| Damour massacre | |
|---|---|
| Part of theLebanese Civil War | |
 A destroyed house in Damour (ICRC archives) | |
| Location | 33°44′N35°27′E / 33.733°N 35.450°E /33.733; 35.450 Damour,Lebanon |
| Date | 20 January 1976; 50 years ago (1976-01-20) |
| Target | Maronite Christians |
Attack type | Massacre |
| Deaths | 150–582[1] |
| Perpetrators |  Palestine Liberation Organization Al-Mourabitoun |
| Motive | Anti-Christian sentiment, revenge for theKarantina massacre |
TheDamour massacre took place on 20 January 1976, during the 1975–1990Lebanese Civil War.Damour, aMaronite Christian town on the main highway south ofBeirut, was attacked by militants of thePalestine Liberation Organisation andas-Sa'iqa. Many residents were killed or forced to flee.[2] According toRobert Fisk, the town was the first to be subject toethnic cleansing in theLebanese Civil War.[3] The attack was retaliation for theKarantina massacre by thePhalangists.[4]
In theKarantina massacre on 18 January 1976,Kataeb Regulatory Forces killed 1,000 to 1,500 people.[4][5]
TheAhrar and thePhalangist militias, based inDamour, andDayr al Nama had blocked the coastal road leading to southern Lebanon and the Chouf, which turned them into a threat to the PLO and its leftist and nationalist allies in theLebanese Civil War.[6]
That occurred as part of a series of events during the Lebanese Civil War in whichPalestinians joined the Muslim forces,[7] in the context of the Christian-Muslim divide,[8] and soonBeirut was divided along theGreen Line, with Christian enclaves to the east and Muslims to the west.[9]
On 9 January, the militias began a siege of Damour andJiyeh.[10] The PLO entered Jiyeh on 17 January.[10] Before 20 January, more than 15,000 civilians had fled Damour.[3]
On 20 January, under the command ofFatah andas-Sa'iqa, members of the PLO and leftist Muslim Lebanese militiamen entered Damour.[11] Along with twenty Phalangist militiamen, civilians - including women, the elderly, and children, and often whole families - were lined up against the walls of their homes and sprayed withmachine-gun fire by the militiamen; they then systematically dynamited and burned these homes.[12][3][11] Several of the town's young women were separated from other civilians and gang-raped.[3] Most estimates of the number killed range from 150 to 250, with the overwhelming majority of these being civilians;Robert Fisk puts the number of civilians massacred at nearly 250, while Israeli professorMordechai Nisan claims a significantly higher figure of 582.[3][13][14][15][16][17] Among the killed were family members ofLebanese Maronite militia commanderElie Hobeika and his fiancée.[18] For several days after the massacre, 149 bodies of those executed by the Palestinians lay in the streets; this included the corpses of many women who had been raped and of babies who were shot from close range in the back of the head.[14] In the days following the massacre, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims exhumed the coffins in the town's Christian cemetery and scattered the skeletons of several generations of the town's deceased citizens in the streets.[14][3][11]
After theTel al-Zaatar massacre later that year, the PLO resettled some of the survivingPalestinian refugees in Damour. After theIsraeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Zaatar refugees were expelled from Damour and the original inhabitants brought back.[19]
According to an eyewitness, the attack took place from the mountain behind the town. "It was an apocalypse," said Father Mansour Labaky, aChristian Maronite priest who survived the massacre. "They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting 'Allahu Akbar! (God is great!) Let us attack them for theArabs, let us offer aholocaust toMohammad!", and they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children."[20][21][22][23]
According toThomas L. Friedman, the PhalangistDamouri Brigade, which carried out theSabra and Shatila massacre during the1982 Lebanon War, sought revenge not only for the assassination ofBachir Gemayel but also for what he describes as past killings of their own people by Palestinians, including those at Damour.[24][25]Elie Hobeika, who oversaw the attack on Sabra and Shatila, was greatly inspired by the loss of his relatives and fiancée in the attack at Damour.[26]
According to theInternational Center for Transitional Justice, the leadership of Fatah and as-Sa'iqa sought to "empty the city."[11]
The attacking forces were mainly composed of brigades from thePalestinian Liberation Army (PLA) or the PLA's Ayn Jalout brigade armed by Egypt and theQadisiyah brigade from Iraq.[27] as well as members of Fatah and the Muslim Lebaneseal-Murabitun militia are also cited. Others contend that no Lebanese were involved and that those who committed atrocities were Palestinians from the Fatah,Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, andDemocratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with militiamen from Syria, Jordan, Libya,[28] Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and possibly evenJapanese Red Army terrorists who were then undergoing training by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon.[29]
According to historian Robert Fisk,Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO, wanted to execute the local PLO commanders afterwards for what they had permitted.[30]
The Insult, a film by the Lebanese-French director, Ziad Doueiri, about a lawsuit between aPalestinian-Lebanese refugee who fled after theJordanian Civil War, and a Lebanese Christian who survived the Damour massacre, was nominated for theOscars in 2018.
the massacre of 1,500 Palestinians, Shi'is, and others in Karantina and Maslakh, and the revenge killings of hundreds of Christians in Damour
