Re: Why does Iran support the Palestinians?
There is quite a history of bloody engagements beween the Shia and the Palestinians in Lebanon. The slaughter seems to go both ways. In April 2004, I posted a thread called"The Forgotten Shiite Massacre at Sabra and Shatila." The Shiite militia under the sponsorship of Syria conducted a vicious massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps 3 years after the much more publicized massacre blamed on Sharon. According to UN estimates, more than 650 Palestinians were slaughtered and more than 2000 wounded.
The link provided gives a good background of these events.
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1095/9510028.htm](http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1095/9510028.htm)
Here are some excerpts:
“Less than three years after the Israeli-backed 1982 massacre, the camps again were attacked with almost the same ferocity by the Syrian-backed Shi’i-dominated Amal militia. Amal’s full-scale military attack on the Sabra-Shatila and Bourj al-Barajna refugee camps in west Beirut in May 1985 was the first of three separate sieges that lasted through 1988 and became known in Lebanon as “The Camp Wars.” “
“On the eve of the attack on the Palestinian camps in Beirut in the spring of 1985, Amal leader Nabih Berri, who now is a member of Lebanon’s cabinet, stated that Amal refuses “to go back to the situation prevailing before 1982 and the rebuilding of a [Palestinian] state within a [Lebanese] state.” Most Lebanese explained that Amal was doing the dirty work for Syria which, as the occupying power in most of Lebanon, had a vested interest in seeing the Palestinians remain weak and powerless.”
“The first battle of the camps erupted in May and lasted for a month. Some Sabra camp refugees fled deeper into adjoining Shatila camp but when Sabra fell after two weeks, many of the remaining inhabitants were massacred or again made refugees. At Gaza Hospital in Sabra 70 patients were taken from their beds and killed by Amal soldiers. “What the Israelis and their Christian allies could not finish in Sabra camp in September 1982 was completed by Amal in two weeks,” says Akram.”
“In November, 1986, however, the war of the camps resumed and this time the Palestinians were driven to near starvation during a six-month siege. “I didn’t even have food for my baby,” says Umm Mohammed of Shatila. “We would have to go get water through snipers, and every day a mother was shot down.” By March 1987, besieged camp inmates had requested a special religious dispensation to allow those still living to eat the dead. Fortunately the siege was lifted before that happened, but the last battle of the camps was a harrowing test of Palestinian resistance and determination. "