Bus Massacre in Lebanon: Civil War Erupts

Gunmen from the Phalangist militia sprayed a bus carrying Palestinian passengers through the Christian neighborhood of Ain el-Remmaneh in Beirut on April 13, 1975, killing 27 people and igniting a civil war that would consume Lebanon for fifteen years. The attack came hours after unknown assailants had fired on a church where Phalangist leader Pierre Gemayel was attending a ceremony, killing four people. The bus massacre was retaliation, and retaliation would become the defining rhythm of Lebanese violence for the next decade and a half. Lebanon's confessional political system had been fracturing for years under pressures it was never designed to absorb. The National Pact of 1943 had divided political power among the country's eighteen recognized religious sects, with the presidency reserved for Maronite Christians, the prime ministership for Sunni Muslims, and the speakership of parliament for Shia Muslims. By 1975, demographic shifts had made Muslims the majority, but the power-sharing arrangement remained frozen in its 1943 ratios. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, many of them armed fighters expelled from Jordan in 1970, added an explosive element to an already volatile mixture. The civil war quickly drew in outside powers. Syria intervened in 1976, initially on the side of Christian militias, then shifting allegiances repeatedly. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, besieging Beirut to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization. Iran's Revolutionary Guard established Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley, creating a Shia militant force that would outlast the war itself. The United States and France sent peacekeeping troops, only to withdraw after devastating truck bombings of their barracks in October 1983 killed 299 servicemen. The war killed an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 people, displaced nearly a million, and destroyed Beirut's cosmopolitan center, turning a city once called the Paris of the Middle East into a shorthand for urban devastation. The Taif Agreement of 1989 finally ended major hostilities by redistributing political power, but it left Syria as Lebanon's de facto overlord and Hezbollah as the only militia permitted to keep its weapons.