Hala Abou Zaki
ORIENT XXI / August 19, 2026
On 12 August 1976, after a siege of fifty-two days, the Palestinian refugee camp at Tall al-Zaatar, in the eastern suburbs of Beirut, fell to the right-wing Christian Lebanese militias. This was one of the bloodiest episodes in the Lebanese war (1975-1990), involving also Syria and Israel. In the days that followed, the assailants razed the camp.
This article is based on a study carried out between 2023 and 2024 by the Lebanese NGO, “ACT for the Disappeared” on forced disappearances in the eastern and northern suburbs of Beirut during the first two years of war (1975-1976). Several interviews were carried out in this context with survivors from the camp and their friends and relatives.
“I wasn’t a poet then and I never thought about poetry, but I went through a terrible ordeal, the Tall al-Zaatar massacre,” the Palestinian poet Rehab Kanaan tells us. Born in Lebanon in the early fifties, Rehab grew up in Tall al-Zaatar. Her parents were from Safad in the Upper Galilee and had found refuge in Lebanon after the Nakba. During the siege of the camp she lost 51 relatives, including her father, her mother, her five brothers and three sisters. A few years later, the war also took her son, two of her cousins, and separated her from her daughter whom she wouldn’t see again for twenty-four years.
The 50th anniversary of the liquidation of Tall al-Zaatar coincides with a moment in which the Palestinians are up against a new kind of extermination, another ordeal in Rehab’s life. Having settled in Gaza, she lives today in a tent, after losing her house and many close friends to the genocide perpetrated by Israel since 2023. Her life thus mirrors the history of the continued dispossession of the Palestinians, in Palestine and in exile.
The fiftieth anniversary of Tall Al-Zaatar also occurs in the context of another major event: the fall of the Assad regime which played a decisive role in crushing Tall al-Zaatar. With the end of that regime, eyewitnesses are now free to tell of the crimes committed in Lebanon, directly or via local allies, by over more than three decades of Syrian military and security forces’ presence in the country.
A belt of poverty
Tall al-Zaatar camp was set up in 1949 by the International Red Cross to provide shelter for some two thousand Palestinians who had found refuge in Lebanon. Several years later, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) took over the installation, naming it “Camp Dekwaneh”, after the Christian locality where it was situated. However, the camp would come to be better known as “Tall al-Zaatar” by reference to its location on a hill covered with thyme.
Situated as it was near the country’s largest industrial zone, the camp and its surroundings, starting in the fifties, would receive both Lebanese and Palestinian migrants from the poorest rural areas of the country, as well as Syrian labourers. In the seventies, Israel’s incursions into several regions of Lebanon would drive many displaced to settle in and around Tall al-Zaatar. The region would become one of the most populous in the belt of poverty around Beirut. In 1974, Tall al-Zaatar had a population of 15,000.
The camp was at the centre of the “two-year war” (1975-1976) which marked the first cycle of armed clashes in Lebanon. This war pitted two camps against each other. On the one hand there were the forces of the Lebanese Christian Right, whose two most important militias were Pierre Gemayel’s Kata’ib (the Lebanese Phalange) and the Numour al-Ahrar, the “Tigers” of former President Camille Chamoun’s National Liberal Party. On the other side was a Lebanese-Palestinian coalition bringing together the Palestinian factions, the groups of the Lebanese National Movement1 led by Kamal Jumblatt, and other Lebanese militias, most of them Muslim2.
Having initially backed the Lebanese-Palestinian coalition, Damascus changed sides and supported the right-wing Lebanese parties.
The two sides fought it out in the suburbs to the east and north of Beirut, where the shanty-towns of Maslakh and Karantina were located in particular, in the Nabaa district as well as the Palestinian camps of Dbaiyyeh, Jisr al-Basha and Tall al-Zaatar.
Between January and August 1976, these neighbourhoods fell one after another into the hands of the Christian militias which perpetrated several massacres and displaced the population. The battle of Tall al-Zaatar was the last in that series of offensives which contributed to the social and political homogenisation of that part of the national territory, redrew the country’s confessional map and finalised the division of the capital between East and West Beirut.
Hafez al-Assad’s Syrian regime played a decisive role in these events. After having initially supported the Lebanese-Palestinian coalition, Damascus changed sides and backed the right-wing Lebanese parties. This was demonstrated especially in July 1976 when the Syrian air force bombed the armed factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) trying to raise the siege of Tall al-Zaatar; many eyewitness accounts and newspaper articles of the period attest to the presence of Syrian troops in certain camps and neighbourhoods occupied in 1976 as well as in detention centres and at checkpoints manned by right-wing militias.
A siege of fifty-two days
In January 1976, the right-wing Lebanese militias laid siege to Tall al-Zaatar, blocking the movement of people as well as the transportation of food, fuel, medicines and medical supplies. Circulation remained possible, however, through a Lebanese-Palestinian committee (Quwat al-irtibat al-mushtaraka, the Joint Liaison Force) which coordinated movements with both sides.
But on 2 June 1976, the Numour al-Ahrar, followed by the Kata’ib then by the Free Lebanon Army3, launched a massive assault on the camp. For 52 days, the embattled population was shelled almost daily with heavy artillery fire.
In July, the Kata’ib committed two massacres in the Ras Dekwaneh district, near Tall al-Zaatar. The first, in two shelters, left 90 dead, and several missing. In the second, militiamen armed by Israel bombed a building where hundreds of civilians had found refuge. Over 250 were killed, among them those fifty relatives of Rehab Kanaan. This was a preparation for the final assault, reinforced by some fifty battle tanks and armoured personnel carriers provided by their Israeli ally4.
The biggest massacre was from thirst
For Youssef Iraki, one of the camp’s physicians, “the biggest massacre was from thirst”. Starting on 14 July, the water springs became a target for the militiamen, and only one of the camp’s three water sources was working. Each day, between 10 and 30 people – mostly women – trying to fetch water, were killed or wounded by snipers. They were called the “water martyrs”. The lack of water was especially hard on children, as Dr Iraki recalls :
“Every day, we lost some ten children from dehydration. As a doctor, those were the worst moments. A mother would come to me saying: ’Look at my child, he has trouble breathing, he can’t do it anymore.’ Those were the most trying moments.”
During the last days of the siege, the assailants prevented the evacuation of the wounded from the camp. After many negotiations undertaken by Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO’s executive committee, first with the Syrian regime, then with the Phalangist party, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was finally allowed to enter the camp on 2 August to evacuate 40 wounded to West Beirut between the 3rd and 6th of August. On the way, the militiamen grabbed the medical supplies and harassed the wounded. On the 5th and 6th of August, two of these were killed, one of them a child, after which the ICRC put an end to the evacuations.
The fall of the camp
On 10 August 1976, the Christian militias took control of Tall al-Zaatar’s last water source. The camp’s population couldn’t hold out any longer. The next day, the various parties reached an agreement which provided for the evacuation of civilians, mostly to West Beirut, and the withdrawal of the Palestinian fighters through the mountains. But on 12 August 1976, the agreement was broken and the militiamen occupied the camp. On that day, some 12,000 people fled Tall al-Zaatar and its vicinity in chaos and confusion.
Massacres were perpetrated in the camp and in Dekwaneh, as well as at the many checkpoints – between nine and twelve – on the road to West Beirut. Women were raped and the militiamen robbed the civilians; while eyewitnesses stress the presence of the Ahrar and the Kata’ib on the day of the evacuation, other groups played an active role in the massacre, such as the Guardians of the Cedars5, the Free Lebanon Army6 and the Lebanese Youth Movement7. Many Palestinian fighters were killed as they fled through the mountains, while others died of hunger and thirst along the way.
Umm Imad is one of the survivors of Tall al-Zaatar. She remembers that 12th day of August when she lost her six-year-old son Imad, and twenty members of her family. She tells us how, at dawn on that day, they had heard that militiamen had entered the camp and committed atrocities, particularly in the mosque and the hospital. Umm Imad and her family – twenty people in all – decided to seek refuge in the home of a Lebanese friend who lived in an apartment house inside the camp.
As they were about to depart, her youngest daughter wanted to go to the toilet. Her sister’s sister-in-law took advantage of the delay to change her baby’s diaper and told her other son to leave with the rest of the family. Umm Imad told her son Imad to go with them, while her three youngest children stayed with her. She watched them walk away, then around the corner of a building. When she set out to catch up with them, the four grown-ups and thirteen children had vanished into thin air.
Like a bird
As she continues her account, other tragic memories return. After searching in vain for her family, Umm Imad leaves the camp and sets out on the highway to Dekwaneh. On both sides of the road, she sees the corpses of men and youths: “The problem was that you knew all those people, they were your neighbours, your loved ones. “She witnessed an especially heart-breaking scene : a group of militiamen stopped a woman carrying a newborn baby. She begged them to let her go on her way if she gave them her money. While she was removing the baby’s diaper to take out some banknotes, a militiaman seized the infant,” threw it into the air like a bird and shot at it”.
When Umm Imad and her loved ones were getting into a van to go to West Beirut, they were stopped by militiamen who made two of them leave the van. They would never be seen again. Then other horrifying scenes unfolded through the van windows; youths from the camp were chained to jeeps and dragged along the street, others had each leg attached to a different car. Militiamen everywhere shouting: “Yallah jayikon el-mawt!” (“Come on! Your death is near!”). Once they had reached the dividing line, the group had to leave the van and cross on foot over an earthen barrier to reach West Beirut amidst more killings.
Finding their dead
According to Palestinian academic Yezid Sayigh8, 3,500 people were killed and thousands wounded in the 55-day siege. The victims were mainly Palestinians, although there were also Lebanese and Syrians. Because of bombardments, the dead couldn’t be buried in the cemetery. Abdelaziz al-Labadi, one of the camp’s doctors, tells how the camp’s shabab (young men) took it on themselves to bury the dead between the houses, in the belief that when the siege was lifted the families would give them a proper grave. Members of the camp’s residents’ committee or of the various factions recorded the names and burial locations of the dead. Shortly after the fall of the camp and under the terms of an agreement reached between the Palestinian factions and the right-wing Lebanese militia, residents of Tall al-Zaatar were able to come back into the camp, dig 80 corpses and bury them in the martyrs’ cemetery near the Shatila camp in West Beirut.
As for the victims of 12 August 1976, the estimates vary from 1,000 to 2,000 people killed inside and outside the camp, and hundreds more considered missing. Except for those actually involved in these massacres, no one knows what became of the bodies of their victims.
Tall al-Zaatar was the first in a long series of battles
After the fall of the camp, the PLO leadership gathered the survivors of Tall al-Zaatar in Damour, by a cruel irony of history. For indeed, nearly seven months earlier, militiamen from the Lebanese-Palestinian coalition had massacred many inhabitants of this Christian village and forcibly displaced the survivors. The Palestinians remained there until 1982, before having to flee once again when Israel invaded Lebanon.
For the Palestinians, Tall al-Zaatar was actually only the first in a long series of battles, massacres, sieges and forced displacements which would characterise the rest of the war in Lebanon. Today, of the survivors of Tall al-Zaatar, some still live in Lebanon, often in other Palestinian camps, while many have left the country. Despite its disappearance in 1976, Tall al-Zaatar lives on in the memories of survivors but also through the creation, decades later, of a Tall al-Zaatar Residents Association, as well as commemorative events and Facebook pages summarizing the history of the men and women killed or missing during the siege of the camp or on the day of the massacres, 12 August 1976.
Hala Abou Zaki is an anthropologist; his work focuses on crises and migration in the Middle East, particularly Palestinian exile
