BEIRUT: From its inception, Hezbollah’s primary focus was on ending Israel’s 18-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has waged a war against Israeli occupiers, often using inventive schemes and an array of military tactics, such as suicide bombings, assassinations, soldier abductions and murders.
Over the course of 33 years, from 1982 to 2015, Hezbollah and Israel have engaged in a series of military clashes within Lebanese territories.November 1982: After invading Lebanon in June, the Israeli military set up command posts to run the cities they occupied. On Nov. 11, 1982, a Peugeot car rigged with explosives struck a seven-story building being used by the Israeli military in the coastal city of Tyre. The explosion leveled the building and killed 75 Israeli soldiers, border policemen, and Shin Bet agents, some of the worst losses ever for the Israeli Army. Almost exactly a year later, in 1983, an identical bombing happened in Tyre. A suicide bomber drove a pickup truck packed with explosives into a Shin Bet headquarters in Tyre. The explosion killed 28 Israelis.
With the adoption of the Taif Accord in 1989, Lebanon’s Civil War came to an end, but the southern front against Israel remained active for decades.
During the 1990s, after the formal conclusion of the 1975-90 Civil War, Hezbollah engaged Israel in almost daily clashes after the group mounted a resistance operation to drive the occupiers out of south Lebanon. The pace of attacks would intensify well into the decade, with Hezbollah staging ambushes, kidnappings and rocket launchings.
February 1992: Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers by infiltrating their camps. In response an Israeli helicopter gunship struck the motorcade of the party’s then-leader Abbas al-Musawi two days later, killing him and his family. Hezbollah then responded with rocket fire into Israel’s security zone in the south.
Under Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, who assumed party leadership, a retribution policy was enacted in which Hezbollah would respond proportionately to Israeli attacks.
June 1993: Hezbollah launched rocket attacks against northern Israeli villages, and in July 1993 attacks by both Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command killed five Israeli soldiers. In retaliation the Israelis launched the seven-day Operation Accountability, which killed dozens of Hezbollah fighters and 118 Lebanese civilians. After one week of fighting in the southern front an agreement brokered by the United States prohibited attacks on civilian targets.
Persistent attacks by Hezbollah on Israeli military positions, including those of its proxy the South Lebanon Army, continued for years to follow.
April 1996: Hezbollah launched another 30 missiles into northern Israel, citing a roadside bomb that killed a 14-year-old Lebanese boy in the village of Barashit as the reason. In response to intense shelling in March and April, the Israelis launched the seven-day Operation Grapes of Wrath on April 11. Over 1,000 air raids were conducted by Israel and some 600 cross-border rockets were fired by Hezbollah.
September 1997: Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli special forces unit with an explosive device outside the security zone occupied by Israel. The soldiers were killed after entering an orchard booby-trapped with bombs in the town of Ansarieh. A clash ensued and Israeli rescue teams came under fire as they attempted to transport the dead. At least a dozen Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush which Hezbollah would reveal 14 years later was planned after the party intercepted video footage broadcast by Israeli spy UAVs.
May 1999: Hezbollah attacked 14 Israeli and South Lebanon Army outposts simultaneously. The outpost in Beit Yahoun was overrun and one SLA soldier was taken prisoner.
May 2000: Israel withdrew its forces from south Lebanon which led to the collapse of the South Lebanon Army, considered a great victory for Hezbollah. However, Israel maintained its occupation in the Shebaa Farms, and Hezbollah vowed to continue resistance operations until the area was free of any Israeli presence.
October 2000: Hezbollah attacked Israel in a cross-border raid in the Shebaa Farms area, killing three Israeli soldiers on border patrol. In 2004, over 400 Palestinian and 30 Lebanese prisoners, including Hezbollah leaders Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid and Mustafa Dirani, as well as the remains of 59 Lebanese killed by Israel, were exchanged for the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and Elhanan Tannenbaum, an Israeli colonel in the reserves kidnapped by Hezbollah in Dubai in October 2000.
From this point on, a low-level border conflict consisting of Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli military positions in and around Shebaa would persist for another six years until July 12, 2006.
July 12, 2006: Hezbollah abducted two Israeli reserve soldiers in a cross-border raid, a move that sparked the 2006 July War, a 34-day military conflict.
In return for the bodies of the two captured soldiers, Hezbollah demanded the release of Lebanese prisoners. Israel initially refused the demand and responded with airstrikes and artillery fire targeting Hezbollah posts and Lebanese infrastructure, including the airport. The conflict killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, as well as 165 Israelis, mostly soldiers. A United Nations brokered cease-fire went into effect Aug. 14, but the war formally ended Sept. 8, when Israel lifted its naval blockade.
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