Fatah: Sabra and Shatila massacre a ‘war crime’

The Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah, yesterday said that the Sabra and Shatila massacre is a “war crime” for which Israel bears full responsibility as the occupying power controlling Lebanon at that time.

“The Sabra and Shatila crime is engraved in the memory of all the Palestinian people, along with a long series of massacres committed by the Zionist terrorist gangs before and during the 1948 war within the framework of the policy of ethnic cleansing, and the massacres committed by Israel as a state including the massacres of Deir Yassin, Qibiya, Kafr Qasim, and dozens of others,” the movement’s Information and Culture Commission said in a statement marking the 39th anniversary of the massacre.

On 16 September 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the right-wing Christian Phalange militia stormed the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut and massacred hundreds, maybe thousands, of mostly Palestinian civilians.

Fatah stressed that the Israeli crimes will not be subject to a statute of limitations, and that the Palestinian people are determined to hold the criminals accountable and to hold Israel accountable as a terrorist state responsible for all the crimes it committed against them.

“The Palestinian leadership is following up on this file in the International Criminal Court, and the time of silence is over. The Palestinian leadership and people will not rest until Israel is held accountable for the war crimes it has committed,” the statement added.

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