It was one of the worst killing sprees of the twentieth century.

The actual number is still in dispute, but as many as 3,000 unarmed men, women and children of the Sabra/Shatila refugee camps in west Beirut were systematically slaughtered by Lebanese Christian militiamen with Israeli help for the crime of being Palestinian.

The irony of what came to be known as the Sabra and Shatila massacres was the financing, training and overall support given the Phalange, or Kata’eb, a group modeled after the Third Reich, by the Jewish state. That detail did nothing to prevent the relationship from cementing in the 1970s and 80s, when both entities saw a common enemy in the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinians in Lebanon, a presence blamed for the country’s civil war.

September 15 marked the 26th anniversary of the day the carnage began.

Much is known about what led up to the massacres: The Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to drive out the PLO. A U.S.-negotiated deal was conducted by special envoy Philip Habib in which Palestinian fighters would leave Lebanon in exchange for the Israeli pledge not to enter Beirut and the camps, which they broke soon after the PLO left.  Under the false pretext that “200 terrorists” remained in the camps, the IDF surrounded the camps and sent in the Phalange in to “disarm” them. The Phalangist militiamen were especially incensed in their belief that their leader, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated by PLO agents two days earlier and wanted revenge. For three days and three nights, the militiamen went on a rampage, using knives, swords and axes, as well as guns and explosives to kill thousands of unarmed civilians as the Israelis provided flares for the Phalangists so they could continue working through the night.

What isn’t well known is what happened inside the camps during the massacre.

One Arab American, a survivor who witnessed the violence firsthand, has shed light on the gruesome details in his book “Lost Blood.”

Marco Abraham, of Witchita, Kansas, was born into the Shatila refugee camp in 1965. The 43 year-old, in his own words, has never known peace. Even before the 15-year civil war began in 1975, said Abraham, violence was a way of life.

“All I heard is rockets falling on the houses in the camps and bullets are flying, dead bodies there, see people lose limbs – that was normal life that I grew up in,” he said over the phone.

The book is a memoir of Abraham’s times just before, during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the events leading up to the massacre itself and the immediate aftermath. Throughout, he describes a world of poverty, dodging sniper bullets and the bonds of friendship and love for his best friend Abud Alsalam and a girl named Rola, both of whom were killed.

Abraham described in “Lost Blood” the conduct of the Israeli troops that surrounded the camps on Sept. 15 on the premise that 200 PLO terrorists still inhabited the camps.

“We watch the Israeli soldiers treat the elderly men and women in the street disrespectfully, pushing them around and spitting on them,” one chapter reads.

“The speakers also say that we have two hours to comply, any weapon found in the camp after this time will bring a severe punishment for the entire family. No one wants to risk communal punishment so all hurriedly gather weapons to throw on the growing pile in front of the Israelis on the main street.”

This is before the Phalange, who had revenge for a 1976 massacre on a Christian village on their mind, entered the camp.

After the disarmament, IDF soldiers took up position in a sporting complex called Sports City, which overlooked the camp on a hill, and began firing indiscriminately into the camp, “for their own amusement,” Abraham wrote.

The camp sent five elderly men to ascend the hill and ask them to stop firing. In the book, Abraham and the others wait for them to return, but to no avail. When asked, he said their fate was no different than the rest of the massacre’s victims.

“They shot them execution style,” he said, referring to the Israeli soldiers. 

The book spares no gory detail, chronicling the day-by-day trials and tribulations of a young man trying to survive hell. At 18 years of age, Abraham endured starvation, bombardment, the death of loved ones and even cannibalism, all before the Israelis and Phalangists entered the camps Sept. 15.

But it was from a hiding place on the rooftop of a neighbor’s house, wrapped in a carpet, and peering through a hole cut with his six clicks knife, where he saw a landscape worthy of Dante’s “Inferno.”

Among the things he witnessed was a woman felled by a Phalangist axe as she ran with her kids, a little boy’s head bashed into a wall, a young man drawn and quartered by jeeps while his mother watched.

Through the carpet, Abraham also witnessed a fetus torn from its mother’s womb and, right next to him on the rooftop, he witnessed a girl of nine raped by two different Phalangists and thrown over the rooftop. And, after the massacre, he finds Rola’s corpse in the position her rapist/murderers left her in.

All the while, Israeli collusion and awareness of the massacre was evident throughout the book, leading up to the arrival to the camps of a person one Israeli officer called the “bastard” – then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

Some details are hard to corroborate, and nowhere else is such an event recorded, not even in Robert Fisk’s classic “Pity The Nation”; all the more startling given Abraham’s passages about foreign reporters witnessing Sharon’s arrival in the camps.

However, according to the complaint lodged against the former Israeli prime minister in Belgium in 2001:

“From 9 a.m., General Sharon was present to personally direct the Israeli penetration, installing himself in the general army area at the Kuwait embassy junction situated at the edge of Shatila camp.”

In other words, Sharon was in the area, and could’ve made the trip.

There’s also Abraham’s claim that this is the first book to reveal what happened inside the camps, that, “this is what makes “Lost Blood” unique,” he said during the interview.

But details are already known about the massacre — from the survivors themselves, first in the 2001 indictment against Sharon and in a 2005 book documenting the massacre, “Sabra and Shatila 1982,” by Bayan al-Hout, a professor at the Lebanese University. Al-Hout’s book is based on interviews with survivors conducted in November 1982 and published in Arabic in 2003. “It is the most comprehensive and authoritative account of what took place in Sabra and Shatila,” according to Electronic Intifada.

Despite the horrific experience, Abraham harbors no ill will towards Israel and Israelis.

“I don’t call out at all to throw Israel into the ocean. I acknowledge their right to live,” he said, adding, “But I want them to acknowledge our right to live. This is the most important. Why? Because they’re the ones who’ve got the power.”

That power was demonstrated on his father in 1948 Nablus, West Bank, when Jewish soldiers gave him the ultimatum of leaving his home or being killed, which is what brought Abraham’s family to Lebanon.

It’s also a power manifested in the book itself, which he claimed was supposed to be published last year by a company in Colorado, but was canceled, according to Abraham, due to political pressure. When asked, he refused to divulge the name of the publisher and said the proceeds are going to end starvation of Sudanese children, but didn’t specify which charity or whether it had to do with Darfur. He also claimed he has received death threats.

“This book is a message. It’s not a story — it’s a message. I’ll go anywhere to spread this message,” he said.

“Lost Blood” is available at www.marcoabraham.com.