From Sabra and Shatila to Gaza: The Cost of Impunity

Imagine this scene: “One young woman, fearing she would not survive, stepped out of the crowd and handed her infant to one of the female doctors.” Those are the words of American Jewish nurse Ellen Siegel, recalling that moment from Shatila—one of Lebanon’s 12 official Palestinian refugee camps, established in 1949—and the adjacent Sabra neighborhood, which was predominantly Palestinian but was not itself an UNRWA refugee camp. Siegel had volunteered to go to Lebanon as a nurse to help Palestinians and Lebanese civilians caught up in Israel’s 1982 invasion, and was working at Gaza Hospital in the Sabra area when the massacre began.

On September 18, as she and other foreign medical workers were being forced out of the hospital by Phalangist militiamen, Siegel watched her colleague, volunteer doctor Swee Ang, carry the baby a short distance before a militiaman stopped her, took the infant, and handed it back to its mother.

Around them, Siegel recalled, women and children were huddled under the guard of armed men while dead bodies lay along the streets.

Next week, September 17, marks the second day of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which began on September 16, 1982, and ended on September 18—44 years ago. Lasting approximately 43 hours, the slaughter was carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen while Israeli forces surrounded and controlled the area. The exact number of civilians killed remains disputed, with estimates ranging from several hundred to over three thousand; Palestinian sources have put the death toll at more than 3,500.

The scene carried a particular horror for Siegel, a Jewish American who had grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust. She recalled thinking of Jewish mothers in Germany and Poland handing their infants to strangers in desperate attempts to save them from extermination. She had been taught, she wrote, that whenever she witnessed an injustice, she was obligated to speak out.

She did speak. In October 1982, Siegel submitted a 12-page statement detailing what she had witnessed, and on November 1, she testified before Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry. The commission’s 1983 report found Defense Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible for failing to prevent the massacre and recommended his removal from office. Yet, as is consistently the case when Israel investigates its own military—a doctrine of impunity dating back to the state’s founding on stolen Palestinian land—no criminal charges or prosecutions followed. Though Sharon stepped down as defense minister at the time he remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio, stayed at the heart of Israeli power, and eventually became prime minister—later laying siege to Ramallah and widely implicated in the murder of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

The terror Siegel witnessed was not an isolated aberration, but an early indication of a pattern in which Palestinian civilian suffering could generate outrage and documentation without producing meaningful accountability. Her testimony captured the human cost of that impunity in intimate detail: a mother desperately handing her infant to a stranger in the hope of saving its life. The tragedy of her account lies not only in the horror of September 1982, but in what followed—the gap between what the world knew and what it was willing to do. Over the next four decades, that gap would become a defining feature of the international response to Palestinian civilian deaths.

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The sheer volume of civilian blood spilled frames the core question of international apathy.

In September 1982, inside the narrow confines of Sabra and Shatila, thousaqnds of  defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered over three days—a body count compiled so hurriedly that mass graves were dug before many victims could even be identified.

Fast-forward to Gaza today, where the organized genocide has claimed the lives of over 74,000, a vast proportion of who are women and children. Yet, both then and now, Western political establishments and legal bodies hesitated or flatly refused to apply the term “genocide” and uphold the obligations that come with it. In 1982, the slaughter was framed strictly as a localized “massacre” or “atrocity,” avoiding the legal weight of the 1948 Genocide Convention to dodge the mandatory international duty to intervene. Today, despite explicit warnings from UN experts and preliminary findings by international courts, world leaders perform the same rhetorical gymnastics. While symbolic gestures like recognizing a Palestinian state are offered, they yield far too little in terms of immediate accountability; Western powers remain unwilling to force Israel to end its occupation or ensure its military commanders and soldiers are held to account, even under domestic legal frameworks that consistently deny justice to Palestinian victims. The International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued in November 2024 against top Israeli leadership should have been acted upon immediately—yet instead of enforcing them, major political powers have targeted the court itself for dismantling.

When Siegel traveled to Jerusalem to testify, she was driven by a conviction rooted in the historical memory of her own people: “Six million Jews perished because no one spoke out,” she later wrote.

She trusted that putting a face and voice to the horror would force a moment of genuine judicial accountability. Instead, the commission’s primary function proved to be institutional damage control. While it conceded that Israel held “indirect responsibility” and prompted Ariel Sharon’s administrative resignation, it actively minimized the testimony of international medical workers, casting doubt on their impartiality while shielding Israeli military and political leadership from criminal prosecution. Rather than delivering justice, the inquiry pioneered a template of state-managed self-investigation—producing a performative display of moral introspection that satisfied Western allies while ensuring those who facilitated the slaughter suffered no real legal penalty.

Four decades later in Gaza, a new generation of international medical workers is delivering identical, horrifying eyewitness accounts—while being directly targeted by the Israeli army in a campaign that has killed over 1,580 healthcare personnel, injured hundreds more, and forced the closure of most medical facilities.

But whereas in 1982 Israel felt compelled to construct an internal commission, today it does not even bother to listen. When these medics speak out in international media, Israel, in a characteristically hypocritical stance, simply responds by smearing them with accusations of antisemitism. 

Forty-four years after Sabra and Shatila, international legal structures have advanced greatly—most notably with the creation of the International Criminal Court—yet the reality for Palestinian civilians have hardly changed for the better. From the ongoing genocide in Gaza to relentless, state-backed settler attacks across the occupied West Bank, Israeli impunity remains entirely uncontained. Had the international community acted with genuine resolve 44 years ago and held Israel strictly accountable, it might have shattered the doctrine of impunity before it could enable today’s catastrophes. The failure to deliver justice in 1982 did not merely leave past crimes unpunished—it paved the direct path to present-day destruction.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.