The Coastal Road massacre occurred on 11 March 1978, when Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. The attack was planned by the influential Palestinian militant leader Abu Jihad and carried out by Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist party founded by Jihad in 1959. The initial plan of the militants was to seize a luxury hotel in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
According to a Fatah commander who had helped to plan the attack, the timing was aimed primarily at scuppering Israeli–Egyptian peace talks between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and damaging Israel's tourism sector. However, due to a navigational error, the attackers ended up north of their target, and were forced to find an alternative method of transportation to their destination.
Time characterized it as "the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history." Fatah dubbed the hijacking "Operation of the Martyr Kamal Adwan" after the chief of operations of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who was killed during the Israeli commando raid on Lebanon in April 1973. In response to the massacre, Israel launched Operation Litani against PLO bases in southern Lebanon three days later.
Background and perpetrators
The PLO claimed responsibility for the attack, which was planned by influential Fatah leader Abu Jihad. The attack's purpose was to disrupt ongoing Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations. Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad feared that a truce between Israel and Egypt would be detrimental to their cause. The operation was considered to be of such importance that Abu Jihad, together with his operations commander for Lebanon Azmi Zair, personally briefed the participants.
Israel received intelligence of the planned attack from a Shin Bet source codenamed Housemaid, who met with Israeli military intelligence official Amos Gilad in a safehouse in Jerusalem and briefed him about the plans. The intelligence was confirmed by wiretaps of the PLO offices in Cyprus. Israeli intelligence pinpointed the PLO squad's base to the beach of Damour, learned the attackers' names, and discovered that the goal behind the planned raid was to disrupt peace negotiations with Egypt. On 5 March 1978, Israel launched a military operation to preempt the planned attack. Shayetet 13 naval commandos raided the PLO base at Damour to wipe out the squad, but only killed all of those in one building, while those in a nearby building, who did not come out or open fire, survived the raid.
After intelligence was received from Housemaid that not all of the PLO squad had been killed, Gilad demanded that the commandos be sent in again to wipe out the remaining guerrillas, arguing that as Abu Jihad now knew that Israel was aware of his plans he would be spurred to launch the attack sooner, but Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, not wanting headlines of an Israeli raid on Lebanon to cast a shadow over his upcoming visit to the Pentagon, refused to authorize another such mission. The surviving guerrillas proceeded to carry out the attack.
Attack
On 9 March 1978, 13 Palestinian fedayeen, including 18-year-old female Dalal Mughrabi, left Lebanon on a boat headed for the Israeli coast. They were equipped with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, light mortars and high explosives. On 11 March, they transferred to two Zodiac boats and headed towards the shore. One of the Zodiacs capsized in the rough weather, and two of the militants drowned, but the surviving 11 carried on with their mission.
Landing
The eleven survivors landed on a beach near the kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, north of Tel Aviv. Due to stormy weather they had lost their bearings and believed they had landed in Cyprus. They met American photographer Gail Rubin, who was taking nature photographs on the beach and asked her where they were, and were relieved when she told them they were in Israel. Then they killed her. Both surviving attackers said that Mughrabi shot Rubin, who was a niece of United States Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff.