zone, which was supposed to serve as a punishment, due to the Jordanian support to the PLO. The Jordanians made this assumption as they saw the size of the raiding Israeli forces entering the battle. Arafat said "What we have done is to make the world ... realize that the Palestinian is no longer refugee number so and so, but the member of a people who hold the reins of their own destiny and are in a position to determine their own future". Palestinians and Arabs generally considered the battle a psychological victory over the IDF, which had been seen as 'invincible' until then, and recruitment to guerilla units soared. Fatah reported that 5,000 volunteers applied to join within 48 hours of the battle. By late March, there were nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan. Iraq and Syria offered training programs for several thousand guerrillas. The Persian Gulf states, led by Kuwait, raised money for them through a 5% tax on the salaries of their tens of thousands of resident Palestinian workers, and a fund drive in Lebanon raised $500,000 from Beirut alone. The Palestinian organizations began to guarantee a lifetime support for the families of all guerrillas killed in action. Within a year after the battle, Fatah had branches in about eighty countries. After the battle, Fatah began to engage in communal projects to achieve popular affiliation. The battle of Karameh and the subsequent increase in the PLO's strength are considered to have been important catalysts for the 1970 events of the civil war known as Black September, in which the kingdom managed to expel the Palestinian groups to Lebanon after they had started to gain control over Jordan. Later, the United Nations Security Council issued resolution 248 which condemned the Israeli raid on Jordanian territory and the violation of the cease-fire line, it recalled on resolutions 237 which had encouraged Israel to ensure the safety of civilians in military areas. The resolution affirmed that reprisals were not to be tolerated and that repetitions of such violations would have forced the Security Council to take further steps. The battle was the first engagement between the Israelis and Palestinians, in which the latter used suicide bombers. Files released by the IDF in 2011 revealed that the IDF began planning the two operations in 1967, one year before the bus incident. They also revealed that the IDF had practiced crossing the Jordan