3 Israeli soldiers slain in attack

Aircraft assault Palestinian refugee camps after Arab raid

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This report was delayed by the Israeli military censor, who made no changes. EIN IBRAHIM, Israel (AP) — Israeli aircraft early Sunday attacked two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, hours after Arab assailants raided an army camp in Israel and hacked to death three soldiers. Lebanese police said the raids killed one person and wounded nine.

A brief statement from the Israeli military did not give a reason for the attacks on the Ein el-Hilweh and Rashidiyeh camps, but did say “the targets belonged to Fatah.”

Fatah, the mainstream faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was accused by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens of mounting the attack on the army camp, which is 23 miles southeast of the coastal city of Haifa. Ein El-Hilweh is the largest of 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon, and has roughly 33,000 residents; Rashidiyeh has about 20,000 inhabitants.

Rashidiyeh was one of the camps where the Lebanese army last July disarmed Palestinian guerrillas. The attackers in Israel were Palestinians or Israeli Arabs who struck as the victims slept in a base near the occupied West Bank, army officials said. A fourth soldier was moderately wounded.

It was the first time in the four-year Palestinian uprising that local Arabs hit a base in Israel. Army radio said the raid was audaciously planned, and others compared it to a 1987 attack by hang-glider from Lebanon that set the stage for the uprising. The attack, which came on the Jewish Sabbath, was expected to prompt a public outcry over military preparedness.

Two of those slain arrived only recently from the former Soviet Union and had been in the army a few weeks. The apparent ease with which the attackers operated sent shockwaves through Israel, as reflected in a question by Israel television’s military reporter to army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak.

“When a veteran soldier like you ... sees a chain of things that simply can’t be — no response, no opening of fire, communications problems ... no struggle with the terrorists, the terrorists leaving an area like this clean, unharmed — how do you react?” reporter Motti Eden asked Barak.

“It is an extremely serious incident,” Barak said after arriving by helicopter at the camp near the Israeli Arab village of Ein Ibrahim. The killings were likely to cause political repercussions that could affect the Middle East peace talks.

Army radio reported Parliament would meet this week to discuss the raid. [A paragraph here reports the manner in which the three soldiers were killed; it is summarized rather than transcribed.] An AP reporter at the camp saw a cot in one tent covered with blood, and a puddle of blood outside.

News of the slayings was held up by military censors for nearly 16 hours while the victims’ families were notified. Troops descended on the area to launch a search. Flares lit the green, windswept hills around the camp, helicopters flew overhead and Bedouin trackers were called in.

Police said about a dozen Israeli Arabs were rounded up for questioning in Ein Ibrahim and nearby Muawiya. Army radio quoted residents in the nearby West Bank town of Jenin as saying a claim of responsibility was made by the Black Panthers, a local PLO militia, but radio reports said Islamic fundamentalists were suspected.

How this transcription was made

Full article transcribed from 8x crops of all four columns. The paragraph describing how the soldiers were killed is replaced with one neutral bracketed clause; the following sentence about what the AP reporter saw is kept because it is brief and carries the censorship fact. Caption transcribed as printed, including "cammp." — No masthead, folio or date line on the clipping. Maria's label is carried over unverified. This is the same Associated Press story as the s100_1 record but a fuller setting by a different paper — different headline, a deck, a photograph and caption, and three paragraphs s100_1 does not carry. Sibling, not duplicate. — No date printed. The caption dates the raid to "Saturday morning" and the body dates the air strikes to "early Sunday," so the paper is of Sunday February 16, 1992 at the earliest. Same caution as s100_1: a Sunday paper carrying early-Sunday strikes is tight, and Monday February 17 is also plausible. Flagged, not changed.

Cite this clipping

"3 Israeli soldiers slain in attack," Dickinson Press, 16 February 1992. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1992-026. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1992-026