Terrorists Seize Bus In Israel

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Transcribed from the clipping

Editor's note: This dispatch was subject to censorship by the Israeli military censors. TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Arab gunmen who reportedly came from the sea seized a tourist bus Saturday on the main Israeli coastal highway and the bus blew up after a 30-mile ride toward Tel Aviv, police said. Sources said several civilians died in the attack.

No official casualty figure was immediately available. A Tel Aviv city spokesman said 10 persons were hospitalized here. Witnesses said the bus caught fire in a shootout with Israeli troops, but Israeli military censors clamped down on efforts to report further details.

In Beirut, a spokesman claiming to represent Yasser Arafat's Palestinian guerrilla group Al Fatah telephoned The Associated Press and said Al Fatah had carried out the attack. “The enemy forces rushed army and police units to the area,” the caller said. “Our forces managed to destroy completely two trucks carrying a number of Zionist enemy soldiers.”

At least some of the attackers escaped from the bus and were believed to be hiding in the farm fields and coastal scrub seven miles north of Tel Aviv, Israeli radio said. The nationalities and number of people aboard the bus were not known. Police sealed off the area and a search was mounted for the escaped terrorists.

“There were six or seven of them, and they were continually shooting over our head,” passenger Arza Tazor, 24, told reporters. “I remember police breaking the windows of the bus and telling us to jump,” she said. “I jumped.” She was hosptialized in shock.

Israeli radio said the gunmen came by sea and beached at the kibbutz cooperative farm Maagan Michael, 37 miles north of Tel Aviv. The road is Israel's main coastal highway. The radio said the gunmen had fired on passing cars for several minutes before the bus went up in flames.

Air force helicopters were circling the site as ambulances raced back and forth along the highway, witnesses said. The gutted, smoking red bus stood beyond a police barricade on the north-south highway.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [no masthead on clipping] — One scan of part of a newspaper page, read at 8x-10x across four columns. The whole article is transcribed. A large Associated Press Wirephoto of the burned-out bus occupies the lower right with the caption transcribed above. The page also carries a SEPARATE, unrelated article in the lower left column, "Crash Victim Is Identified," about an Anchorage pilot killed in a light plane crash near Lake Clark Pass; it is not part of this record. That local Alaska story is incidentally the strongest corroboration on the page that this is an Anchorage paper, since no masthead is visible. No date line or page number; the date rests on Maria's slide label. The internal evidence fits it: the attack happened Saturday 11 March 1978 Israel time, the article says "Saturday," and the caption says "today" and "this morning," which works for an Anchorage evening paper roughly eleven hours behind Israel.

Cite this clipping

"Terrorists Seize Bus In Israel," (newspaper unidentified), 11 March 1978. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1978-023. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1978-023