Israeli Naval Patrols See Trouble Brewing

By NICOLAS B. TATRO, Associated Press Writer

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Editor's Note: This story was submitted to the Israeli military censor who ordered a deletion. OFF THE LEBANON COAST — Pointing to a map of Lebanon’s coast, the captain of the Israeli patrol boat Dvora says the possibility of a Palestinian guerrilla attack has seldom been greater.

“In the eight years I have been on these boats, I don’t remember a time when there was such certainty in the air that something was going to happen,” said Capt. Chen.

He spoke as the 69-foot craft sliced through the waters a few hundred yards off the south Lebanon coast, sweeping the coastline with radar and occasionally stabbing through the darkness with a powerful searchlight.

The tension felt by Chen and his eight-member crew is reflected throughout Israel at a time when efforts to arrange Palestinian-Israeli negotiations are at a standstill.

Palestinian guerrillas, including hard-liners who oppose PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s diplomatic initiative, have mounted two recent seaborne raids, using speedboats for the first time and finding a chink in Israel’s armor.

On the Jewish holiday of Shavuot on May 30, boats with heavily armed Palestinians from Abul Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front were launched from a mother ship that had set sail from Libya. One outran Israeli defenders and reached the shore near a crowded beach resort before four Arabs were killed and seven captured.

The attack prompted the United States to suspend its political dialogue with the PLO. On June 23, Chen’s Dvora — Bee in Hebrew — ran down a speedboat heading toward the Israeli border settlement of Rosh Haniqra and killed two guerrillas armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles.

Responsibility was claimed by a fundamentalist faction of Lebanese Sunni Moslems, traditional allies of the PLO. Ariel Merari, a terror expert at Tel Aviv University, says a successful raid could set off a chain reaction that could end in a new Middle East war.

He notes that terror raids were a contributing factor to the 1956, 1967 and 1982 wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “A single dramatic terror attack or series of smaller ones change the atmosphere and trigger a war,” he said.

… Chen, whose full name could not be used in keeping with military regulations, was surrounded by a bank of squawking radios linking him to other Israeli patrol craft as well as radar and other shore installations.

How this transcription was made

Excerpt is the left-hand column in full, which is the article's opening run, stopped at a complete sentence; the piece continues in two columns beneath the photograph and the full text was read at magnification but not transcribed past this point. Printed as set and not repaired: "ones change the atmosphere" in the Merari quotation (no "can"), "Moslems", and "Rosh Haniqra". No passage dwells on graphic physical detail, so nothing was compressed. The paper sets the headline in title case with every word capitalized. — Running head across the top of the page reads "HICKORY DAILY RECORD—Wed., July 4, 1990—9D", in full capitals for the title. Matches Maria's label exactly. — The page's own running head reads "Wed., July 4, 1990". July 4, 1990 was a Wednesday. The body's internal chronology fits: a raid on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot "on May 30" and a second incident "On June 23", both earlier the same year. Maria's label agrees. A further passage was transcribed from the scan on 2 November 2026: the sentence in which the paper reports that the captain’s full name could not be used.

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"Israeli Naval Patrols See Trouble Brewing," Hickory Daily Record, 4 July 1990, p. 9D. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1990-034. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1990-034