Life On Lebanese Border: Rockets, Refugees, Tourists

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Transcribed from the clipping

KLEIA, Lebanon (AP) — Driving through southern Lebanon behind the Israeli military advance is an eerie experience when you are accustomed to viewing it only through the fence from the other side of the border. For years, Israeli motorists riding near the frontier would watch the barbed-wire fence uneasily for guerrillas who occasionally took potshots at passing cars.

An Israeli acquaintance used to point to a white two-story villa with red pillars about 200 yards inside Lebanon. “Drive fast past that house,” he would say. “Sometimes they aim rocket-propelled grenades at our road.” Now I drive right in front of the house. It is deserted.

The streets of Kleia are empty except for a ragged mob of children waving and shouting “Shalom, Shalom, Israelis!” When we stop, a few men wearing green Israeli army jackets come out of buildings. They call to us in Hebrew. Israeli soldiers? No. Christians who have been supported by the Israelis in the fight against the Palestinians and their leftist Moslem allies.

Sometimes the only way to distinguish between the Christians and the Israelis is by the large crosses the former wear around their necks. Kleia has been at war for two years. A farmhouse has a gaping hole in its red-tile roof. In the front yard where you would expect to find the family station wagon, an armored car is parked.

The Katyusha rocket is a brute of a weapon — big, erratic and devastating when it hits its target. Palestinians fired four or five across the border into northern Israel, killing two Israelis. The Israeli villagers sit in the open, brimming with good humor. “The Katyusha fell — Boom! — like that,” said Tsili Namir, 19.

It blew out the ceiling and smashed the windows of a neighboring house. No one was hurt. Israeli border towns have their trove of miracle stories. Like the one about the family that decided to ignore the air raid warning and stay at the dinner table. A Katyusha crashed through their shelter. Had they been inside they probably would have died.

One woman invited her guests to take tea on the porch. Then they changed their minds because it was chilly, and sat inside. A Katyusha reduced the porch to rubble. The fighting on the Lebanese border is a minor tourist attraction. One busload of sightseers stopped at the fence and the tourists gazed at white puffs of smoke where Israeli planes were attacking.

Some stayed overnight for the experience of sleeping in shelters. “That’s something to write home about,” says one straw-hatted camera-clicker.

How this transcription was made

SEPARATE clipping on slide 96, NOT part of the Galveston truce article (which is assembled from scans 1 and 2). This is its own record. The story runs in three columns across the top of the page; a large Bamberger’s Easter Bunny breakfast advertisement occupies the lower right and is not transcribed. The story is written in the first person and appears to be cut off at the right of the scan after the sightseers paragraph. — Running head printed across the top right of the page: “Daily Record, Northwest N.J., Sunday, March 19, 1978—A9”. 19 March 1978 was a Sunday. Matches Maria’s label.

Cite this clipping

"Life On Lebanese Border: Rockets, Refugees, Tourists," The Daily Record, 19 March 1978, p. A9. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1978-029. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1978-029