Will avenge Tal Zaatar, Palestinians warn foes

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BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — The Palestinians and their leftist Moslems Lebanese allies threatened today to avenge the fall of the Tal Zaatar Palestinian camp and vowed that Lebanon’s civil war would continue. Palestinian leader Farouk Kaddoumi said his men would “avenge Tal Zaatar elsewhere in Lebanon.”

Leftist papers said the Moslems might “escalate fighting in Christian-held mountain areas,” through which Moslem villages are still scattered. “Lebanese will have to brace for a protracted war,” said Kamal Jumblatt, the Moslem leader of the Lebanese leftists. “We must brace ourselves for more shocks, similar to that of Tal Zaatar.

“Our prime duty now is to set up a strong popular army to resist the Syrian invasion and to liberate captured areas. We will have to resist partition, because a Christian state in our midst would turn out to be another Israel in the heart of the Arab region.”

The fall of Tal Zaatar Thursday removed the last Moslem stronghold from Christian East Beirut and consolidated the area with the Christian hinterland north of the capital. Christian militiamen fought mop-up actions today against isolated pockets of defenders in the 74-acre camp.

Palestinian sources said scattered hand-tohand fighting continued but admitted that the camp had been conquered. Hours after Tal Zaatar fell, Moslem gunmen of the Ambushers militia laid siege to the Assyrian quarter in the heart of Moslem West Beirut.

The Ambushers accused the quarter’s 3,000 Christians of supporting “Christian atrocities” against refugees from Tal Zaatar. Street fighting escalated during the night along the dividing line in Beirut and nearby mountain towns. An incomplete count of casualties by security officers and hospitals showed at least 186 persons killed and 215 wounded.

The war has taken more than 34,000 lives since it erupted in April 1975. Leftist gunners fired artillery and mortar barrages into the Christian suburb of Ashrafiyeh, and Christians returned the fire, officials said.

A spokesman for the French Embassy said two French guards were killed and a third one was wounded when shells hit a terrace in the embassy compound in western Beirut and the ambassaodr’s residence. Leftist sources said Christian militias supported by Syrian forces were “opening a new front” in mountain areas southeast of Beirut.

They said the Syrians had reinforced positions near Jezzine and Dhahr Ramleh, east of the Moslem port of Sidon, with 40 tanks equipped with long-range cannon. Christian leaders estimated that 200 to 300 Palestinians were still fighting from underground bunkers, slit trenches and the ruins of houses in Tal Zaatar.

“There can’t be more than seven of them in any one spot,” said a weeping old man. “The boys who were fighting, may Allah rest their souls, were all killed.”

Christian artillerymen held their fire as some 12,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians — most of them old people and children — poured out of the camp and through the Christian lines to Moslem West Beirut.

Arab League mediator Hassan Sabri Kholi said 8,000 persons were evacuated by trucks supplied by the Red Cross, the League’s peacekeeping force and the Christian Phalange militia, while 4,000 fled on foot. Christian fighters overran the Moslem slum of Nabaa, about a mile from Tal Zaatar, last weekend.

The twin conquests continued the de facto partition of the smaller-than-Connecticut nation.

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"Will avenge Tal Zaatar, Palestinians warn foes," The Anniston Star, 13 August 1976. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1976-029. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1976-029