U.S. approved Israeli raid, Arafat says

United Press International

Transcribed from the clipping

“TUNIS, Tunisia (UPI) — Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat led thousands of mourners yesterday at the funeral of 17 Palestinians killed in the Israeli air raid on PLO headquarters near Tunis. In Paris and Bern, Switzerland, parades protested the attack.

In an interview published today in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, Arafat accused President Reagan of personally approving the Israeli raid in an attempt to assassinate him. The mass funeral, which was attended by senior Tunisian officials, came a day after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel for Tuesday’s attack.

Arafat, who was out jogging during the attack on his headquarters, addressed the crowd in a choked voice, saying the attack had ‘mixed Palestinian and Tunisian blood.’ ‘I especially regret that Tunisia was the victim of the Israeli attack,’ he said. ‘This is not the first time for us, we are used to it.’

At least 73 were killed and 100 injured in Tuesday’s raid, carried out by eight Israeli F-15 jet fighters. Israel said the attack was in retaliation for the Yom Kippur killings of three Israelis in Cyprus. Arafat told Al Ahram the raid was Reagan’s response to a Middle East peace proposal made by the PLO and Jordan.

The PLO chief said he remained committed to the PLO-Jordanian initiative, but vowed to ‘find new ways to impose our just peace’ and vowed to escalate action against Israel. ‘We need a complete reassessment,’ Arafat said. ‘What happened was not simply a raid by Israeli warplanes.

It is a premeditated American-Israeli operation, approved by President Reagan, to assassinate the chairman of the PLO.’ ‘Isn’t the message clear? Doesn’t it mean that they do not want peace?’ Arafat also called for an emergency Arab summit ‘to deal with the gauntlet that was hurled at the face of all Arabs.’

The mourners, many of them women and children, jammed streets near the leveled headquarters as uniformed Tunisian soldiers and PLO fighters marched solemnly past carrying 17 coffins aloft. The United States, which initially called the Israeli raid a ‘legitimate act of self-defense,’ has since backed off that approval.

Washington abstained in Friday’s Security Council vote, allowing the resolution condemning the attack to pass 14-0. Bourguiba praised the U.S. move in a statement Saturday.”

Context added by this archive

A photograph of a man embracing a mourner runs above a headline that is about what an American president approved. Seventy-three people were killed; seventeen coffins are carried past in the copy. The United States called the raid a legitimate act of self-defense and then abstained four days later, which the story records in consecutive paragraphs.

Cite this item

"U.S. approved Israeli raid, Arafat says," Pittsburgh Press, 6 October 1985. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-007