Israel Planned to Blow up Beirut Stadium, Assassinate Arafat in 1982

The Israeli newspaper "Yediot Aharonot" revealed, on Friday, that Tel Aviv planned to blow up Beirut stadium and kill Palestine's Yasser Arafat and his comrades. However the operation was canceled at the last moment.

General Meir Dagan devised a plan to blow up the Beirut stadium, during the festival that the "Fatah" movement planned to organize on the occasion of the start of the revolution, on January1,1982, and chose the name "Olympia" for it.

The aim was to assassinate Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), and other leaders of the "Liberation Organization", who was expected to attend the festival, along with hundreds and possibly thousands of Palestinians.

He started implementing his plan as Israeli intelligence envoys, with local support from Lebanese, placed two truck bombs near the stadium, and planted explosive devices under several chairs inside the stadium and on the stage.

The bombs were supposed to be detonated, and a minute later when people were in a panic of flight, the two trucks would be detonated by a remote control device, noting that each one of them was carrying a ton of explosives.

However, the prime minister Menachem Begin backed away from carrying out the operation at the last minute. On the morning of the same day, when he was bedridden at home, he summoned the army commanders who were aware of it, and ordered them to halt the implementation of the operation and, in effect, to cancel it.

Israeli Journalist Ronen Bergman, an author and terrorism specialist who also writes for the American New York Times, stated in the report ,to be published on Friday in Israel, that the plan was drawn up in Tel Aviv at the end of 1981, in response to a series of Palestinian armed operations carried out inside Israel.

The Chief of Staff of the Israeli army Rafael Eitan and the commander of the northern region General Janusz Ben Gal met immediately after the funeral ceremony for the dead Israelis, and decided to take revenge on the leaders of the "Palestine Liberation Organization", "by killing them all," starting to draw up plans for that.

The mission was handed over to  Dagan, who was famous for his assassination squad in 1971 in the army, and took command of the Israeli army in occupied southern Lebanon in 1980.

Dagan was disappointed throughout his life due to the cancellation of the operation, and he kept saying that if it had been possible for him to implement it, the First Lebanon War in 1982 would have been saved, and the whole face of the Middle East would have changed, according to the report.