☠Black Saturday

On 6 December 1975 the bodies of four young Kataeb members were found on the Fanar road. Kataeb gunmen led by Joseph Saadeh, whose son was among the dead, set up checkpoints in the port district near the party's headquarters and killed Muslim and Druze civilians on the basis of their identity cards, most of them port workers: between 150 and 200 dead by most accounts, and some 300 abducted whose fate was never known. The National Movement and the Palestinians answered by widening the Battle of the Hotels, and "Black Saturday" became the marker of the war's turn to systematic sectarian killing.