On this day in 1982, in the Sabra neighbourhood of Beirut and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp, a massacre began that lasted until 18 September. The recorded estimates of the dead range from about 1,300 to about 3,500 civilians, most of them Palestinians and Lebanese Shias. The killing was carried out by the Lebanese Forces militia, one of the main Christian militias of the Lebanese civil war, with the Israel Defense Forces holding the surrounding area.
Inquiries followed. The United Nations General Assembly took the matter up before the year was out. In Israel, the Kahan Commission was appointed and reported the following February. In Lebanon and elsewhere, families spent years attempting to establish the names and numbers of the dead, work that has never been fully completed.
Forty-four years on, the figures are still given as a range, because no one was ever able to count them all. The link below sets out what is on the record.
Many of the dead were buried together in a mass grave beside the camp, and families still gather there each September to read names aloud. Where the names were never established, mourners have simply prayed for the unnamed.