Sabra and Shatila
Israel-haters like to highlight the Sabra and Shatila massacres committed by Lebanese Phalangists who were allied with Israel, however that draws away all attention to the many Palestinian terrorist attacks leading up to that, which spanned over ten years and cost the lives of too many Israelis and South Lebanese.
The reason Israel had to go into Lebanon in 1982 was because the PLO and other Palestinian terrorist organizations were headquartered there and were conducting terrorist actions against Israel, the PLO had been expelled from Jordan in 1970 after instigating the Black September civil war.Here are some of the terrorist attacks against Israel leading up to the 1982 Israel incursion into Lebanon:
🏴 From 1968 onwards, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began conducting raids from Lebanon against Israel, as well as abroad.
🏴 El Al Flight 426 was an El Al passenger flight hijacked on July 23, 1968 by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), setting off a wave of hijackings by Palestinian terrorists.
One of the hijackers opened the unlocked door to the flight deck, clubbed the copilot with the butt of his pistol and ordered the plane to fly to Algiers. The other two hijackers threatened the passengers with pistols and hand grenades.
🏴 In December 1968 Two Palestinian commandos attacked an Israeli plane in Athens, Greece. One passenger, Israeli Leon Shirdan, 50, of Haifa, was shot dead and two others were injured.
🏴 The Avivim school bus massacre was a Palestinian PFLP terrorist attack on an Israeli school bus on May 22, 1970 in which 12 civilians were killed, nine of them children, and 25 were wounded, one of whom died of a wound sustained in the attack 44 years later.
The attack took place on the road to Moshav Avivim, near Israel’s border with Lebanon. Two rocket propelled grenades RPGs were fired at the bus.
🏴 On September 7, 1970, in the series of Dawson’s Field hijackings, three planes were hijacked by PFLP: a SwissAir and a TWA that were landed in Azraq area and a Pan Am that was landed in Cairo.
Then on September 9, a BOAC flight from Bahrain was also hijacked to Zarqa. After all hostages were removed, the planes were dramatically blown up in front of TV cameras.
🏴 The Damour massacre took place on January 20, 1976, during the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War. Damour, a Maronite Christian town on the main highway south of Beirut, was attacked by Muslim and left-wing militants with help from Palestine Liberation Organisation units.
Part of its population died in battle or in the massacre that followed, and the remainder were forced to flee.Twenty Phalangist militiamen were executed, and then civilians were lined up against a wall and sprayed with machine-gun fire. Estimates of the number killed range from 100 to 500.
The Phalangist Damouri Brigade, which carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the 1982 Lebanon War sought revenge not only for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, but also for what he describes as past killings of their own people by Palestinians, including those at Damour.
🏴 The Munich massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, in which the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took eleven Israeli Olympic team members hostage and killed them along with a West German police officer.
🏴 The Kiryat Shmona massacre was an attack by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command on civilians in the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona on 11 April 1974.
Eighteen people were killed, nearly half of them children, and 16 were wounded.
🏴 The Ma’alot massacre was a Palestinian terrorist attack that occurred in May 1974 and involved a two-day hostage-taking of 115 Israeli people which ended in the murders of over 25 hostages.
It began when three armed members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) entered Israel from Lebanon. Soon afterwards they attacked a van, killing two Israeli Arab women while injuring a third and entered an apartment building in the town of Ma’alot, where they killed a couple and their four-year-old son. From there, they headed for the Netiv Meir Elementary School, where they took more than 115 people (including 105 children) hostage on 15 May 1974, in Ma’alot. Most of the hostages were teenagers from a high school in Safad.
🏴 The Savoy Hotel attack was a terrorist attack by members of the Palestine Liberation Organization against the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 4–5 March 1975. The terrorists arrived by boat and went on a rampage through the streets ending up at the hotel where they murdered 5 hostages.
🏴 On Friday, July 4, 1975, a refrigerator that had five kilograms of explosives packed into its sides exploded on Zion Square, a main square leading to Ben Yehuda Street and Jaffa Road. Fifteen people were killed and 77 injured in the attack. Ahmad el-Sukar, who was responsible for placing the bomb, was released from Israeli prison in 2003 as a gesture to Arafat.
🏴 On May 3, 1976, thirty-three passers-by were injured when a booby-trapped motor scooter exploded at the corner of Ben Yehuda and Ben Hillel Streets. Among those injured were the Greek consul in Jerusalem and his wife. The following day, on the eve of Independence Day, the municipality organized an event at the site of the attack, under the slogan “Nevertheless.”
🏴 On November 13, 1975, an explosive charge went off near Cafe Naveh on Jaffa Road, near the pedestrian mall. Seven people were killed and 45 injured.
🏴 On 27 June 1976, an Air France plane with 248 passengers was hijacked by two members of the PFLP.
🏴 On 11 March 1978, eleven PLO militants made a beach landing 30 km. south of Haifa, Israel, where they seized a bus, full of people, killing those on board in what is known as the Coastal Road massacre. By the end of the incident, nine hijackers and 38 Israeli civilians (including 13 children) were dead.
🏴 On January 1, 1979, a car bomb was found opposite Cafe Atara on the pedestrian mall and was neutralized about half an hour before it was to have blown up.
🏴 On March 24, 1979, one person was killed and 13 people were injured when an explosive charge blew up in a trash can in Zion Square.
🏴 The 1979 Nahariya attack (codenamed by its perpetrators as the Nasser Operation) was a raid by four PLF militants in Nahariya on April 22, 1979. During the attack they killed three Israeli civilians and a police officer, including a father and two of his young children. Another child was accidentally suffocated in efforts to hide her from the attackers.
🏴 Leading up to 1982, there were almost continuous border clashes between Israel and Palestinian terrorist organizations.From the ceasefire, established in July 1981, until the start of the war, the Israeli government reported 270 terrorist attacks by the PLO in Israel, the occupied territories, and the Jordanian and Lebanese border (in addition to 20 attacks on Israeli interests abroad).Becker, Jillian (1984). PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization. AuthorHouse. p. 257.
🏴 The 1982 Israel military operation into Lebanon was launched after gunmen from Abu Nidal’s organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin treated the incident as a casus belli for the invasion
