Border Violence, Hands of Peace

An experience of fire followed by an exchange of words

Bloody violence broke out once more last week across the border between Israel and Lebanon. From bases below the Litani River, Palestinian fedayeen launched a series of attacks with Soviet-made Katyusha rockets on the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya. Three Israelis, one a 35-year-old mother of two, were killed and five wounded.

To revenge the dead and discourage further attacks, Israel retaliated--and perhaps overreacted--with heavy artillery barrages and bombing raids on southern Lebanon. When the Israeli Phantoms and Kfirs had completed their runs and wheeled back to base, three villages--'Izziyah, Hinniyah and Burj al Shamali--had been all but wiped out. The Lebanese government claimed that at least 119 people, most of them women and children, were dead and more than 200 were wounded. The casualty toll was the worst ever in southern Lebanon, exceeding that of a similar Israeli raid on Dec. 2, 1975, in which 100 died and 150 were wounded.

The eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth warfare snapped a six-week cease-fire along the border that had been arranged by the U.S. The confrontation threatened to snag the slow and painful process by which President Carter hopes to get Israelis and Arabs together at a Geneva peace conference, presumably this year. At his press conference last week, Carter deplored the heavy loss of life, but he declined to single out Israel for striking what had obviously turned out to be civilian targets. "The overriding consideration," the President said, "is not to condemn Israel at this point for retaliation, but just to say that if the provocations were absent then the retaliation would have been unnecessary."

Palestinian spokesmen last week insisted that Israel had broken the ceasefire first with heavy artillery barrages on Nabatiyah and nearby Beaufort Castle, an ancient crusader fortress below Mount Hermon that has been used by Palestinians as an observation post. In retaliation, the Katyushas were launched on Nahariya from Hill 352, apparently by soldiers of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israeli military commanders believed that Syria might have condoned the rocketing, since the trucks that carried the Katyushas had not been halted at Syrian checkpoints just north of the Litani River. (The river marks the "Red Line" of Israel, below which it will not allow Syrian troops.)

After the bombing raids, Lieut. General Mordechai Gur, Israel's chief of staff, insisted that his pilots had struck the targets assigned them. Said he: "We know for sure that the bombing was accurate and the results were good. We did not attack any civilian areas or refugee camps."

That was untrue--as Western newsmen who visited the scene quickly discovered. In a highly unusual move, Premier Menachem Begin summoned U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis to his office in Jerusalem to express sympathy for the victims. Said Begin: "If the news reports are correct on civilian casualties, we regret it very deeply, but we do not apologize for the operation itself. If there is quiet on the other side, there will be absolute quiet on our side."

TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis, who drove south from Beirut to the scene of the raids, last week filed this report: "The Israeli bombers dropped enough bombs on 'Izziyah to wipe Yankee Stadium off the face of the earth. In all, 54 houses were leveled. What had once been a village was suddenly a furrowed land of 20-odd bomb craters.

"I came upon a man digging with his hands, pushing aside rubble and raising dust, his eyes scared. 'Somewhere under here are my two children,' he said softly. Those who had escaped by hiding in the caves where livestock are generally kept hunted for other survivors; when they heard a cry, they dug. A lady in black walked through the rubble carrying a mirror almost as tall as she and somehow still intact. Pausing to rest, she set it carefully on the ground for a moment. 'Now I've lost my husband,' she said. 'And my question is Why kill us? We don't fight.'

"Nearby Hinniyah suffered a similar fate. Burj al Shamali, the Palestinian refugee camp, fared somewhat better, although its hospital was half destroyed by bombs that killed nine children inside. Taking casualties at Tyre General Hospital, a few miles away on the coast, Dr. Yussek Iraki angrily said: 'All the people I have treated were 100% civilians. None was a Palestinian fighter.' "

Infuriated by the casualties, Palestinians again unleashed scattered new rounds of Katyushas, most of which hit around Kibbutz Yir'on near the border. That led to a second Israeli bombing raid. The fedayeen were ordered to cease firing by Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Earlier in the week, Arafat had been present at an extraordinary nationally televised address to the Egyptian parliament by President Anwar Sadat, who did not even mention the air raids that had just taken place in Lebanon. Declared Sadat: "There is no time to lose. I am ready to go to their house, to the Knesset, to discuss peace with the Israeli leaders."

At week's end Begin responded to this rhetorical offer in a peace message addressed to "citizens of Egypt." Said the Israeli Premier: "We, the Israelis, stretch out our hand to you. It will be a pleasure to welcome and receive your President with the traditional hospitality you and we have inherited from our common father, Abraham. And I, for my part, will be ready to come to your capital, Cairo, for the same purpose: no more wars--peace, a real peace, and forever."

Of course, neither leader is likely to visit the other's capital in the near future. In fact, Sadat immediately brushed off Begin's appeal as an attempt to divide the Arabs on the eve of their Mideast strategy meeting in Tunis. Nonetheless, the proposals were certainly a more hopeful exchange than the deadly one that racked southern Lebanon last week.

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