Benghazi

Overview

Benghazi is a port city in Cyrenaica, eastern Libya. Known in antiquity as Hesperides and later Berenice, it has been a center of trade, Jewish communal life, political protest and armed conflict. Its history reflects successive periods of Roman, Arab, Ottoman and Italian rule, followed by the upheavals of independent Libya. Benghazi became central to the Libyan civil war of 2011, when protests against Muammar Gaddafi grew into an uprising and his forces threatened the city. NATO intervened with the aim of preventing a massacre there.

After Gaddafi’s fall, weak state institutions left armed groups with substantial power in Benghazi. The city became the site of the September 11, 2012, attacks on a U.S. diplomatic mission and a nearby CIA annex, which killed four Americans. Public opposition to militias produced the Save Benghazi demonstrations later that month and another, deadly confrontation in June 2013. Fighting intensified again during the Libyan civil war of 2014–2020, as forces led by Khalifa Haftar fought Ansar al-Sharia, the Islamic State and other jihadist groups. Later accounts of detention, torture and abduction show that armed control did not by itself secure civil rights.

Geography

Benghazi’s position on Libya’s Mediterranean coast made it a port for Cyrenaica and a point of contact with communities elsewhere in North Africa and across the sea. That connection shaped its history: Jews in the early modern city earned livelihoods through regional and Mediterranean trade, while families arriving from Tripoli and Italy helped sustain its Jewish community. Benghazi also served as an eastern center distinct from Tripoli, Libya’s capital. Following the 2011 revolution, events in either city could affect the country’s divided political and security institutions.

The city’s neighborhoods and public buildings became prominent during successive conflicts. Demonstrators gathered outside the Northern Court in 2011, while snipers occupied rooftops, including that of the Tebisti hotel. In 2014, Camp 36 in the Bou Atni district became a major battlefield. Fighting continued in western Benghazi in 2016 and 2017, and detention abuses were documented at al-Kwaifiya prison. These sites mark different stages of the city’s passage from protest against Gaddafi to militia competition, jihadist insurgency and rule by eastern security forces.

Ancient and biblical history

In antiquity, Benghazi was called Hesperides and later Berenice. After 74 B.C.E., Berenice formed part of Roman Cyrenaica. Inscriptions provide unusually direct evidence of its Jewish residents and their institutions. One dated 13 B.C.E. records that Jews of Berenice held citizenship and were governed by Jewish archons. Another, discovered in 1938, commemorates donors to a synagogue dedicated in 56 C.E. Together, the inscriptions establish a civic and religious community rather than merely an inferred Jewish presence in the ancient city.

The surviving names in both inscriptions include many non-Jewish forms, evidence of cultural interaction within the Hellenistic and Roman world. The Jewish community experienced the wider upheavals affecting the Jews of Cyrenaica, including those associated with the revolt centered on Cyrene in 115 C.E. The city also passed through the Byzantine period. Berenice was largely deserted after the Arab conquest in 660, and its later history cannot be treated as an uninterrupted continuation of its Roman urban life. No biblical identification for Benghazi is established by the supplied historical evidence; its documented ancient names are Hesperides and Berenice.

Jewish history

By the 14th century, the city bore the Arabic name Benghazi. Jews from Tripoli helped repopulate it in the early 16th century, working in trade and crafts, including metalwork and tailoring. More Jewish families moved from Tripoli after the Ottoman occupation of 1640. Epidemics and poverty drove residents away in 1745, but members of the community returned around 1750. Jewish life began to flourish around 1775 with the arrival of families from Italy. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Benghazi had about 400 Jewish families divided into two congregational groups, each maintaining its own synagogue.

World War II brought repeated changes of control and severe persecution. British forces took Benghazi on February 6, 1941. After Italian forces recaptured it on April 3, hostile Muslim youths attacked the city’s Jews. British forces retook Benghazi on December 24, 1941, before Italian and German forces captured it again on January 27, 1942. The Axis return was followed by anti-Jewish attacks and systematic plunder of Jewish shops. Benghazi was also among the forced-labor destinations for Jews deported from Tripoli in 1942, demonstrating that wartime displacement reached the city from elsewhere in Libya.

Almost all of Benghazi’s Jews were deported to the Giado desert camp during the war. Starvation and typhus killed 562 of the deportees there. Deportation devastated a community that had endured for centuries through migration, economic hardship and earlier changes of rule. During the 1967 Six-Day War, Libyan authorities placed Benghazi’s Jews in army barracks outside the city for their protection. Most of those who remained subsequently emigrated, mainly to Italy. Their departure formed part of the wider Jewish exodus from the Muslim world and ended Benghazi’s long-established Jewish communal presence.

Modern history

Benghazi played a role in Libya’s political history before the 2011 uprising. Gaddafi entered its Military Academy in 1963 and helped organize a secret group opposed to the monarchy. Decades later, the city became a center of opposition to his own rule. In 2011, thousands of demonstrators, including lawyers, gathered outside Benghazi’s Northern Court and demanded a constitution. Snipers took positions on rooftops, including the Tebisti hotel, as violence escalated. Gaddafi sent his son Saadi to Benghazi amid the unrest. Soldiers joined protesters, who defeated a force of Gaddafi’s elite guards.

After scores of protesters were killed, demonstrations against Gaddafi spread from Benghazi to Tripoli. Benghazi became a critical front as government forces threatened the city, and NATO intervened with the aim of preventing Gaddafi’s forces from massacring its people. The city’s importance to the uprising made it a symbol of the revolution, but the collapse of Gaddafi’s rule left the new authorities facing a separate problem: armed formations that had gained power during the war retained their own leadership, weapons and agendas. Their presence shaped Benghazi’s politics well after the original uprising had succeeded.

Benghazi also appeared in an earlier episode of international history: hijacked aircraft departed the city before flying to Uganda, a stage in the 1976 hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe. In later decades, the city’s international significance arose chiefly from Libya’s internal conflicts and their effects on foreign missions. That role did not erase its longer history as a port and regional center, but it placed Benghazi at the center of debates about the security of diplomats, the authority of Libya’s governments and the conduct of armed groups.

Security

After the revolution, Benghazi’s security vacuum gave militias and jihadist organizations room to operate. Katibat Ansar al-Sharia announced itself in February 2012. At a June gathering it hosted, roughly 1,000 participants, including members of other militias, demanded implementation of sharia. The group acknowledged destroying Sufi shrines and graves in the city. Ansar al-Sharia later reappeared to provide security at al-Jala Hospital after withdrawing from public view. These activities combined armed influence with efforts to present the group as a local provider of security, while Libya’s nascent state institutions struggled to impose authority.

Attacks on foreign facilities and personnel preceded the September 2012 assault. On May 22, assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Benghazi. On June 6, attackers used an improvised explosive device against U.S. facilities. A convoy carrying Britain’s ambassador to Libya was attacked on June 11. On September 11, armed attackers struck the U.S. mission and nearby CIA annex. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed. The attacks made Benghazi a focus of U.S. criminal proceedings and scrutiny of diplomatic security.

The murders were followed by the September 2012 Save Benghazi demonstrations against militias. Public anger persisted. On June 8, 2013, a dispute involving a compound used by Libya Shield’s 1st Brigade developed into a protest demanding the brigade’s dissolution. The confrontation killed at least 41 people, mostly protesters, and wounded more than 150. Army Chief of Staff Yousef al-Mangoush resigned afterward. Coptic Christians in Benghazi also accused the brigade of operating a torture center and targeting people with cross tattoos. The accusations underscored the vulnerability of civilians and religious minorities when armed groups exercised power with limited state oversight.

Militia detention was a broader Libyan problem: in 2013, Benghazi was one of three areas with the greatest concentration of militia-held detainees, alongside greater Tripoli and Misrata. By 2014, Benghazi had become a major front in renewed civil war. Haftar’s Operation Dignity fought Ansar al-Sharia and allied jihadist forces. On July 29, about 1,000 Ansar al-Sharia and allied fighters overran Camp 36 in Bou Atni, seized military supplies and forced special forces to withdraw. Ansar al-Sharia leader Muhammad al-Zahawi then declared Benghazi an Islamic emirate, although that declaration did not settle control of the city.

Fighting continued through 2016. In February, Haftar’s forces fought Islamic State operatives and the Shura Council of the Benghazi Revolutionaries. The Islamic State claimed that three bombs killed 22 of Haftar’s soldiers during the fighting. On June 22, 2016, Haftar’s forces launched an offensive against Islamic State and other jihadist positions in western Benghazi. Forces aligned with the Shura Council remained active, and fighting against them continued in western Benghazi in January 2017. The prolonged battles showed how the post-revolution security crisis had developed into an urban war involving rival armed organizations and competing claims to political authority.

Present day

The Libyan National Army, associated with Haftar, was based in Benghazi in 2023. Control by its forces and aligned security agencies did not end documented abuses. Witness testimony recorded at least 16 detainee deaths from torture or medical neglect at Benghazi’s LNA-controlled al-Kwaifiya prison between 2017 and 2022. A United Nations fact-finding mission identified the Benghazi-based Libyan National Army and aligned armed groups among perpetrators of abuses against Libyans and migrants. These findings form part of the record of the city’s postwar governance as well as its military history.

In June 2023, gunmen linked by local rights monitors to the eastern Internal Security Agency abducted activist and parliamentary candidate Belgasem Mohamed al-Jared from his Benghazi home. The case illustrated continuing pressure on political participation and civil society in eastern Libya. Benghazi also remained a venue for foreign contact with Haftar: during a January 12 visit to Libya, CIA Director William Burns met Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh in Tripoli and Haftar in Benghazi. An American drone was shot down over Benghazi on August 22, 2022, while Haftar’s forces controlled the city.

The city’s civic life has unfolded alongside these security and political pressures. The Christian-operated book ship MV Logos Hope initially received permission to dock in Benghazi, Misrata and Tripoli in August 2022. Meanwhile, Libya’s competing centers of power continued to attract different foreign backers: Turkey traditionally supported the Tripoli-based government, while Egypt and the United Arab Emirates backed Haftar. Benghazi’s position as the eastern military and political center thus remained significant to Libya’s national divisions, even as questions of detention, accountability and civilian safety persisted within the city.