Israeli Invasion of Lebanon
Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to destroy the PLO and stayed for eighteen years. Lebanon had been in civil war since 1975, in which its confessional political system, the presence of some 300,000 Palestinian refugees, the PLO's armed state within a state in the south, and Syrian intervention had all compounded each other. The stated pretext for the invasion was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London by a group that was an enemy of the PLO. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister, had a wider plan than the cabinet had approved: the army went well beyond the forty-kilometre limit discussed, reached Beirut within a week, and besieged the western half of the city for two months with shelling and air strikes. The PLO leadership was evacuated to Tunis in August under an American-brokered agreement that guaranteed the safety of the refugees left behind. The Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated on 14 September, and Israeli forces admitted his Phalangist militia into the Sabra and Shatila camps, where between 800 and 3,500 people were killed over three days while the camps were surrounded and lit by flares. Some 400,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and an Israeli commission found Sharon indirectly responsible and forced his resignation as defence minister. Hezbollah was founded in the occupation's first years and drove Israel out of the south in 2000. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people died in 1982. The war's longest consequence is the movement it created. Hezbollah grew out of the Shia population of the south, which had not been a party to the original quarrel, and became the strongest non-state armed force in the region and a permanent factor in Lebanese politics.
- Year: 1982 CE
- Category: Military
