Israel retaliates after Arab attack

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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 today 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 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 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 of the operation 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 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.

How this transcription was made

The complete article, read in printed order: left column, then the column to its right under the "WORLD" section flag. It runs a little over 2,000 characters and was kept whole because the closing paragraph on the peace talks is the point the article builds to. "Hacked to death three soldiers" is the paper's own single-clause account of the attack and is kept verbatim; no passage dwells on graphic physical detail, so nothing was compressed. Printed inconsistency kept as set: the camp is "Ein el-Hilweh" in one paragraph and "Ein El-Hilweh" in the next. "WORLD" is a standing section flag sitting between the headline and the second column, not a deck, so `dek` is empty. A sliver of an unrelated adjacent story, roughly two letters wide, runs down the right edge of the scan; it is unreadable and not transcribed. — No masthead, folio or running head survives on this clipping. The top edge of the scan is a plain rule above the photograph; nothing identifies the paper. `pub` is carried from Maria's label only. Flagging a second thing for the record: the Binghamton paper normally sets its own name as "Press & Sun-Bulletin" (ampersand, hyphen), not "The Press and Sun Bulletin". I cannot test that against this page because the page carries no masthead, and I have not changed the label — but if the archive is going to hold a paper under this spelling, somebody should check it against a scan that does show a masthead before it becomes a separate newspaper in the counts. — No date line on the clipping. Internal evidence fits a Sunday paper in mid-February 1992 and is consistent with Maria's label: the photo caption dates the manhunt to "Saturday"; the body says the attack "came on the Jewish Sabbath" and that Israeli aircraft struck "early today", i.e. the morning of publication; it calls the intifada "the four-year Palestinian uprising" (begun December 1987); it names Moshe Arens as Israeli Defense Minister and Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak as army chief of staff (Barak took that post in April 1991); and it refers to soldiers newly arrived "from the former Soviet Union", which dates it after December 1991. February 15, 1992 was a Saturday, so a February 16, 1992 paper fits. Not proved by the page.

Cite this clipping

"Israel retaliates after Arab attack," Press and Sun Bulletin, 16 February 1992. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1992-027. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1992-027