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(from www.mallat.com, website of the plaintiffs' counsel) Case brought by:
Represented
by their counsels: Bring a civil indictment against Messrs Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron and other Israelis and Lebanese responsible for the massacres, killings, rapes and disappearance of civilian population that took place in Beirut from Thursday 16 to Saturday 18 September 1982 in the region of the camps of Sabra and Shatila. The charge is based in conformance with the law of 16 June 1993 (modified by the law of 10 February 1999) relative to the repression of grave violations of international humanitarian law in particular:
Equally, the charge is founded on international customary law and on the 'ius cogens' in connection with the same crimes. The
plaintiffs have been personally injured and/or have lost close family
members or property by these crimes. On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, in reaction to the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador Argov in London on June 4. On the same day, the Israeli secret services attributed the attempted assassination to a dissident Palestinian organisation commandeered by the Iraqi government, which was then concerned with deflecting attention from its recent setback in the Iran-Iraq war. The long-prepared Israeli operation was christened "Peace in the Galilee". Initially, the Israeli government had announced its intention to penetrate 40km into Lebanese territory. The military commander, under the orders of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, had meanwhile decided to execute a more ambitious project that Mr Sharon had prepared several months previously. After having occupied the south of the country and destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese residences there, simultaneously committing a series of violations against the civilian population , the Israeli troops penetrated as far as Beirut, and by 18 June 1982 they had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organisation's armed forces in the west side of the town. According to Lebanese statistics, the Israeli offensive, particularly the intensive shelling against Beirut, caused 18,000 deaths and 30,000 injuries, mostly among civilians. After two months of fighting, a ceasefire was negotiated through the intermediary of United States Envoy Philip Habib. It was agreed that the PLO would evacuate Beirut, under the supervision of a multinational force deployed in the evacuated part of the town. The Habib Accords envisaged that West Beirut would subsequently be invested by the Lebanese army, and the Palestinian leadership were given American guarantees for the security of civilians in the camps after their departure. The evacuation of the PLO ended on 1 September 1982. On 10 September 1982, the multinational forces left Beirut. The next day, Mr Ariel Sharon announced that "2,000 terrorists" had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, after the previous day's assassination of President-elect Basher Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, "surrounding and sealing" the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by an entirely civilian Lebanese and Palestinian population, the entirety of armed resistors (more than 14,000 people) having evacuated Beirut and its suburbs. Historians and journalists agree that it was probably during a meeting between Ariel Sharon and Bashir Gemayel in Bikfaya on 12 September that an agreement was concluded to authorise the "Lebanese forces" to "mop up" these Palestinian camps. The intention to send the Phalangist forces into West Beirut had already been announced by Mr Sharon on 9 July 1982 , and in his biography he confirms having negotiated the operation during his meeting with Bikfaya. According to Ariel Sharon's 22 September 1982 declarations in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps of Beirut was decided on Wednesday 15 September 1982 at 15.30. Also according to General Sharon, the Israeli commandant had received the following instruction: "The Tsahal forces are forbidden to enter the refugee camps. The "mopping-up" of the camps will be carried out by the Phalanges or the Lebanese army." From dawn on 15 September 1982, Israeli fighter-bombers were flying low over West Beirut and Israeli troops had secured their entry. From 9am, General Sharon was present to personally direct the Israeli penetration, installing himself in the general army area at the Kuwait embassy junction situated at the edge of Shatila. From the roof of this six-storey building, it was possible to clearly observe the town and the camps of Sabra and Shatila. From midday, the camps of Sabra and Shatila - in reality a single zone of refugee camps in the south of West Beirut - were surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who had installed checkpoints all around the camps permitting the surveillance of the entrances and exits. During the late afternoon and evening, the camps were bombarded with shells. By Thursday 16 September 1982, the Israeli army controlled West Beirut. In a release, the military spokesperson declared, "Tsahal controls all the strategic points of Beirut. The refugee camps, including the concentrations of terrorists, are surrounded and closed." In the morning of 16 September, the following order was issued by the army high command: "The searching and mopping up of the camps will be done by the Phalangists/Lebanese army." During the morning, shells were fired down towards the camps from high locations and Israeli snipers were shooting down at people in the streets. At about midday, the Israeli military command gave the Phalangist militia green light to enter the refugee camps. Shortly after 5 o'clock pm, a unit of approximately 150 Phalangists entered Shatila camp from the south and southwest. At that point, General Drori telephoned Ariel Sharon and announced, "Our friends are advancing into the camps. We have coordinated their entry." Sharon replied, "Congratulations! Our friends' operation is approved." For the next 40 hours inside the "surrounded and sealed" camps, the Phalangist militia raped, killed and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and old people. These actions were accompanied or followed by systematic roundups, backed or reinforced by the Israeli army, resulting in dozens of disappearances. Until the morning of Saturday 18 September 1982, the Israeli army, which knew perfectly well what was going on in the camps, and whose leaders were in permanent contact with the militia leaders who perpetrated the massacre, did not intervene. Instead, they prevented civilians from escaping the camps and organised for the camps to be lit up throughout the night by flares sent into the sky from helicopters and mortars. The count of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) and 3,500 (notably in the inquiry launched by the Israeli journalist Kapeliouk). The exact figure will never be determined because in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the ICRC or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried under bulldozed buildings by the militia themselves. Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return. The victims and survivors of the massacres have never received any judicial instruction, whether in Lebanon, Israel or elsewhere. After 400,000 people took to the streets in protest, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) named a commission of inquiry presided over by Mr Yitzhak Kahan in September 1982. In spite of the limitations of the commission's mandate (it was a political and not a judicial mandate) and the total absence of the voices and demands of the victims, the Commission concluded that the Minster of Defence was personally responsible for the massacres. Upon the insistence of the Commission, and the demonstrations that followed its report, Mr Sharon resigned from his post of Minister of Defence but remained in the government as Minister Without Portfolio. It is worth noting that, during the 'Peace Now' demonstration immediately prior to Sharon's 'resignation', demonstrators were attacked with grenades, resulting in the death of a young demonstrator. Several non-official inquiries and reports including those of MacBride and of the Nordic Commission, based mainly on the testimony of eyewitnesses, as well as other pieces of journalistic and historical research, have brought together vital pieces of information. These texts, in part or in full, are annexed to this file. In spite of the evidence of what the UN Security Council described as a 'criminal massacre,' and the sad ranking of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in humankind's collective memory as among the great crimes of the 20th Century, the man found "personally responsible", his associates and the people who carried out the massacres have never been pursued or punished. In 1984, the Israeli journalists Schiff and Yaari concluded their chapter on the massacre with this reflection: "If there is a moral to the painful episode of Sabra and Shatila, it has yet to be acknowledged." This reality of impunity remains true to this day. The United Nations Security Council condemned the massacre with Resolution 521 (19 September 1982). This condemnation was followed by a 16 December 1982 General Assembly resolution qualifying the massacre as an "act of genocide."
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