The 1978 Invasion of South Lebanon

On 14 March 1978, Israel invaded south Lebanon with some 25,000 soldiers, supported by air, artillery, and naval bombardment — Operation Litani, aimed at driving the PLO’s fighters back from the border and consolidating a friendly militia zone in the south. The invasion followed the coastal road attack of 11 March, in which Fatah fighters who had landed by sea hijacked a bus near Haifa; thirty-eight Israeli civilians, thirteen of them children, were killed in the hijacking and the shootout that ended it.

The week-long offensive killed between 1,100 and 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Lebanese and Palestinian, and displaced between 100,000 and 250,000 Lebanese civilians from the south — the first mass displacement in what would become a generation of them. On 19 March the UN Security Council adopted Resolutions 425 and 426, calling on Israel to withdraw its forces forthwith from all Lebanese territory and establishing the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. UNIFIL’s first troops deployed within days; the “interim” force remains in south Lebanon to this day.

The PLO accepted a ceasefire on 28 March after talks between Arafat and UNIFIL’s commander — the movement’s first open acceptance of a ceasefire arrangement with Israel. Israel withdrew later in 1978 but handed its border strip to a proxy militia rather than to UNIFIL, and the underlying confrontation was left standing. Four years later it returned at far greater scale, in the invasion that reached Beirut.