Lebanese Civil War Erupts in Beirut
- Date
- 1975
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Middle East (Lebanon)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war ignited on 13 April 1975, when Phalangist gunmen ambushed a bus in Beirut's Ain el-Remmaneh district, killing 27 Palestinian passengers in what became known as "Black Sunday." The massacre triggered fighting between Christian militias and a Palestinian–leftist alliance, fracturing a state whose confessional power-sharing system had grown badly out of balance with its shifting population.
What began as street clashes spiraled into a multi-sided conflict drawing in Syria, Israel, and later a wide array of sectarian militias, with Beirut physically split by a "Green Line." The 1975–1990 war killed an estimated 120,000 people, displaced roughly a million, and shattered the country's reputation as the prosperous "Switzerland of the Middle East." It also reshaped regional politics, prompting Syrian and Israeli military interventions and helping give rise to Hezbollah. The war's unresolved sectarian tensions and weakened central state continued to shape Lebanon long after the guns fell silent.
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Empires active in 1975
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Dutch Empire1581 CE – 1975 CE
- Yugoslavia1918 CE – 1992 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
- Khmer Rouge Seize Cambodia and Declare Year Zero1975
- Cuban Missile Crisis16–28 October 1962
- The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi7 April – 19 July 1994
- Korean War25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953
- The September 11 attacks11 September 2001
Further reading
The wider story
A History of the Modern Middle East
The go-to survey of the region from the late Ottoman era to the present.
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