[10] Instead, Israeli troops were stationed at the exits of the area to prevent the camp's residents from leaving[11] and, at the request of the Lebanese Forces,[12] shot flares to illuminate Sabra and Shatila through the night during the massacre.

[13][14] In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Seán MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore responsibility for the militia's massacre.

Examples: the Syrian-backed Karantina massacre (January 1976) by the Kataeb and its allies against Kurds, Syrians and Palestinians in the predominantly Muslim slum district of Beirut; Damour (January 1976) by the PLO against Christian Maronites, including the family and fiancée of the Lebanese Forces intelligence chief Elie Hobeika; and Tel al-Zaatar (August 1976) by Phalangists and their allies against Palestinian refugees living in a camp administered by UNRWA.

[31] On 15 June 1982, 10 days after the start of the invasion, the Israeli Cabinet passed a proposal put forward by the Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, that the IDF should not enter West Beirut but this should be done by Lebanese Forces.

Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, had already issued orders that the Lebanese predominantly Christian, right-wing militias should not take part in the fighting and the proposal was to counter public complaints that the IDF were suffering casualties whilst their allies were standing by.

[43] Fawwaz Traboulsi [ar; de] writes that while the massacre was presented as a reaction to the assassination of Bachir, it represented the posthumous achievement of his "radical solution" to Palestinians in Lebanon, who he thought of as "people too many" in the region.

Later, the Israeli army's monthly journal Skira Hodechith wrote that the Lebanese Forces hoped to provoke "the general exodus of the Palestinian population" and aimed to create a new demographic balance in Lebanon favouring the Christians.

[45] On morning of Wednesday 15 September Israeli Defence Minister, Sharon, who had also travelled to Beirut, held a meeting with Eitan at the IDF's forward command post, on the roof of a five-storey building 200 metres southwest of Shatila camp.

and light-weapons fire from the Sabra and Shatila camps was directed at this forward command post, and continued to a lesser degree on Thursday and Friday (16–17 September).

[48] According to Linda Malone of the Jerusalem Fund, Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan[49] met with Phalangist militia units and invited them to enter Sabra and Shatila, claiming that the PLO was responsible for Gemayel's assassination.

It was published in the edition of 1 September of Bamahane, the IDF newspaper, that a Phalangist told an Israeli official: "[T]he question we are putting to ourselves is—how to begin, by raping or killing?

"[60] A US envoy to the Middle East expressed horror after being told of Sharon's plans to send the Phalangists inside the camps, and Israeli officials themselves acknowledged the situation could trigger "relentless slaughter".

[64] At roughly the same time or a little earlier at 19:00, Lieutenant Elul testified that he had overheard a radio conversation between one of the militia men in the camp and his commander Hobeika in which the former asking what he was to do with 50 women and children who had been taken prisoner.

[42][64] The Kahan Commission determined that the evidence pointed to 'two different and separate reports', noting that Yaron maintained that he thought they referred to the same incident, and that it concerned 45 "dead terrorists".

A deputy tank commander some 180 metres (200 yd) away, Lieutenant Grabowski, saw two Phalangists beating two young men, who were then taken back into the camp, after which shots rang out, and the soldiers left.

When he expressed a desire to make report, the tank crew said they had already heard a communication informing the battalion commander that civilians had been killed, and that the latter had replied, "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere.

[71][page needed] Shamir testified that from his recollection the main thing Tzipori had told him of was that 3/4 IDF soldiers killed, no mention of a massacre or slaughter, as opposed to a "rampage" had been made.

[4]In the afternoon, before 16:00, Lieutenant Grabowski had one of his men ask a Phalangist why they were killing civilians, and was told that pregnant women will give birth to children who will grow up to be terrorists.

[71][page needed] Between 18:00 and 20:00, Israeli Foreign Ministry personnel in Beirut and in Israel began receiving various reports from U.S. representatives that the Phalangists had been observed in the camps and that their presence was likely to cause problems.

Among them were a Norwegian journalist and diplomat Gunnar Flakstad, who observed Phalangists during their cleanup operations, removing dead bodies from destroyed houses in the Shatila camp.

[75] Janet Lee Stevens, an American journalist, later wrote to her husband, Dr. Franklin Lamb, "I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their waists and their legs spread apart; dozens of young men shot after being lined up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles.

"[76] Before the massacre, it was reported that the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, had requested the return of international forces, from Italy, France and the United States, to Beirut to protect civilians.

I ask Italy, France and the United States: What of your promise to protect the inhabitants of Beirut?In interviews with film director Lokman Slim in 2005, some of the Lebanese Christian militia fighters reported that, prior to the massacre, the IDF took them to training camps in Israel and showed them documentaries about the Holocaust.

"[5] According to Alain Menargues, on 15 September, an Israeli special operations group of Sayeret Matkal entered the camp to liquidate a number of Palestinian cadres, and left the same day.

[93] The negotiations under the mediation of US diplomat Philip Habib, which oversaw the withdrawal of the PLO from Beirut, had assigned responsibility to the American-led Multinational Force for guaranteeing the safety of those non-combatant Palestinians who remained.

[102] William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland,[103] stated that "there was little discussion of the scope of the term genocide, which had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision".

[99] The independent commission headed by Seán MacBride looking into reported violations of International Law by Israel, however, did find that the concept of genocide applied to the case as it was the intention of those behind the massacre "the deliberate destruction of the national and cultural rights and identity of the Palestinian people".

[106] On 25 September 1982, Peace Now, which had been established 4 years previously, organised in Tel Aviv a protest demonstration which brought to the streets some 10% of Israel’s population, an estimated 400,000 participants.

[115] The jury found the article false and defamatory, although Time won the suit in the U.S. court because Sharon's defense failed to establish that the magazine's editors and writers had "acted out of malice", as required under U.S. libel law.

[118] According to Robert Fisk, Osama bin Laden cited the Sabra and Shatila massacre as one of the motivations for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which al-Qaeda attacked an American Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia.