Israeli–Lebanese conflict
The Israeli–Lebanese conflict, or the South Lebanon conflict, is a long-running conflict involving Israel, Lebanon-based paramilitary groups, and sometimes Syria. The conflict peaked during the Lebanese Civil War. In response to Palestinian attacks from Lebanon, Israel invaded the country in 1978 and again in 1982. After this it occupied southern Lebanon until 2000, while fighting a guerrilla conflict against Shia paramilitaries. After Israel's withdrawal, Hezbollah attacks sparked the 2006 Lebanon War. A new period of conflict began in 2023, leading to the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
The Palestine Liberation Organization recruited militants in Lebanon from among the Palestinian refugees who had been expelled or fled after the creation of Israel in 1948. After the PLO leadership and its Fatah brigade were expelled from Jordan in 1970–71 for fomenting a revolt, they entered southern Lebanon, resulting in an increase of internal and cross-border violence. Meanwhile, demographic tensions over the Lebanese National Pact led to the Lebanese Civil War. PLO actions were one of the key factors in the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War and its bitter battles with Lebanese factions caused foreign intervention. Israel's 1978 invasion of Lebanon pushed the PLO north of the Litani River, but the PLO continued their campaign against Israel. This invasion led to the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982 and, in alliance with the Christian Lebanese Forces, forcibly expelled the PLO. In 1983, Israel and Lebanon signed the May 17 Agreement providing a framework for the establishment of normal bilateral relations between the two countries, but relations were disrupted with takeover of Shia and Druze militias in early 1984. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon in 1985, but kept control of a security buffer zone, held with the aid of proxy militants in the South Lebanon Army.
In 1985, Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist movement sponsored by Iran, called for armed struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory. It fought a guerrilla war against the IDF and SLA in south Lebanon. Israel launched two major operations in southern Lebanon during the 1990s: Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. Fighting with Hezbollah weakened Israeli resolve and led to a collapse of the SLA and an Israeli withdrawal in 2000 to their side of the UN designated border.
Citing Israeli control of the Shebaa farms, Hezbollah continued cross-border attacks intermittently over the next six years. Hezbollah now sought the release of Lebanese citizens in Israeli prisons and successfully used the tactic of capturing Israeli soldiers as leverage for a prisoner exchange in 2004. The capturing of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah ignited the 2006 Lebanon War, which saw cross-border attacks and another Israeli invasion of the south. Its ceasefire called for the disarmament of Hezbollah and the respecting of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon by Israel. Hostilities were suspended on 8 September.
After the 2006 war the situation became relatively calm, despite both sides violating the ceasefire agreements; Israel by making near-daily flights over Lebanese territory, and Hezbollah by not disarming. There was an increase in violence during the April 2023 Israel–Lebanon shellings.
The Gaza war sparked a renewed Israel–Hezbollah conflict, beginning one day after the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel. The conflict initially consisted of tit-for-tat airstrikes and shelling. The conflict escalated in September 2024, beginning with the Israeli explosion of Lebanese pagers and walkie talkies. Israel then began an aerial bombing campaign throughout Lebanon, killing at least 569 people on 23 September; the largest conflict-related loss of life in a single day in Lebanon since the Civil War.
Background
The territories of what would become the states of Israel and Lebanon were once part of the Ottoman Empire which lasted from 1299 until its defeat in World War I and subsequent dissolution in 1922. As a result of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign in 1917, the British occupied Palestine and parts of what would become Syria. French troops took Damascus in 1918. The League of Nations officially gave the French the Mandate of Syria and the British the Mandate of Palestine after the 1920 San Remo conference, in accordance with the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement.The largely Christian enclave of the French Mandate became the French-controlled Lebanese Republic in 1926. Lebanon became independent in 1943 as France was under German occupation, though French troops did not completely withdraw until 1946.
The rise of antisemitism in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust during World War II, had meant an increase of Jewish immigrants to a minority Jewish, majority Arab Mandate. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt and thereafter the British increasingly came to rely on Jewish police forces to help maintain order. Eventually, the resultant rise in ethnic tensions and violence between the Arabs and Jews due to Jewish immigration and collaboration would force the British to withdraw in 1947. The United Nations General Assembly developed a gerrymandered 1947 UN Partition Plan, to attempt to give both Arabs and Jews their own states from the remains of the British Mandate; however, this was rejected by the Arabs, and the situation quickly devolved into a full-fledged civil war.
History
1948 Arab–Israeli War
In 1948, the Lebanese army had by far the smallest regional army, consisting of only 3,500 soldiers. At the prompting of Arab leaders in the region, Lebanon agreed to join the other armies that were being assembled around the perimeter of the British Mandate territory of Palestine for the purpose of invading Palestine. Lebanon committed 1,000 of these soldiers to the cause. The Arab armies waited for the end of the Mandate and the withdrawal of British forces, which was set for 15 May 1948.Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948. The next day, the British Mandate officially expired and, in an official cablegram, the seven-member Arab League, including Lebanon, publicly proclaimed their aim of creating a democratic "United State of Palestine" in place of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. The League soon entered the conflict on the side of the Palestinian Arabs, thus beginning the international phase of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq declared war on the new state of Israel. They expected an easy and quick victory in what came to be called the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Lebanese army joined the other Arab armies in the invasion. It crossed into the northern Galilee. By the end of the conflict, however, it had been repulsed by Israeli forces, which occupied South Lebanon. Israel signed armistice agreements with each of its invading neighbors. The armistice with Lebanon was signed on 23 March 1949. As part of the agreement with Lebanon, Israeli forces withdrew to the international border.
By the conclusion of that war, Israel had signed ceasefire agreements with all of the neighbouring Arab countries. The territory it now controlled went well beyond what had been allocated to it under the United Nations Partition Plan, incorporating much of what had been promised to the Palestinian Arabs under the Plan. However, it was understood by all the state parties at the time that the armistice agreements were not peace treaties with Israel, nor the final resolution of the conflict between them, including the borders.
After the war, the United Nations estimated 711,000 Palestinian Arabs, out an estimated 1.8 million dwelling in the Mandate of Palestine, fled, emigrated or were forced out of Israel and entered neighboring countries. By 1949, there were 110,000 Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon, moved into camps established by and administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
With the exception of two camps in the Beirut area, the camps were mostly Muslim. Lebanese Christians feared that the Muslim influx would affect their political dominance and their assumed demographic majority. Accordingly, they imposed restrictions on the status of the Palestinian refugees. The refugees could not work, travel, or engage in political activities. Initially the refugees were too impoverished to develop a leadership capable of representing their concerns. Less democratic regimes also feared the threat the refugees posed to their own rule, but Lebanon would prove too weak to maintain a crackdown.
The Palestine Liberation Organization recruited militants in Lebanon from among the families of Palestinian refugees who had left Israel in 1948.
War over water and the Six-Day War (1964–1967)
Despite sharing in the ongoing border tensions over water, Lebanon rejected calls by other Arab governments to participate in the 1967 Six-Day War. Militarily weak in the south, Lebanon could not afford conflict with Israel.Nevertheless, the loss of additional territory radicalized the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps hoping to return home. The additional influx of refugees turned Palestinian camps throughout the Middle East into centers of guerrilla activity.
Rise of the PLO militants (1968–1975)
The PLO, from its inception in 1964 by Ahmed Shukeri, began executing numerous terror attacks on Israeli civilians in attempt to fulfill its mission charter's vow to pursue in "the path of holy war " until the establishment of a Palestinian State in place of the State of Israel. The series of attacks drove the Israeli Defense Forces to strike in return, instigating the long and still unresolved struggle between the PLO and the IDF.From 1968 onwards, the Palestine Liberation Organization began conducting raids from Lebanon into Israel, and Israel began making retaliatory raids against Lebanese villages to encourage the Lebanese people to themselves deal with the fedayeen. After an Israeli airline was machine-gunned at Athens Airport, Israel raided the Beirut International Airport in retaliation, destroying 13 civilian aircraft.
The unarmed citizenry could not expel the armed foreigners, while the Lebanese army was too weak militarily and politically. The Palestinian camps came under Palestinian control after a series of clashes in 1968 and 1969 between the Lebanese military and the emerging Palestinian guerrilla forces. In 1969 the Cairo Agreement guaranteed refugees the right to work, to form self-governing committees, and to engage in armed struggle. "The Palestinian resistance movement assumed daily management of the refugee camps, providing security as well as a wide variety of health, educational, and social services."
On 8 May 1970, a PLO faction, called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, crossed into Israel and carried out the Avivim school bus massacre.
In 1970, the PLO attempted to overthrow a reigning monarch, King Hussein of Jordan, and following his quashing of the rebellion in what Arab historians call Black September, the PLO leadership and their troops fled from Jordan to Syria and finally Lebanon, where cross-border violence increased.
With headquarters now in Beirut, PLO factions recruited new members from the Palestinian refugee camps. South Lebanon was nicknamed "Fatahland" due to the predominance there of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization. With its own army operating freely in Lebanon, the PLO had created a state within a state. By 1975, more than 300,000 Palestinian displaced persons lived in Lebanon.
In reaction to the 1972 Munich massacre, Israel carried out Operation Spring of Youth. Members of Israel's elite Special Forces landed by boat in Lebanon on 9 April 1973, and with the aid of Israeli intelligence agents, infiltrated the PLO headquarters in Beirut and assassinated several members of its leadership.
In 1974 the PLO altered its focus to include political elements, necessary for a dialogue with Israel. Those who insisted on a military solution left to form the Rejectionist Front, and Yassir Arafat took over the PLO leadership role.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, which split from the PLO in 1974, carried out the Kiryat Shmona massacre in April of that year. In May 1974, the DFLP crossed again into Israel and carried out the Ma'alot massacre. In retaliation for this attack, Israel bombed and destroyed the Nabatieh refugee camp.