// In a crowded corner of southern Beirut, tucked behind a row of street stalls where traders hawk DVDs, shoes and clothes, lies an unremarkable patch of land, empty except for a collection of placards and posters.

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Topic
Middle East unrest
Lebanon
Middle East
One shows a woman standing over a pile of bloated, twisted bodies, an arm raised to the sky and a look of bewilderment on her face.

Others have images of dead bodies and a man wailing as he holds up the bloodied corpse of a baby. One placard reads: "We will never forget."

And here, indeed, they cannot forget. For this nondescript patch of land in Ghobeiry is a mass grave containing the unidentified bodies of scores, perhaps hundreds, of hastily buried men, women and children massacred 30 years ago in the nearby Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

For three days, Lebanese Christian militia scoured the camps and systematically slaughtered refugees trapped inside by an Israeli military cordon.

The massacre, against the backdrop of the country's 15-year civil war and Israel's invasion the same year, shocked Lebanon and Israel, and appalled a wider world that had thought itself inured to senseless bloodshed in what it saw as an inherently fratricidal corner of the Middle East.

Three decades later, there has been no accountability and no historical reckoning: no Lebanese or Israeli citizen has ever been brought to justice for the slaughter of those whose whose remains lie in the ground.

In the centre of the patch of land is a simple plaque commemorating the victims of the mass killing that took place from September 16 to 18, 1982. The Red Cross estimates up to 1,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed during in those three days.

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