Phalangist militia fighters, allowed into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by the Israeli Defense Forces surrounding Beirut, killed hundreds to thousands of civilians in retaliation for the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel. The massacre, which ended around this date, provoked international outrage and a subsequent Israeli commission found military leaders indirectly responsible.
For three days, Phalangist militiamen moved through the narrow alleys of the Sabra and Shatila camps on the outskirts of Beirut, killing residents in their homes and in the streets. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred to more than 3,000, with most independent investigations settling on a toll in the high hundreds to low thousands, overwhelmingly Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians.
Israeli forces had encircled the camps as part of the broader 1982 Lebanon War and, according to the later Kahan Commission inquiry, allowed the Phalangist militia to enter despite warnings about likely reprisals for the assassination of Lebanon's Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel days earlier. The commission found Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the killings, a finding that forced his resignation from that post, though he later returned to Israeli politics and eventually became prime minister.
The massacre remains one of the defining atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War, a searing symbol invoked for decades afterward in debates over accountability, occupation, and the protection of civilians in war.