep their aim of ending the genocide of the people in Gaza and ending the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine uppermost in mind. The peoples of the world stand as one with the Palestinian people as well as with the peoples of Lebanon and other countries Israel is targeting and all the Resistance forces.

Anniversary of 1982 U.S./Zionist Massacre in Sabra and Shatila

Scene from the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, April 1982.

This September 15-18 marks the 42nd anniversary of the conscience-searing Sabra and Shatila massacre carried out in 1982 by the Israeli Zionists in Lebanon. The war criminal Israeli Minister of Defence, General Ariel Sharon, led the ground forces which slaughtered no less than 2,920 and possibly as many as 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiite Muslims. This event marked a defining moment in the Palestinian struggle to be rid of the decades-long illegal military occupation of their lands and lives by the so-called State of Israel.

The massacre took place in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. It was conducted mainly by the Kataeb Party (also known as the Phalanges Party), a Lebanese Christian party, and its associated militias known as the Lebanese Forces. The executioners were mobilized and supervised by the Israeli Army which inserted themselves under various pretexts with a major aim of permanently expelling the entire Palestine Liberation Organization, including its leader Yasser Arafat, from Lebanon.

The slaughter proceeded in two stages, one entirely executed by Israeli so-called Special Forces led by Ariel Sharon and the other by a Lebanese fascist gang financed by the Israeli government. On September 15, as few as 63 and as many as 167 Palestinians capable of communicating in English with media beyond Lebanon (notably lawyers, medical staff and teachers) were individually identified and killed by an Israeli unit called Sayeret Matkal. From approximately 6:00 pm September 16 to 8:00 am September 18, 1982 a more widespread massacre was carried out by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia in an operation personally supervised at the entrance of the Shatila camp by Sharon. Apart from being formally disciplined in the most minor way by an Israeli inquiry after these events, Sharon became known worldwide after these horrific events as the “Butcher of Beirut.”

“The smell lingered for several months, more than six months, horrible stench,” said Najib al-Khatib, a Palestinian refugee whose father and 10 other family members were killed.

More than four decades have passed but the Palestinian people are unable to erase the memory of what happened those days in the homes and alleys of Beirut including the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Testimonies from the survivors of the massacre reveal bone-chilling details of slaughter, mutilation, rape, and mass graves.

The United Nations passed a resolution declaring the massacre an “act of genocide.” In February 1983, the UN commission found that “Israeli authorities or forces were involved, directly or indirectly in the [Sabra and Shatila] massacres.”

An Israeli investigation held General Arial Sharon, the then Israeli minister of military affairs, “personally responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge.” Despite facing charges of genocide, Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in 2001.

How the Massacre Unfolded

Between 1947 and 1949, Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns, killing tens of thousands of local inhabitants. From a population of 1.9 million Palestinians, at least 750,000 were expelled from their homeland and became refugees. Nearly 100,000 Palestinians fled to neighbouring Lebanon where they lived in refugee camps.

In 1969, an Egyptian-brokered agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese army gave control of the 16 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to the PLO.

In 1970, the PLO moved its base from Jordan to Lebanon.

In 1975, a civil war broke out between the Lebanese Front (LF), a coalition of right-wing Christian Phalange militia backed by the Israeli regime and the U.S., and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). The LNM also included the PLO.

In June 1982, the Israeli army led by Sharon invaded Lebanon in order to destroy the PLO which was at the time headquartered in Beirut, the Lebanese capital. The PLO withdrew from Lebanon by September 1, 1982, after being assured by the U.S. and a multi-national force that the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon would be protected. The U.S. went so far as to provide written guarantees it would protect the Palestinian civilians remaining in the camps from the Lebanese Christian militia.

The multinational force that was to protect the Palestinian refugees after the PLO’s withdrawal from Lebanon arrived on September 1, 1982. The force intended to stay for 30 days but pulled out early, on September 10, paving the way for the massacre.

On September 14, 1982, Bachir Gemayel, the Lebanese president-elect and leader of the Lebanese Forces, was killed when an explosion rocked the Kataeb Party’s headquarters in the Achrafieh area of Beirut. The Phalangists blamed the PLO for Gemayel’s assassination and sought revenge. Israel invaded western Beirut, encircling and sealing off Sabra and Shatila. The regime prevented anyone from exiting the area. Israeli forces then paved the way for the Phalangists to enter and carry out the massacre.

After the Zionist terrorists finished their orgy of killing, the bodies of the dead, including Palestinian and Lebanese children, littered the streets for days.

According to a 2022 report by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, the military commanders in the Israeli occupation army and Phalangists met to coordinate the massacre. Then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved Sharon’s plan to attack the refugee camps.

Reports reveal that a meeting was held between the officials of the Phalangist militia and the Israeli commanders in Beirut after the massacre to work out how to conceal the Israeli involvement.

U.S. Backing for Sabra and Shatila Massacre

The documents from the annexes to the Kahan Commission, created to investigate the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre and headed by former Israeli Supreme Court president Yitzhak Kahan, detail the interactions between the U.S. and Israeli governments at the time of the massacre in Lebanon.

The commission documented transcripts and accounts of the meetings between Israeli officials and U.S. diplomats. The documents clearly show that U.S. officials knew that all of the PLO’s military forces had been withdrawn from Beirut before the massacre. It is clear that the U.S. failed to push back when bullied by Sharon, who falsely claimed that “2,000 terrorists” had been secretly left behind by the PLO. This bogus claim was the pretext Sharon used for the occupation of West Beirut, and for sending the Phalangist militia into the refugee camps.

Exchanges between U.S. and Israeli officials prove that in 1982 the U.S. was responsible for giving Sharon permission for the invasion of Lebanon, for providing the weapons that would ultimately be used to kill over 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, and for failing to abide by its guarantees to the PLO for the safety of the civilian population in the camps.

The documents from the secret annexes to the Kahan Commission report show a high degree of U.S. involvement in failing to halt or reverse both the advance of Israel’s forces into West Beirut and Sharon’s introduction of Phalangist militia into Sabra and Shatila.

The documents confirm that U.S. officials in collaboration with senior Israeli regime officials knew that the reactionary Christian militia would massacre Palestinians if allowed to attack the camps after the PLO military forces protecting them had been evacuated.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was a precursor to the genocide the U.S./Israeli Zionists are committing in Gaza and the West Bank today. The current U.S/Israeli Zionist genocidal war has claimed the lives of more than 41,200 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, women and children, health care personnel, teachers, journalists, writers, poets and religious leaders. The British medical journal The Lancet has suggested the real figure is likely more than 180,000 deaths.

For nearly 12 months the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany and various U.S. puppet regimes have presented the same excuses for the current genocide as they presented in 1982 for the slaughter carried out in Sabra and Shatila. The Palestinians know that their written guarantees of human rights protection are a ruse, a criminal ruse to carry out crimes against the Palestinians and against humanity. The Resistance Forces have now taken the initiative into their own hands. With their desperate acts, the U.S./Israeli Zionists are ringing their own death knell.

(With files from the Hardial Bains Resource Centre including shunpiking Magazine’s Dossier on Palestine and the Party Press).