1942: During World War II, the second Battle of El Alamein in northern Egypt begins. It would end on Nov. 4 in defeat for the Axis as German Field Marshal Edwin Rommel was forced to retreat to Tunis after an onslaught by the British Eighth Army under the command of Bernard Montgomery.
1946: Speaking to 400 delegates, President Harry Truman opens the first session of the United Nations General Assembly at the New York City Building in Flushing meadow Park in Queens, New York. Among the 51 founding members of the UN, seven are from the Middle East: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. The opening day is marred by various incidents, including power failures and overeager U.S. marines bullying members of the public, the press and a few delegates.
1973: The United Nations Security Council adopts Resolution 339, a cease fire ending the Yom Kippur War between Israel, Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
1983: In the Lebanese civil war, a suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines. At the same time, a bomber attacks French barracks elsewhere in beirut, killing 58 French paratroopers.
- The 1983 Attack on US Marines in Beirut
- Eyewitness to a Bombing: A Chaplain Remembers
- President Reagan on the Marines Massacre
- John McCain’s Beirut Deception
- Hezbollah and the Bombing of the Barracks
- Timeline: Lebanon’s Civil War
1998: After nine days and nights of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sign the “Wye River Memorandum” (named for the Maryland plantation where it was brokered by President Clinton), an agreement not so much to settle old questions as to agree to restart negotiating over them.
2002: At 9 p.m. in Moscow, 41 Chechen separatists calling themselves the Islamic Suicide Squad take more than 800 people hostage in a Moscow theater. They demanded an end to the war in Chechnya. On Oct. 27, Russian troops pump an aerosol version of a fast-acting opiate named fentanyl into the theater then storm it. The fentanyl kills 129 hostages and 41 militants.
