User:Al-Rimawi/sandbox

On 18 January 1976; Christian Lebanese Front of the Lebanese Civil War (including the Kataeb, Guardians of the Cedars, Tiger Militia, and the Lebanese Youth Movement) attacked the Karantina district of East Beirut, and also the nearby Maslakh quarter,  massacring around 1,500 civilians, predominantly Palestinian Muslims. The event was dubbed the Karantina massacre.

Karantina was a slum area with thousands of poor families, home to a population of Lebanese Sunni and Shia Muslims, and also Palestinian refugees, Kurds, Armenians, and Syrian guest workers, located in East Beirut. Despite being located right within the predominantly Christian side of the city, the district was a homogenous Muslim enclave. By the time when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975; there were some formal representatives of many groups within the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Karantina, such as Fatah and the PFLP. Fatah had many local operatives providing the organization with intelligence within Karantina, and other Palestinian factions had caches of weapons in the district as well. In addition, some local militants even used Karantina as a base of operations. The shantytown in Karantina was erected on land that technically belonged to Lebanese private landowners, local businesses, and also Maronite monastic orders. These landowners have also encouraged the militias to attack and sack Karantina, so that they could regain access to potentially valuable real estate located in the district, close to the Port of Beirut. Karantina was a residential area, and was not fortified and secured by walls and checkpoints. Due to the fact that it was a homogenous Muslim enclave with no Christian population, Christian militias had no intelligence on who was "trustable" and who was politically hostile in the region and therefore viewed all locals as potential enemies who couldn't be trusted to remain.

On 15 January 1976, the district was surrounded by several different Christian militia forces. The attack was relatively uncoordinated and not well-planned or executed from a military perspective. After clashes with some armed local residents and a small number of Palestinian commandos, the attackers quickly overran the military resistance in Karantina, and entered the district on 18 January.

After brief military resistance,

Most residents of the district survived the massacre, but they were forced to leave Karantina and were deported to the front lines by trucks and buses. This act of deportation, which specifically targeted Muslims, along with the massacre, was defined as an act of ethnic cleansing. Similar incidents were also recorded in other neighborhoods like Nabaa, Haret el- Ghawarneh, and Sebnay. In response to such attacks on Muslims by Christian factions, Palestinian factions and their Lebanese allies launched similar attacks and massacres on Christian towns, an immediate reprisal being the massacre in Damour.