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Israel
Palestinian Terrorist Groups
The PLO was formed in 1964 as an umbrella body for a number of
elements of the Palestinian resistance movement. Its main constituent
force was Al Fatah (Movement for the Liberation of Palestine),
whose head, Yasir Arafat, assumed control of the PLO in 1968.
At the outbreak of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Al Fatah numbered
6,500 armed men organized into regular units. Another PLO faction
was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
ideologically close to the Soviet Union and led by a Christian,
George Habash. The PFLP was bitterly opposed to compromise with
Israel. Numbering about 1,500 adherents in 1982, it was responsible
for some of the most deadly international terrorist actions against
Israel and its supporters. Other leftist groups had splintered
from the PFLP, including the Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (DFLP), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command (with ties to Syria and Libya), and the Palestine Liberation
Front (Iraq-supported). The Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), numbering
nearly 4,000 men in 1982, was established in 1964 as the military
arm of the PLO. In practice, however, the Syrian general staff
controlled the PLA's contingents of Palestinian troops and the
Jordanian army controlled one brigade in Jordan. The Abu Nidal
organization, an anti-Arafat group supported by Libya and Syria,
was responsible for many terrorist actions in Western Europe and
against pro-Arafat Palestinians.
Initially linked to Syria, Al Fatah came into its own after the
June 1967 War, when the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under
Israeli control. Palestinian refugees poured into Jordan, where
the PLO established virtually autonomous enclaves, and from which
it launched guerrilla raids. Israel's retaliation inflicted heavy
damage within Jordan. The PLO refused demands from King Hussein
that it cease operations and, in a sharp conflict with Jordanian
forces in 1970 and 1971, was driven out of Jordan. Shifting its
headquarters to Lebanon, the PLO adopted a more formal military
structure, benefiting from an abundant flow of arms from other
Arab nations. In spite of the danger of Israeli reprisals, the
Lebanese government was forced to accept the independent political
and military presence of the PLO in Lebanon.
Airliner hijackings had been an element in the PLO's strategy
since 1967. In retaliation against an attack on an El Al airliner
in Athens in 1968, Israel mounted a helicopter raid against the
Beirut International Airport, destroying thirteen Arab-owned aircraft.
A number of deadly terrorist incidents and guerrilla attacks against
Israeli West Bank settlements occurred during the 1970s. In an
attempt at hostage-taking, the Black September group, an extremist
faction of Al Fatah, killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympics in 1972. A climax in the terrorist campaign occurred
in March 1978, when Al Fatah raiders landed on the Israeli coast
south of Haifa, attacking a bus and cars on the Tel Aviv-Haifa
highway. Thirty-five Israelis were killed and at least seventy-four
were wounded. In reaction to the highway attack, the IDF launched
Operation Litani in April 1978, a three-month expedition to clear
the PLO guerrillas from Lebanese border areas. Within one week,
the strong IDF force had driven back the PLO and established complete
control in southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.
Nevertheless, the PLO had not been dealt a decisive blow. With
Soviet help, it began to accumulate substantial numbers of heavy
weapons, including long-range artillery, rocket launchers, antiaircraft
weapons, and missiles. Between 1978 and 1981, numerous IDF raids
against PLO installations in southern Lebanon were answered within
hours by random artillery and rocket attacks on Israeli border
settlements. By mid-1981, the reciprocal attacks were approaching
the intensity of full-scale hostilities. Punishing bombing raids
by the Israeli air force included an attack aimed at PLO headquarters
in Beirut that caused many civilian casualties. Although a truce
was arranged with the help of United States ambassador Philip
Habib on July 24, 1981, acts of PLO terror did not abate inside
Israel, in the West Bank, and in foreign countries. Israel considered
the continued presence of long-range weapons threatening its northern
population centers an unacceptable threat. In June 1982, Israel
justified its invasion of Lebanon as the response to an assassination
attempt against its ambassador in London by the Abu Nidal group.
At the outset of the war, the PLO had approximately 15,000 organized
forces and about 18,000 militia recruited among Palestinian refugees.
In spite of the large quantity of weapons and armor it had acquired,
it never reached the level of military competence needed to meet
the IDF in regular combat. When three division-size IDF armored
columns bore down on the 6,000 PLO fighters defending the coastal
plain below Beirut, the Palestinians fought tenaciously even though
they were poorly led and even abandoned by many senior officers.
Effective resistance ended within a week when the IDF closed in
on the Beirut suburbs (see 1982 Invasion of Lebanon, this ch.).
To avoid the domestic and international repercussions of the
bloody street fighting that an attack on the PLO headquarters
in West Beirut would have entailed, an agreement was negotiated
whereby the PLO troops and command would evacuate Lebanon and
withdraw to other Arab states willing to receive them. By September
1982, more than 14,000 PLO combatants had withdrawn. About 6,500
Al Fatah fighters sailed from Beirut. Most of the others crossed
into Syria, and smaller contingents went to other Arab countries.
As of 1987, it was believed that between 2,000 and 3,700 guerrillas
were still in Syria, 2,000 were in Jordan, and smaller groups
were quartered in Algeria, the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen),
the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), Iraq,
Sudan, and Tunisia. By 1988, however, many PLO fighters had filtered
back into Lebanon. About 3,000 armed men aligned with Al Fatah
were located in two camps near Sidon, forty kilometers south of
Beirut, and an additional 7,000 fighters aligned with Syria reportedly
were deployed in bases and refugee camps in eastern and northern
Lebanon.
Much of the Arab terrorism directed against Israel during the
mid-to-late 1980s was conducted by Syrian-sponsored Palestinian
groups that rejected Arafat. To a lesser extent, terrorist threats
resulted from Libyan involvement or from Fatah and its Force 17.
Terrorists made a number of attempts to infiltrate the Israeli
coast by sea and the anti-Arafat Abu Musa faction mounted several
terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. The Damascus-based PFLP waged
a relentless campaign to inhibit the development of moderate Palestinian
leadership in the occupied territories. The shadowy Abu Nidal
was believed responsible for a number of actions in which Israel
was not necessarily the primary target. These included the hijacking
of an Egyptian airliner with the loss of many lives in late 1985,
and shooting and grenade attacks at the El Al counters of the
Rome and Vienna airports a few months later.
The Shia population of southern Lebanon had initially welcomed
the IDF as adversaries of the PLO. By 1984, however, they had
turned against the Israelis because of the dislocation caused
by the Israeli occupation. Protests turned to violence in the
form of hundreds of hit-and-run attacks by Shia gunmen against
Israeli troops. The situation eased with the end of the Israeli
occupation in mid-1985.
Southern Lebanon continued to be a potentially dangerous base
for guerrilla attacks in 1988, following the partial reorganization
of PLO elements in Lebanon and the introduction of hundreds of
Shia radicals of the Hizballah (Party of God) movement supported
by Iran. Numerous attempts had been made by terrorist squads to
penetrate Israel's border defenses. A zone inside Lebanese territory
eighty kilometers long and averaging ten kilometers in depth was
patrolled by 1,000 IDF troops backed by 2,000 SLA militiamen recruited
among Christian Maronites. The IDF conducted periodic sweeps of
this zone to discourage cross-border infiltration and shelling
by the PLO. The frontier itself was protected by antipersonnel
mines, an electronic fence, acoustic, radar and night-vision systems,
fortified positions, and mobile patrols.
The Palestinian uprising (intifadah) that broke out
in December 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip apparently was
launched spontaneously and was not directly controlled by the
PLO. Burying their longstanding rivalries, local members of Al
Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, the Palestinian Communist Party, and fundamentalists
of the Islamic Holy War faction provided leadership through "popular
committees" in camps and villages. A loose coordinating body,
the Unified National Command of the Uprising, distributed leaflets
with guidance on the general lines of resistance. By August 1988,
a separate Islamic fundamentalist organization had emerged. Known
as Hamas, the Arabic acronym for a name that translates as the
Islamic Resistance Movement, it rejected any political settlement
with Israel, insisting that a solution would come only through
a holy war (see Palestinian Uprising, December 1987- , this ch.).
Data as of December 1988
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