Many Palestinians Killed In Israeli Revenge Raids

Transcribed from the clipping

“…low-income housing project near there was heavily damaged by waves of Israeli F4 Phantom jets. An Arab guerrilla at the scene said as many as 300 persons may have been killed or wounded in the complex. A doctor at a hospital in Sidon said 50 casualties were brought in there and 11 of the victims were dead on arrival.

‘Many other casualties were taken to another hospital in the city, but I don’t know how many,’ the doctor said. In Cairo, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy warned that Arab states could not stand idly by in the face of ‘Israeli acts of aggression.’

And in Washington, the White House said of the Arab attack on Maalot and the Israeli retaliatory strikes: ‘Continuing cycles of violence of this sort can only obstruct the achievement of a peaceful settlement of the Middle East.’

Despite the Israeli air strikes into Lebanon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew as scheduled to Damascus Thursday and held long discussions with Syrian President Hafez Assad in a continuing effort to bring about a troop disengagement along the Israeli-Syrian front.

In his report on the Israeli raid near Sidon, Jensen said one of the three-story apartment houses in the housing complex was demolished and that entire walls and all the windows of others were blown out. Bomb craters 20 feet deep could be seen all around the area.

The main target of the Israeli attack in the Sidon area was the Ein el Helweh refugee camp, largest in Lebanon, Jensen said. Guerrillas there said scores of children were buried in rubble in the camp and that many more casualties were coming in from the Lebanese-populated housing complex.

Three other persons were reported killed in Nabatiyem, a township 10 miles southeast of Sidon. A spokesman in Sidon for the Al Fatah guerrilla organization said the Israeli air strikes in that area lasted about 45 minutes. The Lebanese Defense Ministry in Beirut earlier said the raids on all seven guerrilla bases and refugee camps lasted about 20 minutes.

The spokesman, identifying himself only as ‘Salah,’ told Jensen he saw 12 Israeli Phantoms striking together at one time. ‘Tell your government that Phantoms are very effective against innocent civilians,’ the spokesman added. Ambulances sped down the coast highway into Sidon packed with casualties on blood-spattered stretchers.

Armed Palestinian guerrillas patroled the devastated areas, Jensen reported. Funerals for the teen-age victims of the Maalot incident began in northern Israel just as word was given to the nation that the air strikes were carried out.

The Israeli military command first said the air strikes were aimed only at guerrillas bases but since some of these are near refugee camps civilian areas may have been hit. It said at first that the raids were strategic military strikes and not revenge actions for Maalot.

Fire and smoke rose up from a guerrilla base near the international airport at Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. Air raid sirens sounded in that city for the first time since the Middle East war in October and people scurried for cover as Israeli planes shrieked overhead. In four towns in northern Israel, funeral services were held for the Maalot victims.

A service at Safad, near Maalot, was broken off when a group of youths broke through police lines shouting, ‘Death to the Terrorists!’ President Ephraim Katzir of Israel and Deputy Premier Yigal Allon tried to calm them but failed. They departed under heavy police guard.

The terrorists seized about 85 Israeli teen-agers in a school at Maalot on Wednesday and threatened to blow them up unless Israel released 20 terrorists held in Israeli jails. Israeli troops rushed the building with guns blazing in what officials said was an operation to prevent the terrorists from killing the children.

There has been no official report on how the children were killed or wounded — whether by crossfire or by the Arabs themselves. An Israeli military source maintained, however: ‘All the children were killed by the terrorists. The Arabs started shooting the kids immediately when Israeli soldiers entered the building.’

Targets in Thursday’s retaliatory air raids included the Urj el-Barajneh guerrilla camp near the Beirut airport; the Hein el Halweh camp near Sidon, which was Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp; the Al Ashbal camp, also near Sidon, which was used as a military training center for Palestinians; the second largest refugee camp, at Rashidieh, on the outskirts of the Biblical port city of Tyre, 40 miles South of Beirut; and the southern Lebanese villages of Rachieya el Foukhar, Khraibe and Mahrouneh also were attacked.

An Israeli military communique said: ‘Targets attacked included terrorist concentrations in southern Lebanon and Fatahland, and offices, headquarters, ordinances and workshops of terrorist organizations in the Nabativa Sidon and Sur region—on the Lebanese coast.’ ‘Also attacked was a training camp of the Popular Front, south of Beirut.

The targets … belong to Al Fatah and the Popular Front—Habash—and the Popular Front Jebel and Hawatmeh Popular Democratic Front. The latter two organizations were involved in yesterday’s acts at Maalot.’”

Context added by this archive

The headline names who did the killing and calls the raids revenge, which the Israeli military command in the same copy says they were not. Underneath it, the paper prints both of the day’s accounts of the Maalot school: that there is no official report on how the children were killed, and an Israeli military source saying all of them were killed by the attackers.

The photograph of Sidon shares the page with an illustrated advertisement for summer fashions.

Cite this item

"Many Palestinians Killed In Israeli Revenge Raids," The Wichita Eagle, 17 May 1974. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1974-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1974-006