Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, driving PLO forces out of southern Lebanon and besieging PLO fighters and civilians in West Beirut for over two months before a negotiated evacuation. Civilian displacement across southern Lebanon and Beirut has been estimated at 500,000 to over 700,000 people, with heavy damage to Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre. In September 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia allied with Israel killed an estimated 1,300–3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps; an Israeli commission of inquiry (the Kahan Commission) found Israel indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the massacre. Israel subsequently maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon, contributing to further waves of displacement, until withdrawing in 2000.
Israel invaded Lebanon to expel the PLO and besieged Beirut; Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian forces were combatants, and allied Christian Phalangist militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians under Israeli military oversight.
Lebanon has held no census since 1932, so all figures are estimates; UN and Lebanese administrative estimates put the population at roughly 2.7-3.0 million in the early 1980s, of whom about 350,000 were UNRWA-registered Palestine refugees. The census gap is itself political, since a count would settle the confessional balance on which the political system rests.
Lebanese police and government figures widely reported at the time put the dead at roughly 17,000–19,000 for the 1982 invasion and siege of Beirut, mostly civilians, with the Washington Post reporting an aggregate of some 48,000 killed and wounded; MERIP's contemporaneous analysis 'The War of Numbers' and Israeli officials argued the Lebanese counts conflated killed with wounded and that the true figure was substantially lower, hence the low end here. For the Sabra and Shatila massacre specifically, estimates run from several hundred in Israeli military intelligence reporting cited before the Kahan Commission to about 3,500 in the research of Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout. Palestinian and Lebanese sources favour the higher figures, Israeli sources the lower.
The Kahan Commission and UN General Assembly records document the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian civilians by Phalangist militia, and contemporaneous reporting compiled by the Washington Post and MERIP documented the siege of West Beirut with cut-offs of water, food, fuel and electricity and heavy destruction of residential districts.
Lebanon