Lebanon's civil war ran from April 1975 to 1990 and produced an estimated 120,000 deaths, close to 900,000 displaced and large permanent emigration, alongside interventions by Syria from 1976 and Israel in 1978 and 1982. Its displacement was overwhelmingly sectarian and reciprocal: in January 1976 Christian militias overran the Karantina slum in East Beirut and Palestinian and allied forces destroyed the Christian town of Damour days later; the Tel al-Zaatar camp fell after a long siege in August 1976 with heavy Palestinian civilian casualties; the Sabra and Shatila massacre followed the 1982 Israeli invasion, recorded separately in this atlas; and the Mountain War of 1983-84 in the Chouf expelled most of the Christian population of the district. Beirut was divided by a Green Line for fifteen years. Some 17,000 people disappeared and remain unaccounted for, and Lebanon's 1991 general amnesty foreclosed prosecutions for wartime crimes; a National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared was finally established by law in 2018 after decades of campaigning by families. A post-war Ministry of the Displaced managed a partial and contested return programme, and many displaced never went back.
Lebanese militias, Palestinian factions, and Syrian and Israeli forces displaced populations along sectarian lines across fifteen years of war
Lebanon has held no census since 1932, so all figures are estimates; UN and Lebanese official series put the resident population at roughly 2.7 million in 1975, including some 300,000 Palestine refugees. Displacement estimates from the Ministry of the Displaced and from academic studies run to 800,000-900,000 people over fifteen years, with about a fifth of the population still displaced at the war's end.
The commonly cited figure of about 120,000 dead comes from Lebanese post-war estimates and is bracketed here; the low end reflects conservative conflict-dataset counts of recorded deaths and the high end includes the disappeared and indirect deaths. No official casualty registry was maintained during the war and the 1991 amnesty ended attempts to establish one judicially.
The International Center for Transitional Justice, Lebanese official commissions on the missing, and contemporary ICRC and press reporting documented massacres, sieges of camps and neighbourhoods, mass disappearance and the destruction of whole quarters.
Lebanon