1982 Lebanon War

1982 Lebanon War
Part of the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon and the Israeli–Lebanese conflict

Top: Israeli troops invading Lebanon, 1982
Date6 June – 29 September 1982 (end of Israeli operation)[4] or 5 June 1985 (most Israeli forces withdrawn)
Location
Lebanon
Result

Israeli tactical victories,[5] strategic failure[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

Territorial
changes		 Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon
Belligerents
Others
Commanders and leaders
Strength
  • Israel:
    • 78,000 troops
    • 800 tanks
    • 1,500 APCs
    • 634 aircraft
  • LF:
    • 30,000 troops
  • SLA:
    • 5,000 troops
    • 97 tanks
  • Syria:
    • 22,000 troops
    • 352 tanks
    • 300 APCs
    • 450 aircraft
    • 300 artillery pieces
    • 100 anti-aircraft guns
    • 125 SAM batteries
  • PLO:
    • 15,000 troops
    • 80 tanks
    • 150 APCs
    • 350+ artillery pieces
    • 250+ anti-aircraft guns
Casualties and losses
  • Israel:
    • 654 killed and 3,887 wounded (1982–85)[15][16]
    • 4 missing
    • 12 captured
    • 1 aircraft lost
    • 2 helicopters lost
  • PLO:
    Syria:
    • 1,200 killed
    • 296 captured
    • 300–350 tanks lost
    • 150 APCs lost
    • c. 100 artillery pieces lost
    • 82–86 aircraft lost
    • 12 helicopters lost
    • 29 SAM missile batteries lost[20]

Total casualities: 19,085 killed and 30,000 wounded.[21]
Civilians at Sabra-Shatila massacre: 800-3,500 killed.[21]

Also see Casualties below.

The 1982 Lebanon War, also called the Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon,[22][23][24] began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military, which had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. The Israeli military operation, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was launched after gunmen from the Abu Nidal Organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin blamed the PLO,[25][26] using the incident as a casus belli.[27][28][i] It was the second invasion of Lebanon by Israel, following the 1978 South Lebanon conflict.

The Israelis sought to end Palestinian attacks from Lebanon, destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country, and install a pro-Israel Maronite Christian government.[29][30][31] Israeli forces attacked and overran PLO positions in southern Lebanon and briefly clashed with the Syrian Army, who occupied most of the country's northeast. The Israeli military, together with the Christian Lebanese Forces and South Lebanon Army, seized control of the southern half of Lebanon and laid siege to the capital Beirut. Surrounded in West Beirut and subjected to heavy Israeli bombardment, the PLO and their allies negotiated a ceasefire with the aid of United States Special Envoy Philip Habib. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, were evacuated from Lebanon, overseen by a multinational peacekeeping force. By expelling the PLO, removing Syrian influence over Lebanon, and installing a pro-Israeli Christian government led by President Bachir Gemayel, the Israeli government hoped to sign a treaty that would give Israel "forty years of peace".[32]

Following the assassination of Gemayel in September 1982, Israel's position in Beirut became untenable and the signing of a peace treaty became increasingly unlikely. There was outrage at the IDF's role in the Israeli-backed, Phalangist-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shias. This stoked Israeli public disillusionment with the war. The IDF withdrew from Beirut and ended its operation on 29 September 1982.[33] The May 17 Agreement of 1983 ended the state of war between Israel and Lebanon, and provided for an Israeli withdrawal from the country. Amid rising casualties from guerrilla attacks, the IDF retreated south of the Awali river on 3 September 1983.[34]

From February to April 1985, the Israeli military undertook a phased withdrawal to its "South Lebanon security zone" along the border. The Israeli occupation saw the emergence of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shia Islamist group.[35] It waged a guerrilla war against the Israeli occupation until the IDF's final withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.[36] In Israel, the 1982 invasion is also known as the First Lebanon War.[ii]

  1. ^ "In the Spotlight: PKK (A.k.a KADEK) Kurdish Worker's Party". Cdi.org. Archived from the original on 13 August 2011. Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  2. ^ "Abdullah Öcalan en de ontwikkeling van de PKK". Xs4all.nl. Archived from the original on 15 December 2010. Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  3. ^ "a secret relationship". Niqash.org. Archived from the original on 14 March 2012. Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  4. ^
  5. ^ Eligar Sadeh Militarization and State Power in the Arab–Israeli Conflict: Case Study of Israel, 1948–1982 Universal-Publishers, 1997 p.119.
  6. ^ Naor, Dan; Lewin, Eyal (3 April 2023). "Was the 1982 Lebanon War a Deviation from Israeli Security Doctrine?". The Journal of the Middle East and Africa. 14 (2): 219–244. doi:10.1080/21520844.2023.2171652. ISSN 2152-0844.
  7. ^ Schulze, Kristen E. (1 January 1996). "Perceptions and Misperceptions: Influences on Israeli Intelligence Estimates During the 1982 Lebanon War". Journal of Conflict Studies. ISSN 1715-5673. The failure of the invasion can be seen as the result of a number of misconceptions by the Israelis. The most prominent misconceptions underlying Israel's policy were: that Lebanon had a Christian majority, that the position of the president was a strong one, that the Lebanese Forces were powerful, that the Maronites wanted a Christian state, that the Maronite faction they were liaising with represented all Maronites, and that the Maronites were reliable.
  8. ^ Katz, Andrew Z. (1 July 2017), 5 Israel's 1982 Invasion of Lebanon to Secure Peace in the Galilee, Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 135–162, doi:10.1515/9781626376687-007, ISBN 978-1-62637-668-7, retrieved 26 September 2024, The failure of Operation Peace of [sic] Galilee to achieve its objective prevailed upon the new national coalition government, which took office in 1984, to withdraw forthwith from Lebanon.
  9. ^ "Israel's 3-Year War in Lebanon Ends, But Some Troops Remain Behind". Washington Post. 6 June 1985. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 26 September 2024. In the latest poll, in May, 36 percent of the public still said it was right to launch the war in 1982 and 60 percent said it was wrong. Significantly, 75 percent said the war was a failure.
  10. ^ Kainikara, Sanu (2007). "Pathways to Victory: Observations from the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Conflict" (PDF). The failure of the political objectives of Operation Peace for Galilee highlights a significant disconnect in Israel's execution of the conflict. In the opinion of John Garofano, Israel's political leaders, especially Ariel Sharon, had overestimated the time available and underestimated the cost in lives to achieve these goals. Corroborating this view, Shlomo Gazit, a former head of Israeli military intelligence says that both Begin and Sharon 'chose to isolate themselves from their intelligence advisors and never evinced the slightest doubt that they could achieve their objective'. As the siege of Beirut continued, Sharon's ability to direct IDF operations was gradually restricted by his cabinet colleagues to the point that he could only issue piecemeal orders. Meanwhile, the IDF suffered large numbers of casualties in fierce urban fighting and later became bogged down in two decades of a low-intensity war against Hezbollah that it could not win
  11. ^ Hertling, Mark. "What I Learned from Watching the Israeli Army". www.thebulwark.com. Retrieved 26 September 2024. In 1982, the IDF were initially successful, but changes in government policy and civilian leaders' strategic objectives caused mission creep, dysfunction, and eventual failure to achieve military goals. Israel withdrew its forces to the border areas by 1985, and withdrew further to the international boundary in 2000.
  12. ^ Khalidi, Rashid (4 January 2014). Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War. Columbia University Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-231-53595-3. However, the failure of "Operation Peace for Galilee" goes far beyond the objectives implied by the war's shrewdly chosen code name, since those who planned it had set their sights much farther afield.
  13. ^ Hammes, Thomas X. (17 February 2006). The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. Voyageur Press. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-7603-2407-3. Adding to their frustration was the most recent and only failure of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF): Operation Peace for Galilee, the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon.
  14. ^ References:
    • Armies in Lebanon 1982–84, Samuel Katz and Lee E. Russell, Osprey Men-At-Arms series No. 165, 1985
    • Hirst, David (2010). Beware of Small States. NationBooks. pp. 144–145. ISBN 978-1-56858-657-1. In time, however, Arafat and his guerrilla leadership decided that they would have to withdraw, leaving no military and very little political or symbolic presence behind. Their enemy's firepower and overall strategic advantage were too great and it was apparently ready to use them to destroy the whole city over the heads of its inhabitants. The rank and file did not like this decision, and there were murmurings of 'treason' from some of Arafat's harsher critics. Had they not already held out, far longer than any Arab country in any former war, against all that the most powerful army in the Middle East – and the fourth most powerful in the world, according to Sharon – could throw against them? (...) But [Palestinians] knew that, if they expected too much, they could easily lose [Lebanese Muslim support] again. 'If this had been Jerusalem', they said, 'we would have stayed to the end. But Beirut is not outs to destroy.
  15. ^ Uri Ben-Eliezer, War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel's Militaristic Nationalism, University of California Press (2019)
  16. ^ Gad Barzilai, Wars, Internal Conflicts, and Political Order: A Jewish Democracy in the Middle East, State University of New York Press (1996)
  17. ^ Gabriel, Richard, A, Operation Peace for Galilee, The Israeli-PLO War in Lebanon, New York: Hill & Wang. 1984, p. 164, 165, ISBN 978-0-8090-7454-9
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference payment was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ "Israeli General Says Mission Is to Smash P.L.O. in Beirut". The New York Times. 15 June 1982. Retrieved 1 May 2017.
  20. ^ Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991
  21. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Race was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  22. ^ MacQueen, Benjamin (2013). An Introduction to Middle East Politics: Continuity, Change, Conflict and Co-operation. Sage Publishing. p. 73.
  23. ^ Ramsbotham, Oliver; Woodhouse, Tom (1999). Encyclopedia of International Peacekeeping Operations. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 136.
  24. ^ Lindley-French, Julian (2007). A Chronology of European Security and Defence 1945-2007. Oxford University Press. pp. 145–146, 155.
  25. ^ [Ze'ev Schiff, Ehud Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War, Simon and Schuster 1985 pp.98f:'Argov had been shot by an unusual weapon of Polish manufacture known as a WZ 63, . . Israeli intelligence knew that this late-model weapon had been supplied to Abu Nidal's organization but not yet to other terrorist groups. . . The key point that the intelligence officers wanted to convey to the Cabinet was that Abu Nidal's organization was an exception among the Palestinian terror groups. Once among Yasser Arafat's closest friends, Abu Nidal had over the years turned into the chairman's most vicious enemy . .Abu Nidal referred to Arafat contemptuously as "the Jewess's son" and had made repeated attempts on his life. Arafat, in return, had pronounced a death sentence on Abu Nidal.'
  26. ^ Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, Random House 2014 p.288:'When Prime Minister Menachem Begin was told that the assassins were Abu Nidal's men -sworn enemies of Arafat and the PLO- he reportedly scoffed,"They're all PLO, Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal- we have to strike at the PLO".'
  27. ^ Kahalani, A Warriors Way, Shapolsky Publishers (1994) pp. 299–301
  28. ^ Harvey W. Kushner, Encyclopedia of Terrorism Sage Publications (2003), p.13
  29. ^ Tucker, Spencer C.; Roberts, Priscilla (2008). The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. A Political, Social, and Military. ABC-CLIO. p. 623. ISBN 978-1-85109-841-5.
  30. ^ Bickerton, Ian J. (2009). The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-86189-527-1.
  31. ^ Martin, Gus (2013). Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues. Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4522-0582-3. The operation was called Operation Peace for Galilee and was launched in reply to ongoing PLO attacks from its Lebanese bases.
  32. ^ Friedman, p. 157
  33. ^ "Two decades on, Israel confronts legacy of 'forgotten' south Lebanon occupation". The Times of Israel. 18 June 2021.
  34. ^ "Israel units start the withdrawal from Beirut area". The New York Times. 4 September 1983.
  35. ^ "Hezbollah | Meaning, History, & Ideology | Britannica". www.britannica.com. 24 September 2024. Retrieved 24 September 2024.
  36. ^ Morris, Benny: Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1998
  37. ^ sales, Ben (1 October 2024). "Israel's Third Lebanon War is underway: What you need to know". Times of Israel. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  38. ^ "Events in North amount to 'Third Lebanon War,' security official says". Jerusalem Post. 23 September 2024. Archived from the original on 6 October 2024. Retrieved 6 October 2024.


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