Beirut-based international broadcasters, unable to transmit film because of poor communications in Lebanon — especially after the Syrians closed the satellite transmission facility in Beirut toward the end of June 1982 — began sending footage to Israel, where they were subjected to Israeli censorship before being relayed by satellite to North America or Europe. Shots of bombed out residential areas and of wounded and dead civilians drew particular scrutiny
When Israeli censors blocked transmission of an ABC interview with Yasser Arafat, the network aired it anyway on June 21, attributing the broadcast to a misunderstanding. In retaliation, Israel barred ABC from using its satellite station, lifting the ban only two days later after the network submitted a letter of “regret.”
The apology did not mask ABC’s frustration. All three American networks bristled at the nightly intrusions of Israeli censorship, which appeared on U.S. television screens in stark fashion. ABC, NBC, and CBS newscasts—especially those covering the civilian suffering in Lebanon —would suddenly cut to black, white lettering announcing: ‘22 seconds deleted by Israeli censors.’ When footage was left intact, it carried a different caption, superimposed on the screen: ‘Cleared by Israeli censors.
A few examples of U.S. network reports illustrate the scope and nature of critical coverage in the later days of the invasion — a level of reporting unique to the 1982 war and its aftermath, unprecedented both before the invasion and compared to today. One could even argue that their reporting from Lebanon was one of the rare moments in media history when journalists practiced their profession to the fullest in covering Israel — coming closer than ever to the standards they have long professed — and still falsely claim to uphold today.
These reports also reflect the broader media climate at the time, particularly among correspondents in Lebanon, and help explain how international outrage over Israeli actions fueled Israel’s post-war strategy to control and intimidate Western mainstream media in its favor, to reshape its image for years to come, ultimately growing into the monstrous machine we are witnessing today.
Perhaps one of the most forceful and critical reports on Israeli conduct in Lebanon came from NBC’s John Chancellor. Standing on a rooftop in Beirut on August 2, 1982 - nearly a month after the invasion began - he described the invading army as “imperial Israel,” carrying out “savage” attacks on Lebanon:
What's an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? The answer is that we are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else's country, and world opinion be damned.”
He compared that day’s fierce bombing of Beirut to the Nazi aerial attacks during the Spanish Civil War. (Notably, Prime Minister Begin, in justifying the invasion, compared Arafat to Hitler.)
On June 23, 1982, ABC anchor Peter Jennings reported:
International criticism of the Israeli occupation has not eased up and today a French organization, Doctors without Frontiers, said it was refused to set up an emergency hospital in Sidon. The medical team quoted an Israeli colonel as telling them, ‘if you work in the Lebanese hospitals, we will send you out of the country.’ The French doctor in charge of the team said nearly 200 doctors were ready to work but were not allowed to pick up the wounded.
Below, excerpts from ABC’s Richard Threlkeld’s June 25, 1982 report help better illustrate the unprecedented language and narrative used by some mainstream American media in the days after Israel launched its 1982 invasion.
(Note: He was referring to the United Nations General Assembly council vote that the U.S. vetoed in addition to vetoing a Security Council resolution the following day.)
In his June 25 report, which began with footage of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin speaking to a nearly empty General Assembly, Threlkel attempted to underscore Israel’s unpopular war around the world. The 5.9-minute clip also showed Threlkeld speaking from a devastated neighborhood in south Lebanon, interspersed with shots of an injured child being carried away. It also showed displaced civilians and a coffin.
In the report, which began with footage of Begin speaking to a nearly empty UN General Assembly, Threlkeld tried to bring home the unpopularity of Israel’s war. The 5.9-minute video also showed Threlkeld reporting from a devastated neighborhood in south Lebanon, interspersed with shots of an injured child being carried away.
A lot of the world has begun to see Israel differently. Israel was always that gallant little democracy fighting for survival against all the odds. Now the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently in the West Bank and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense that gallant little underdog Israel has started behaving like a neighborhood bully. Israel had its way here in South Lebanon against Washington’s wishes and got what it wanted. ....
The PLO had spread itself out among the population so a lot of innocent civilians got in the way. Israel insists the civilian dead were in the hundreds; the Red Cross says it was more like 9,000; perhaps a quarter of a million are homeless. Nobody knows for sure. The Israelis killed more than 2000 PLO fighters and captured thousands more. Another 6,000 they have bottled up in West Beirut where the war goes on. ...
And nobody knows what’s to become of the 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who don’t carry a gun. The war has turned many of them back into refugees. Israel will not want them next door, raising a new generation of guerrillas; and Palestinians of course don’t have a home to go to. ...
Israel would like its friend, the Lebanese Christians, to run the country, but they don’t want to be seen as Israel’s errand boys. ...
As for Israel, it has never been more secure and never so quite alone in the world. It has confounded its enemies and it has commanded fear and respect, but it’s not the Israel its first Prime Minister Ben-Gurion always imagined it would be, that Israel, that light onto the nations.
For context, Threlkeld referred to the plight of Palestinian refugees since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. “The war has turned many of them back into refugees,” he noted, because they had no home to return to.
To provide a broader perspective, he gave a brief background on Israeli belligerence, including that year’s annexation of East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights - both captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War - and the building of Jewish settlements on the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He wove in Israel’s goal of having its Lebanese Christian allies run the country, describing Israel as “a neighborhood bully.”
Such details and elaborate context would be rare today in mainstream media reporting of a similar conflict — such as the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war or the 2008–9, 2012, and 2014 Israel wars on Gaza. More importantly, the harsh references to Israel would be nealy impossible today.
But it was NBC that was singled out for scrutiny by pro-Israel supporters in the U.S. A documentary titled “NBC in Lebanon: A Study of Media Misrepresentation,” sponsored “Americans for a Safe Israel” group, accused the network of “faulty” coverage. “We see NBC film clips of ruined buildings; we hear correspondents saying they were not military positions. The implication is that Israeli artillery fire was always indiscriminate,” the documentary said when it was released in 1983.
It said NBC Nightly relied overwhelmingly on anti-Israel subjects for its interviews. It is striking that journalists were expected to find pro-Israeli voices in towns and cities under deadly attacks. One might ask whether the media were criticized for not seeking out sympathizers of the 9/11 hijackers among their victims.
The documentary praised other journalists, including New York Times’ bureau chief in Jerusalem David K. Shipler, who claimed that the PLO frequently used civilians as cover and placed its weapons and ammunition in densely populated civilian areas “in the hope that this would either deter Israeli attack, or extract a price from Israel in world opinion for the killing of civilians.”
In a February 18, 1984 opinion piece in the New York Times, television critic John Corry, who mainly supported the views of the documentary, offered his thoughts:
Television journalism has a dynamic of its own; it can be a captive of its own images. The images of collapsed buildings, ruined streets and grieving civilians make a good story. Indeed, they become the whole truth of the story. Journalism, in general, suffers from a lack of memory, and television journalism suffers from it grievously.
Corry was right that images are presented without context. What he did not acknowledge was that the same was true of stories supportive of Israel, a shortcoming that has characterized not only television reporting on the Middle East but also print.
“NBC, along with CBS and ABC - whose coverage, according to the documentary, was only marginally better - compresses daily history into 22 minutes each night. “Events have no past. The PLO had no history of terrorism and murder; Lebanon was not an ancient battleground. Truth was born anew each night,” wrote Corry.
He, of course, omitted to say that Israel also has no history of oppressing Palestinians or of routinely bombing civilians in Lebanon.
‘NBC in Lebanon’ is flawed; it is also disquieting for people who watch the evening news,” Corry said.
Another major critique came in a report by the controversial Jewish Anti- Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL) that lashed out at U.S. TV networks for using inadequate sources for civilian casualties. “Who are ‘Lebanese police,’” “Who is the ‘Lebanese government,’” asked the October 1984 report, directing its anger specifically at casualty figures cited by ABC and NBC on June 4.
It even ridiculed CBS for quoting “international relief officials” in Beirut who reported casualty figures in Sidon. “Who are these 45 ‘international relief officials,’ and if they are in Beirut, how could they be reporting on casualties in Sidon?”
It did not, however, say where the media were supposed to obtain such figures.
Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic said Israel had “lost” the press years before 1982, because “most journalists are young people of the Vietnam generation whose sympathy is always granted to anyone who calls himself ‘a guerrilla’ or a ‘freedom fighter’” - an apparent reference to the PLO - and that television simply ‘makes the problem worse.’”
Pro-Israel critics in the U.S. and elsewhere claimed that news organizations were deceived by the PLO’s sophisticated and elaborate propaganda machine that exploited the suffering of children - a claim ridiculed by journalists and others with extensive experience of the PLO’s incompetence in public relations.
Earleen Fisher recalled some of the PLO officials’ clumsy PR efforts, including a claim by spokesman Mahmoud Labadi that the Israelis had released poisoned balloons over Lebanon to harm children. “Anybody who had ever dealt with the PLO’s so-called information officers knew that it was next to impossible to get anything plausible or credible out of them, especially when it came to [casualty] numbers. ...It was a combination of propaganda and incompetence.”
West Beirut
On August 4, the Israel armored columns tried to push into West Beirut, supported by heavy air and naval bombardment, but were able to advance only a few hundred yards toward the Museum crossing before being force to pull back under stiff Palestinian resistance. Still the fighting left scores dead and wounded, but the battle made clear that storming the city would be far costlier than Israel had anticipated.
Even the press was not immune to Israeli fire. On August 5, Israeli tanks fired phosphorus shells at the Hamra district, hitting the An Nahar newspaper building, which also housed Newsweek and UPI. The Commodore Hotel, long largely spared, was struck by three 75mm rounds. No one was hurt.
The next afternoon, a massive explosion rocked our Beirut neighborhood. We rushed to the target, a few blocks from our office: a five-story apartment building near the Prime Minister’s office in Sanayea had caved in from an Israeli air raid, killing most of the people inside; many others were trapped in its lower floors and basement. Dismembered bodies lay scattered in the rubble.
Rumors spread quickly that Arafat had been meeting inside and had left just minutes before the strike. I stayed briefly to gather the initial details, then hurried back to the office to file. Terry Anderson and Sam Koo, who had also joined us from AP’s Rome bureau, stayed on the scene to talk to eyewitnesses.
Soon after I had left, a double-tap strike, a car bomb went off, bringing more havoc and death to the site where people had gathered to help and search for loved ones.
Anderson later captured the devastation in Den of Lions: Memoirs of Seven Years:
A bulldozer was already maneuvering into the wreckage, trying to open a hole. Bodies were being pulled out and loaded into cars or ambulances as they arrived. Palestinian militiamen shouted and waved their guns, firing into the air to try to keep the crowd back.
One woman, perhaps thirty-five or forty, visibly pregnant, waved her arms and shrieked in grief. Sam approached her and tried to talk to her. Her husband and children were inside the building. He looked at me, a few yards away, and called for the tape recorder I was carrying. I waved him off - another body was coming out of the building.
Abruptly, a shattering blast knocked us all to the ground. I rolled over and over, and scrambled for the doorway of a building behind me. I remembered stepping on someone - alive? A body? - as I threw myself into the building. Huddling against a wall, we waited for the next blast. Nothing. Carefully, I edged out the door.
“Sam? Sam!” There were burned, torn bodies everywhere, it seemed. The woman Sam had been talking to lay on the ground, the bodice of her flowered print dress soaked in blood. Many of the bodies were unrecognizable. I walked among them, peering closely, gagging. None looked like Sam. Walking quickly away as rescue workers once more rushed forward, I flagged down a passing car, and asked the Lebanese man driving it to take me back to the Commodore. Neither of us said a word during the short trip.
I stood in the street and shouted up at the open AP office windows. “I can’t find Sam. I don’t know where he is.” Tatro leaned over the balcony. “He’s here. What happened?” Filthy and shaking, but unhurt. “She’s dead. What was it?” He had been picked up by a couple of Palestinian militiamen and brought back to the office.
In one of Lebanon’s cruelest tactics, someone had driven a car full of explosives to the site of the bombing, knowing a crowd would gather, and carefully set it off where it could do the most damage. Sam wrote the story, then left for East Beirut the next day. Despite his horror and revulsion, he continued to work there, surviving another car bomb at the hotel he was staying at, and a car crash under shellfire, before returning to Rome.
A few days later, I told Nick I had to leave. My nerves had begun to go. After so many weeks, I had to believe my luck was running out. He agreed. I packed my bags and, early one morning, left in a taxi for East Beirut. As we drove away from the Commodore, I could hear the shelling a few blocks away. I held tightly to the door handle. Just a few more minutes. Just a couple of miles. Then one shell hit a building to our left. Another landed down the road, blowing a hole in an apartment. A third, a fourth. But we were through, speeding frantically toward the only open crossing through the Green Line.
The woman Sam Koo was speaking with was decapitated in front of him when the car bomb exploded. Koo himself was blown off his feet. Overhead, Israeli warplanes were still circling the devastated site.
In the aftermath of the air raid, rumors spread that the Israelis had used a so-called “vacuum bomb,” designed to ignite aviation fuel, create immense pressure, and then a vacuum, effective imploding large buildings. This was never confirmed. The device has also been referred to as “blast bomb” or “smart bomb.”
PLO Departure - August 30
On Aug. 12, Yassser Arafat finally agreed to leave Lebanon after the Americans gave assurances that the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians left behind in refugee camps in Beirut would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force (MNF). The Marines, French and Italian peacekeepers completed their deployment on August 26.
On August 23, parliament elected Bashir Gemayel, Israel’s ally and the PLO’s sworn enemy, as Lebanon’s new president. He was to take office the following month. Israel hoped his election would pave the way to a peace treaty requiring the withdrawal of Syrian forces and preventing the PLO’s return once Israel troops pulled back.
However, immediately after he was elected, Gemayel repudiated earlier promises to Israel, declaring that a peace treaty was impossible as long as the Israeli army or any other foreign forces remained on Lebanese soil and that any treaty required the consent of all Lebanese factions. Relations between Israel and the Phalange were already strained since Gemayel refused to fight the PLO in Beirut.
On August 30, after 12 years in Beirut, Arafat left for his next exile in Tunisia. The evacuation of 8,000 Palestinian guerrillas concluded on September 1.
On September 10, the U.S. Marines withdrew from Beirut, followed soon by French and Italians forces - without fulfilling their pledge to protect the Palestinian refugees.
The Lebanese army moved into West Beirut, and the Israelis withdrew from the front lines. But the war was far from over.
On September 14, Gemayel was assassinated in a massive explosion that leveled the Phalange Party headquarters, shattering Israel’s project in Lebanon. His brother, Amin, far less accommodating to Israel, was swiftly elected president with U.S. support.
The very next day, September 15, Israeli forces finally rolled into West Beirut in violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Just beyond the Museum crossing, on the front line of the invasion route, stood Berbir Hospital. By then, only two patients remained inside: a two-month-old baby whose family could not be traced, and a man with chronic injuries. The few staff left were Palestinian.
“When we learned the Israelis were at the Museum, just a few hundred yards away, it was too close for comfort,” Dr. Shamaa recalled. “We continued to receive casualties. They [Israelis] were shelling from air, sea and land. There was always this fear in the back of our minds that they might enter the hospital. What would we do if they appeared at our door? What would happen?”
We went up to the roof to see what was happening. I could see Israeli soldiers in the woods across the street - in the grounds of the French Embassy residence and in the horse race track. They were between the trees, climbing over the walls, not walking on the streets, but within those areas, approaching the hospital and that part of Beirut.”
That night I could hear the Morabitoun and all the other factions firing their RPGs and cannons at the Israelis, and the Israelis firing back. The Morabitoun were saying, ‘this is for you, Sharon.’ It was all cursing. We spent the whole night listening to that back and forth.
The next morning, on the 15th, there was silence. I looked out the window and saw two UN cars coming from the direction of the Museum, and then the Israelis going to Corniche Mazraa.
That’s when they came into the hospital. They parked their Merkava tank across the street from the gate and went inside. At that point, all the hospital staff were Palestinian and they were all hiding. There was just one Lebanese, the sister of the hospital’s manager. She was polite to the Israelis.
The Israelis stayed in the hospital for five days. They occupied all the floors. They went up to the clinic floors, to the rooftop where my flat was - and into my flat. I don't remember ever feeling such pure, unrelenting rage. I couldn’t sleep for five days.
Every time I came face-to-face with one of them, I would shout, ‘You have to leave. This is a hospital. We have patients!’
But we had no patients. The hospital was empty. There were no physicians. Still, I wanted to say, ‘You can't be here. International laws doesn’t allow it!’ They’d reply, ‘Oh, we're protecting you from the terrorists outside, the Morabitoun.’
The soldiers mostly stayed out of sight upstairs, in Dr. Shamaa’s flat, which overlooked Corniche Mazraa. The surrounding area was a no-man’s-land, emptied of life.
Dr. Shamaa remembered:
It took five days of talking to the Israeli soldiers or shouting at them until they finally left. One of them pointed his M16s at me and said, ‘aren't you afraid of us?’
I was not thinking. I told him: ‘you don't scare me at all, you have to leave. This is what you have to do.’ One officer told me: ‘I want to apologize for staying here. One of these days there will be peace between us.’
I couldn’t take it. I told him: ‘There’s not going to be peace between us. Just leave.’
When I finally did go up to my flat, the place was a mess. There were bullet shells everywhere. They’d been firing at people from my home. The place was filthy. They hadn’t used the toilets —they’d relieved themselves in saucers, pots, pans, whatever they could find. On a piece of cardboard, they’d left a message: “Sharon loves you.”
Read Chapter One, Part 5 in the next post.