Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon

Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon
Part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Lebanese Civil War
Fedayeen from Fatah at a rally in Beirut, 1979.
Date 1968–1982 Location Israel, Lebanon Result Israeli victory: PLO ousted from Lebanon in the 1982 Lebanon War, relocated to Tunis.
Belligerents
Israel South Lebanon Army Lebanese Front	PLO  Syria LNM
Commanders and leaders
Menachem Begin Ariel Sharon Rafael Eitan Saad Haddad Antoine Lahad	Yasser Arafat Hafez al-Assad
Strength
78,000 troops (1982) SLA: 5,000 troops (1982)	15,000 militants (1982)

Israeli victory:

The Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon was a conflict initiated by Palestinian militants based in South Lebanon upon Israel since 1968, which evolved into the wider Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and lasted until the expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon in the 1982 Lebanon War. Though the PFLP and some other Palestinian factions continued a low-level military activities against Israel from Lebanese soil, after 1982, the conflict is considered to have shifted from Israeli–Palestinian to Israel–Hezbollah conflict. The South Lebanon insurgency, which peaked through the 1970s, claimed hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian military and civilian lives, and is considered among the key elements to starting the Lebanese Civil War.

From 1968 onwards, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began conducting raids from Lebanon into Israel, and Israel began making retaliatory raids into Lebanon and encourage the Lebanese people to themselves deal with the fedayeen. After an Israeli airline was machine-gunned by Palestinian militants at Athens Airport, Israel bombed the Beirut International Airport in retaliation, destroying 13 civilian aircraft.

The unarmed citizenry could not expel the armed foreigners, while the Lebanese army was too weak militarily and politically. The Palestinian camps came under Palestinian control after a series of clashes in 1968 and 1969 between the Lebanese military and the emerging Palestinian guerrilla forces. In 1969 the Cairo Agreement guaranteed refugees the right to work, to form self-governing committees, and to engage in armed struggle. "The Palestinian resistance movement assumed daily management of the refugee camps, providing security as well as a wide variety of health, educational, and social services."

On 8 May 1970, a PLO faction called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) crossed into Israel and carried out the Avivim school bus massacre.

...
Wikipedia