History of Israel's Atrocities in Lebanon--A Pattern of Jewish State Terrorism By Nadim Ladki; 04-21-1996; Reuter, top of page

BEIRUT, April 21 (Reuter) - Little did anyone suspect when Israeli commandos blew up 13 airliners at Beirut airport 28 years ago that it was to be the first of many Israeli military thrusts into Lebanon. The history of Israel's wars against Arab guerrillas in Lebanon includes many military successes but few long-term gains in its bid to establish security on the Jewish state's northern border.

The current air, artillery and and naval bombardment, in its 11th day, is the latest attempt by Israel to stop attacks by Hizbollah guerrillas on its northern towns. At least 154 people have been killed and hundreds wounded, including 102 refugees shelled at a U.N. base in the south. The seeds of conflict were sown in 1948 when thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the war that followed the proclamation of the state of Israel. Many settled in Lebanon.

Their battle to return to "Palestine" was given fresh impetus when the bulk of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership moved to Lebanon after being ousted from Jordan in 1971. Israel's first big incursion was in 1968. It said the attack on Beirut airport was a reprisal for an attack in Athens by Lebanese- trained Palestinian guerrillas.

In April 1973, Israeli elite troops, including present-day Foreign Minister Ehud Barak disguised as a woman, entered Beirut flats and shot dead three Palestinian guerrilla officials. Israel said those targeted played a role in a guerrilla attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics a year earlier.

In March 1978, in retaliation for the killing of more than 30 bus riders in a raid by sea-borne guerrillas near Tel Aviv, Israel attacked PLO positions in south Lebanon and occupied a 10 km (six mile)-wide strip north of the Lebanese border. About 1,500 people were killed, mostly Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Some of the Israeli forces pulled out, but not before handing over the area to allied Christian militiamen fighting Palestinians and Moslem leftists in Lebanon's civil war. U.N. Security Council resolution 425 ordered the Israelis to leave. They refused. The United Nations set up UNIFIL, a 5,000-strong peacekeeping force to help restore Lebanese state authority down to the border. Israeli troops did not let it reach the border.

In 1981, PLO guerrillas rained Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and the border strip. Israel launched air raids on Beirut in retaliation, killing scores of civilians. A flurry of diplomatic moves prevented the conflict from widening. But in July 1982, after months of calm on the border, Israel invaded Lebanon with the declared aim of routing Palestinian guerrillas. It cited as justification an attack that seriously wounded its ambassador in London. Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon promised his army would stop after 40 km (25 miles) but it encircled Beirut, 40 km further north. After bombardments, PLO fighters agreed to leave the city. About 20,000 people were killed, mostly Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Israel lost hundreds of soldiers.

In September 1982, Israeli forces stormed west Beirut after pro- Israeli Christian leader Bashir Gemayel, who days earlier had been elected president, was assassinated. Israeli troops ringing the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila allowed revenge-seeking Christian militiamen into the shantytowns. Hundreds of refugees were slaughtered and Israel was widely condemned. Bruised by world outrage and hurt by mounting guerrilla attacks by Lebanese Shi'ite Moslem guerrillas, Israel, under Prime Minister Shimon Peres, pulled most of its forces out of Lebanon in 1985 and set up a 15 km (nine mile) wide occupation zone to stop cross-border attacks.

But its continued presence stirred the resentment of local south Lebanese. Israel then faced a more relentless enemy, Hizbollah (Party of God), whose pro-Iranian Islamist militants attacked its troops daily and were ready to die for their cause. In February 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships rocketed the car of Hizbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Musawi, killing him, his wife and son.

Rocket attacks into northern Israel followed, then Israeli forces stormed two villages north of the buffer zone. U.S., U.N. and Iranian diplomacy led to a truce, but it crumbled after Hizbollah killed seven Israeli soldiers in July 1993 and fired Katyushas into northern Israel.

In response, Israel unleashed "Operation Accountability," a week- long air, artillery and naval blitz in which 130 people, mostly Lebanese civilians, died and 300,000 fled their homes. It ended when a U.S.-brokered verbal understanding barred attacks on civilians on both sides of the border but did not mention guerrilla attacks against Israeli occupation troops.

Hizbollah pledged to rocket northern Israel every time Israeli shelling killed Lebanese civilians. It kept the promise, and on April 11, 1996, Israel launched "Operation Grapes of Wrath," its second blitz against south Lebanon and Hizbollah.

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Israel's Terrorist Mistakes in Lebanon Segments Exerpted from TIME Report, top of page By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Johanna McGeary/Jerusalem; 01-25-1988
Dressed in the fine robes and headdress of a Muslim cleric, Sheik Kaouk received two reporters in a lavender-carpeted office with heavy drapes and a photograph of Iran's late Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall. The sheik, who appeared to be in his early 40s, twisted worry beads as he spoke of Israel's "criminal" leaders and "failed" military operations.

Kaouk dismissed the idea of a negotiated solution in Lebanon, saying that Israel never honors the agreements it signs. He pointed to its refusal to withdraw from the West Bank city of Hebron as required by the peace agreements between it and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

"The occupation will not be solved with a signature," the sheik said.

Israel invaded Lebanon during the country's civil war of 1982 to evict Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then a guerrilla movement fighting Israel. Arafat's fighters fled within months, but Israel stayed, provoking Iranian-backed Shiite Muslims to form a militia called Hezbollah.

Three years later, Israel agreed to pull out of Lebanon but held on to the 328-square-mile border security zone that it said was needed to protect northern Israel from attack. The Israeli army remains there along with a proxy Christian militia called the South Lebanon Army.

With the Israeli military itching to respond and prospective voters under fire before an election, Peres began Operation Grapes of Wrath. During the April offensive, Israel used air strikes and ground artillery against the guerrillas in southern Lebanon and Beirut.

The operation, which also targeted Lebanese infrastructure and forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee southern Lebanon, was ostensibly designed to create pressure on the Lebanese government and Syria to rein in Hezbollah.

The operation went awry for Israel when its artillery shells fell on a U.N. camp at Qana, killing more than 100 civilians who had taken refuge there. According to U.N. officials and Israeli press reports, the incident occurred after Hezbollah guerrillas near the camp fired Katyushas and mortars at an Israeli ground unit that had penetrated beyond the occupied zone.

Israel has said that its artillery gunners miscalculated when they fired back and accidentally hit the camp. The U.N. has accused Israel of intentionally firing back at targets it knew to be too close to the camp.

The operation ended with the U.S.-brokered understandings between Israel, Syria and Lebanon that ban attacks on civilians but allow each side to retaliate if its civilians are hit. This is the loophole through which both sides see the agreement unraveling.

On Friday, three children were killed in an explosion near the village of Houla in the Israeli-occupied zone, and each side blamed the other for detonating the roadside bomb.

"Israel only understands the language of retaliation. They only understand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," he [the Sheik] said. "We believe Israel will not feel pain until their people have wept like our people have wept."

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Israel Bombs Lebanon Including Ambulance With Refugees Inside By Carol Giacomo on April 15, 1996, top of page
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Washington has seemed ready to back whatever action Peres felt necessary to ensure his people's security -- and their votes. Typical of this stance was the State Department's comments on Monday about Israel's weekend attack on an ambulance filled with refugees. The single bloodiest episode of the blitz on Lebanon, it killed four girls and two women.

Israel defended the strike, saying the ambulance carried a Hizbollah fighter. "The shelling of the ambulance was a terrible tragedy," deputy spokesman Glyn Davies told a news briefing. But he laid the blame squarely on the radical Islamic group backed by Syrian and Iran, saying, "the violence is due to Hizbollah's Katyusha rocket attacks." James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute, however, blasted Israel' s attacks as "terrorism" and blamed the Jewish state for first violating a 1993 ceasefire accord by disproportionate strikes on civilians and villages, rather than targeting only Hizbollah.

.N. Condemns Israel for Planned Atrocity Bombing of Its U.N. Headquarters By Ramez Ismael; 05-31-1996; Reuters, top of page
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak Wednesday dismissed U.N. criticism of an Israeli attack on a refugee camp as "absurd" and said he did not think the report would have an adverse affect on a cease-fire in Lebanon. "I don't know if this is exactly what the (U.N.) secretary general meant but the whole idea is absurd," Barak told reporters when asked about the report, which concluded that it was unlikely Israel bombed a U.N. refugee camp in southern Lebanon by accident. Barak, posing for photographs with his Omani counterpart, said he did not think the U.N. report, released Tuesday, would have an impact on the situation in southern Lebanon, where a U.S.-brokered cease-fire has been in effect since April 26. "I believe that even the Lebanese know very well that there is no way Israel has done it intentionally or deliberately and that after all, with all the sorrow and regret, it's something that could happen in full scale military activties. The ultimate responsibility we believe is still with Hizbollah (guerrillas) who used the U.N. installation to cover the shooting," he said. The United Nations Tuesday said Israel's shelling of a U.N. camp in southern Lebanon that killed about 100 civilians last month was unlikely to have been the result of gross technical or procedural errors, as Israel claimed. The United States blasted U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros- Ghali for drawing "unjustified" conclusions about Israel's role in the attack. Barak was to meet Secretary of State Warren Christopher immediately after his talks with Oman Foreign Minister Yusef Bin Alawi Bin Abdullah. top of page


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Lebanon: Chapter 4C. Foreign Relations; Countries of the World By As'ad AbuKhalil, top of page
Palestinians have been an integral part of the Lebanese polity since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. At that time, many fled to Lebanon. This refugee population increased after the June 1967 War and the 1970 eviction of the PLO from Jordan. By 1987 there were about 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon (see The Palestinian Element, ch. 2).In 1978 Israel invaded Lebanon, clearing out Palestinian strongholds as far north as the Litani River. Another consequence of the Israeli invasion was the establishment in southern Lebanon of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, whose mission was to separate the various combatants.

As serious as the 1978 incursion was, it paled in comparison with the 1982 Israeli invasion, which affected all of the southern half of Lebanon as far north as Beirut (see The 1982 Israeli Invasion and Its Aftermath, ch. 5). This action had several direct consequences. First, it resulted in the deaths of several hundred Palestinian fighters and the expulsion of several thousand more, not to mention several thousand Lebanese and Palestinian casualties and massive destruction. For a time, the invasion and occupation diminished Syrian influence, as the Syrian Army was forced north and east. The Israeli occupation promoted the creation of the MNF, made up of military units from Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, which supervised the Palestinian evacuation and later stayed to keep the peace. The IDF occupation also created an expedient climate for Bashir Jumayyil (and, subsequently, for his brother Amin) to win the presidency.

In addition, there were several less direct consequences. The occupation of Muslim West Beirut allowed Christian forces, on September 27-28, 1982, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred several hundred civilians. Lebanese Shias, who were severely affected by the invasion and occupation, turned their enmity on the Israelis. As a show of support for their coreligionists, the government of Iran, with Syrian approval, dispatched a contingent of the Pasdaran to the Biqa Valley. Anti-Israeli Shia opposition burgeoned during the occupation, and there were several suicide-bombing incidents perpetrated against IDF positions (see Suicide Bombings, ch. 5).

In 1987 Israel's relations with Lebanon continued to revolve around the issue of security. Israel retained its support of the SLA's activities in southern Lebanon, maintained its ties to the LF, and perpetuated its policy of attacking Palestinian and Lebanese targets that Israel labeled "terrorist" bases. top of page


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Israeli Atrocities History in Lebanon from The Economist The Economist; 04-20-1996, top of page
A WEEK into Israel's ferocious bombardment .. as thousand upon thousand of Israeli shells and bombs thump down on Lebanon, ancient Katyusha rockets continue to be plonked into Galilee' s deserted fields. Operation Grapes of Wrath, a resonant cliche from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", was launched to protect the Israelis of northern Galilee. It has not, in that respect, been a demonstrable success. Yet it has still been a domestic triumph. And, at the start when casualties were low, it won international sympathy; the reproaches were muted.

Strange that: Lebanon, though not Hizbullah, has been badly hurt, its land once again a battlefield, its people being killed and made homeless. Since the barrage began on April 11th, several hundred thousand Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes, trailing up the single road north, seeking temporary refuge in the streets, schools and mosques of Beirut. Their presence, plus Israel's surgical strikes at two of Beirut's power stations, have plunged the capital back into the disorder it thought it had escaped.

Close to 100 Lebanese, most of them civilians, had been killed in the first week of the bombardment, half of them on April 18th when Israel shelled a UN peacekeeping base near Tyre where hundreds of Lebanese refugees were sheltering. Earlier in the day, a family of nine, including small children, had been killed in a raid on a village near Nabatiyeh. The casualty rate, at first relatively low because of Israel's policy of telling people to get out before it blasted their homes, was rising fast. The number of dead Lebanese civilians, in just a few days, was many times more than the 12 people in northern Israel killed by Hizbullah rockets in the 14 years since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.

Israel has struck houses in Beirut, supposedly belonging to Hizbullah but not inhabited by them. Helicopter gunships attacked a Palestinian refugee camp, wounding the small son of a radical commander, the object of the chase.