Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel was faced with cross-border raids and infiltrations by Arab militants and non-militants respectively. Many of these were small scale infiltrations that consisted of unarmed Palestinian refugees attempting to rejoin their families and of smugglers bringing in contraband for Israeli markets. These were later followed with attacks launched by refugees often motivated by economic reasons, but they were quickly adopted by the military of the neighboring Arab states, who organized them into semi-formal brigades which mounted larger scale operations from 1954 onwards. According to Israel, about 9,000 attacks were launched from 1949 to 1956, resulting in hundreds of Israeli civilian casualties.