The Brutal Lebanese Civil War in Photographs, 1975-1989
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) soldiers, displaying a portrait of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, wait to leave Beirut by the port, on August 21, 1982 as more than 10,000 fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), more than 2,000 soldiers from the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), as well as 3,000 Syrian soldiers from the Arab Deterrence Force evacuate Beirut under the protection of the multinational interposition force, composed of France, the United States and Italy armies after three months of a hard siege by the Israeli army.
From June 6, 1982, the Israeli army launched the Israeli military operation called Peace in Galilee, invaded southern Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut for 2 months, with the aim of destroying the infrastructure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and forcing Syria to leave the country. Subjected to a confessional institutional system, Lebanon plunged in April 1975 into a civil war involving several religious communities, each developing their own militia, and regional and international actors (PLO, Syria, Israel, UN, USA) and resulted in a succession of civil wars with alliances in perpetual metamorphosis.
August 28, 2025 | 10:50 pm