the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon by Israel. Hostilities were suspended on 8 September 2006. As of 2015, the situation has generally remained calm, despite both sides violating the ceasefire agreements; Israel by making near-daily flights over Lebanese territory, and Hezbollah by not disarming. Background World War I and Mandate The territories of what would become the states of Israel and Lebanon were once part of the Ottoman Empire which lasted from 1299 until its defeat in World War I and subsequent dissolution in 1922. As a result of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign in 1917, the British occupied Palestine and parts of what would become Syria. French troops took Damascus in 1918. The League of Nations officially gave the French the Mandate of Syria and the British the Mandate of Palestine after the 1920 San Remo conference, in accordance with the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement. The largely Christian enclave of the French Mandate became the French-controlled Lebanese Republic in 1926. Lebanon became independent in 1943 as France was under German occupation, though French troops did not completely withdraw until 1946. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust during World War II, had meant an increase of Jewish immigrants to a minority Jewish, majority Arab Mandate. During the 1936–39 Arab revolt and thereafter the British increasingly came to rely on Jewish police forces to help maintain order. Eventually, the resultant rise in ethnic tensions and violence between the Arabs and Jews due to Jewish immigration and collaboration would force the British to withdraw in 1947. (The area of their mandate east of the Jordan river had already become the independent state of Jordan in 1946.) The United Nations General Assembly developed a gerrymandered 1947 UN Partition Plan, to attempt to give both Arabs and Jews their own states from the remains of the British Mandate; however, this was rejected by the Arabs, and the situation quickly devolved into a full-fledged civil war. 1948 Arab–Israeli War In 1948, the Lebanese army had by far the smallest regional army, consisting of only 3,500 soldiers. At the prompting of Arab leaders in the region, Lebanon agreed to join the other armies that were being assembled around the perimeter of the British Mandate territory of Palestine for the purpose of invading Palestine. Lebanon committed 1,000 of these soldiers to the cause. The Arab armies waited for the end of the Mandate