Khalil Hawi was a Lebanese poet and writer who was one of Lebanon's most prominent poets in the 20th century. In 1982, during the 1982 Lebanon War, that occurred in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, Hawi committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound from a rifle in his apartment in Beirut, driven by his profound despondency over his country's inability and failure to defend itself from the onslaught of the Israeli invasion, when the latter invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982.