Black Thursday: The Massacre of Christians in Beirut in 1975
A historical mapping records 30 to 50 Christian civilians killed in Bashoura in late May 1975. Sociologist Michael Johnson identifies the Knights of Ali as the perpetrators.
The bodies were left in a Muslim cemetery near the line dividing Beirut. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), which compiled the historical mapping in 2013, also records genital mutilation. The killing followed the assassination of a Palestinian man in central Beirut.
The roadblock and the cemetery
Johnson’s 2001 book, All Honourable Men, describes a Shiite armed group setting up a roadblock outside Bashoura cemetery, abducting Christians and killing around 50 of them. The passage is also reproduced in a University of Amsterdam doctoral thesis by Marten Boekelo, which cites Johnson’s account.
Bashoura, also written Bashura or Bachoura, is in West Beirut. The cemetery’s position close to the emerging division between the city’s eastern and western sectors placed the atrocity at a boundary that was increasingly controlling civilian movement. The victims described in the ICTJ entry were civilians, not a military unit.
The figure of 30 to 50 is the range used by ICTJ, not a precise official death toll. An older French educational history published by Les Grignoux gives 24 passersby, most of them Christians. The accounts do not establish whether these numbers cover identical groups of victims.
Who Johnson identifies
Johnson names the Knights of Ali, known in Arabic as Fityan Ali. His attribution is specific: a Shiite group operating at the cemetery roadblock. It does not make every Palestinian faction or every Muslim militia a participant in the attack.
A 2017 history in the Lebanese publication Al-Modon describes Fityan Ali as a local Shiite formation associated with a Syrian aligned front. Drawing on a former official’s recollections, it distinguishes the group from Musa al-Sadr’s Movement of the Deprived. That article supplies organizational background, not an account of this massacre.
Some online summaries also name the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or As-Sa’iqa, a Palestinian faction. Israel News Pulse could not independently verify evidence identifying either organization as a perpetrator of this specific attack. The reported murder of a Palestinian man before the massacre establishes the sequence in those accounts; it does not establish who ordered or carried out the killings that followed.
A date that does not match the name
ICTJ places the incident on May 30, 1975 and calls it Black Thursday. Yet May 30 fell on a Friday. Johnson’s account gives the end of May without fixing a numbered day.
The discrepancy remains unresolved. The established name can be retained, but moving the massacre to Thursday, May 29 simply to make the calendar fit would introduce a date that the evidence reviewed here does not establish.
A city divided by roadblocks
The violence unfolded during the opening phase of Lebanon’s 1975 to 1990 civil war. ICTJ’s chronology records fighting spreading across Beirut on May 23 and militia checkpoints appearing in West Beirut the next day, before the date it assigns to Black Thursday.
After the Bashoura killings, armed men on opposing sides blocked streets in the areas they controlled. ICTJ describes subsequent abductions and executions of both Christians and Muslims, including mutilation of some people who were released.
A roadblock gave an armed group power over an ordinary journey. In this setting, the danger extended beyond exchanges of fire: civilians could be stopped, taken away and selected for violence because of the community to which they belonged. Black Thursday belongs to that early pattern of sectarian abduction and killing.
Separate from Black Saturday
Black Thursday should not be confused with Black Saturday, December 6, 1975. ICTJ describes that later episode as the killing of Muslims and Palestinians by Phalangist militiamen after the deaths of four young Christians. The similar names refer to separate atrocities, months apart, with different victims and attributed perpetrators.
The distinction is preserved in Act for the Disappeared’s 2025 handbook for working with Lebanese families of missing persons, which lists the two episodes separately. Its Black Thursday entry uses an estimate combining deaths and disappearances, a different measure from a count of confirmed deaths.
The handbook describes the lasting burden on families left without answers about relatives: uncertainty about their fate, as well as financial, legal and administrative difficulties. That wider history of disappearance gives the Bashoura account a human context beyond its place in a chronology of massacres.
