Black Saturday (Arabic: السبت الأسود; ) was the massacre of between 150 and 200 Lebanese Muslim and Druze civilians by Phalangist forces on Saturday 6 December 1975, during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War.May Tamimova (2018) The Black Saturday Massacre of 1975: the discomfort of assembling the Lebanese civil war narrative, Contemporary Levant, 3:2, 123-136, DOI: 10.1080/20581831.2018.1531531 It set a precedent for later outbreaks of violence such as the Battle of the Hotels, the Karantina massacre and the Damour massacre.
The killings were led by Joseph Saade, a Phalangist whose son was killed in Fanar earlier that day along with three other young men while heading to a cinema in Brumana. The four young Christian men were found dead with axes and gunshots wounds on the Fanar road in Lebanon. Saade's first son was also murdered by Palestinian gunmen while participating in a rally paper in Beqaa earlier in 1975. The massacre accelerated the rapidly escalating civil war.
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