Israel marks 20 years from historic Lebanon withdrawal
Members of South Lebanese Army who fled to Israel still critical of 'abandonment'
Israel marked 20 years on Sunday since it withdrew its army from Lebanon in a historic and contentious decision by then-prime minister Ehud Barak.
The Jewish state invaded Lebanon in the 1982 or the First Lebanon War as it is also known, successfully uprooting Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist bases and expelling its leaders out of the country.
In 1985, Israel retreated to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, establishing an Israeli security zone, which in the following 15 years, became an armed conflict region between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the native South Lebanese Army (SLA) -- a mainly-Christian militia which fought alongside Israel -- and the recently founded Shiite Hezbollah terrorist organization - an Iranian proxy.
In the duration of Israel’s south Lebanon presence, it lost 414 soldiers, as hundreds of SLA fighters and more than 1,000 Hezbollah members were killed.
On May 24, 2000, in an expedited evacuation operation, Israel withdrew to its last soldier. The Israeli government was criticized harshly at the time by some quarters for “abandoning” the South Lebanese Army as many of its members fled to Israel, some leaving behind their families and property.
Two days following the withdrawal, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah delivered his infamous “spider web” speech, equating Israeli society’s durability to that of cobwebs. “My dear brothers, I am telling you: Israel, which has nuclear weapons, is weaker than the spider’s web,” quoted by outlet Haaretz.
Since the withdrawal, occasional, brief flare-ups between Israel and Hezbollah erupted along the Lebanese-Israeli border -- except for the 2006 Lebanon War which lasted 34 days in which 121 IDF soldiers were killed and some 500 to 700 Hezbollah also died, according to IDF estimates.