Who attacked first in the 1982 Lebanon war?

6 June 1982 · The First Lebanon War

Israel invaded on 6 June 1982, and the war, especially how long it ran, remains contested inside Israel itself. What preceded it: the Palestine Liberation Organization had built a state-within-a-state in south Lebanon and spent a decade launching cross-border raids and rocket fire at Galilee towns, from the Avivim school-bus massacre to the Coastal Road massacre. The trigger was the 3 June shooting of Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, by the Abu Nidal group, a PLO rival, a detail the simple version skips. Sustained attacks came first; the invasion’s scale, and how far it went past its stated aims, is a fair argument. The hardest case →

Who fought it

The war pitted Israel against the PLO, chaired by Yasser Arafat, and against Syrian forces occupying eastern Lebanon under the cover of the Lebanese civil war then in its seventh year. Israel’s cabinet under Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the operation. On the ground, Lebanon itself was a patchwork of militias: the PLO’s own forces (Arafat’s Fatah and smaller factions), Syrian troops, the Lebanese Christian Phalange under Bashir Gemayel, and a UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, that had been deployed since 1978 and could not stop any of it.

What happened, and where

The PLO had turned south Lebanon into what Israelis called “Fatahland,” an armed enclave the Lebanese government did not control, run under the 1969 Cairo Agreement that gave Palestinian fighters the right to operate from Lebanese soil. From it came the Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot school massacres of 1974 and the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, 38 dead including 13 children, which triggered Israel’s first Litani Operation that same year. Rocket and artillery fire into Galilee continued for years afterward. Operation Peace for Galilee, launched 6 June 1982, was declared as a 40-kilometer push to clear PLO artillery range from the border. Within days Israeli forces had gone far past that line, fought Syrian armor and air defenses in the Bekaa Valley, and by mid-June had encircled Beirut itself.

When it escalated

The Bekaa Valley air battle of 9 to 11 June 1982 destroyed roughly 19 Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries and downed some 82 Syrian jets for no confirmed Israeli air-to-air losses, the most lopsided air campaign of the jet age. The siege of West Beirut followed through the summer, with Israeli shelling of PLO positions embedded in a dense civilian city, a preview of the human-shields problem that would recur in every war Israel fought against Iranian-backed militias afterward. A US-brokered ceasefire in August 1982 sent a Multinational Force of American, French and Italian troops to oversee the PLO’s evacuation. Arafat and roughly 14,000 fighters left Beirut by sea for Tunis at the end of August, the PLO’s leadership exiled a thousand miles from Israel’s border.

Sabra and Shatila, and the accountability that followed

Bashir Gemayel, elected Lebanon’s president with Israeli backing, was assassinated on 14 September 1982. In retaliation, his Christian Phalangist militia entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-controlled West Beirut on 16 to 18 September and massacred Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians, estimates range from several hundred to over 3,000 dead. Israeli forces held the perimeter and did not stop it for two days. Israel’s own government convened the Kahan Commission, which found in February 1983 that Israeli officials bore indirect responsibility for failing to anticipate and halt the killing, and that Sharon bore personal responsibility, recommending his removal as defense minister. It is a rare case of a country’s own judiciary indicting its own leadership within months, and it belongs in any honest account of the war.

Casualties and cost

Israel lost 657 soldiers in the 1982 campaign itself, and 1,216 between June 1982 and Israel’s partial withdrawal in May 1985, a toll that broke domestic support for the war and produced Israel’s first mass anti-war movement, the Peace Now rallies of 400,000 people that September. PLO and Syrian fighters killed numbered in the low thousands; Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths across the campaign are disputed, with Lebanese and Red Cross-linked estimates running into the high thousands, figures Israel’s own inquiries have never accepted at face value given the fog of a war fought inside a civil war.

Aftermath and how it is misused today

Israel withdrew most forces by 1985 but held a security zone in south Lebanon, patrolled with a local ally, the South Lebanon Army, until a full and UN-certified withdrawal on 24 May 2000. Out of the resistance to Israel’s occupation of that zone, and with direct funding and training from Iran, Hezbollah was born in the early 1980s, the militia that would fight Israel again in the 2006 Lebanon war and open an unprovoked northern front in 2023. The war is remembered today mostly through Sabra and Shatila and the length of the occupation that followed, both fair criticisms, but the framing that erases the decade of cross-border massacres that preceded 6 June 1982 tells only the second half of the story. Israel shared no border dispute with Lebanon and annexed none of it; every move north followed an attack launched from Lebanese soil.

Hezbollah · Who attacked first in the 2006 Lebanon war · Who attacked first on the Lebanon front in 2023 · Yasser Arafat · The History They Skip · Iran’s Ring of Fire

Sources

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