Tel al-Zaatar massacre
armed siege of a refugee camp in Beirut 1976
The Tel al-Zaatar massacre was the killing of approximately 1,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon on 12 August 1976. The massacre occurred during the Lebanese Civil War, after the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp had been under siege since January 1976 by Lebanese Christian militias of the Lebanese Front led by the Kataeb Phalangists. The attack on al-Zaatar was part of a wider campaign to expel Palestinians from Lebanon, especially those affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). After the massacre, the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp was depopulated and destroyed.
Background
In 1976 Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp was home to more than 30,000 people; mostly Palestinians but also Lebanese. Initially established as a refugee camp to accommodate Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, the camp was administered by UNRWA from 1952 until the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which put the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in charge of the camp.
As the camp's population grew and its area expanded, it came into conflict with the neighbouring Dekwaneh suburb, which was predominantly Maronite Christian, and from 1969 to 1975 several armed clashed erupted between the two populations.
On April 13, 1975, a group of Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen ambushed a bus on its way to Tel al-Zaatar, massacring 27 people, mostly Palestinians. This attack led to the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War.
Following a killing of five Phalangists in the Christian controlled area of Fanar on December 6, 1975, Maronite local militia captured hundreds of Muslims in East Beirut at random and massacred 150 to 200 of them in what became known as Black Saturday.
“Tel al-Zaatar massacre” enters the record as armed siege of a refugee camp in Beirut 1976. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what al-Zaatar, massacre and armed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2359563. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1948, 1952 and 1969.
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