Israel at War: 1982 | 5 Minute Videos

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At dawn, on June 6, 1982, 60,000 Israeli troops, accompanied by 800 tanks, stormed across Israel’s northern border into Lebanon.

So began the fourth Arab-Israeli war—a war that the Israeli government officially dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee but the rest of the world called the Lebanon War.

An old adage holds that everyone knows how wars begin but nobody knows how they end.

That was certainly true in Lebanon.

The war’s roots could be traced back to Israel’s struggle for independence in 1948, when more than 100,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon.

They were kept in refugee camps, which became hotbeds of radicalism.

Then, with the Palestinians’ defeat in the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, another 200,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon along with numerous terrorist groups.

Chief among these was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, under Yasser Arafat.

The massive influx of armed Palestinians tipped Lebanon’s delicate balance between Christians, Druze, and Muslims.

It lead, five years later, to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. Syria exploited the conflict to occupy large parts of the country.

The terrorists, meanwhile, turned their sights on Israel—firing rockets into the Galilee and attacking northern border communities.

In March 1978, terrorists landed on a beach between Tel Aviv and Haifa and attacked the nearby highway, killing 38 civilians, many of them children.

Israel responded by invading southern Lebanon—the Litani Operation—which succeeded in pushing the terrorists back from the border, but only temporarily.

The PLO attacks continued, not only from Lebanon,