Zionist Occupation Planned to Kill Arafat by Blowing up Beirut Stadium: Report

If the plot, planned for January of 1982, had been carried out, agents working on behalf of Israel were to have placed enough explosives under and around the stadium to cause damage that, according to a senior military officer at the time, would have been “unprecedented, even in terms of Lebanon,” the daily said.

Few knew of the plan, the report noted, with the actions of a clandestine unit carrying out guerrilla operations and assassinations being kept secret from much of the military general staff and intelligence corps.

The impetus for the plot, according to the newspaper, was the 1979 attack on Israelis by Samir Kuntar.

Kuntar was imprisoned in 1979 in the Zionist entity and sentenced to three life terms after he and three other Lebanese residents infiltrated the occupied territories from southern Lebanon and staged an attack in the northern coastal town of Nahariya, killing three Israelis, including a police officer.

The military chief of staff at the time, Rafael Eitan, made it clear afterward that any PLO figures in Lebanon were “fair game”, according to the report.

The plan was halted at the last minute, with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin calling it off hours before it was to be carried out, said the newspaper.