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MIDDLE EAST: A Sabbath of Terror

9 minute read
TIME

Palestinian death squad lands in Israel with a savage message

Their orders were to kill until they themselves were killed. And thus last week a Palestinian suicide mission left a grisly trail of carnage along Israel’s main coastal highway from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Slipping ashore from the Mediterranean on the afternoon of the Sabbath, the terrorists hijacked two buses filled with tourists and sightseers, took them on a wild ride down the road toward Tel Aviv, shooting along the way at everyone in sight, and finally destroyed one bus in an orgy of fire and death. Official statistics put the dead at 37 (all but a few of them civilians, among them at least 10 children) and 76 wounded—a toll that exceeded the 1972 Munich massacre (11 dead) and the slaughter at a Ma’alot school in 1974 (26). It was the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.

The Sabbath massacre came on the eve of Israeli Premier Menachem Begin’s scheduled departure for Washington, where he was to confer with President Carter this week on the derailed Middle East peace talks. Begin immediately went into a huddle with members of his Cabinet, then announced that he would postpone his visit to Washington for at least a week. Deeply shocked by the massacre in the midst of renewed efforts toward a Middle East peace settlement, the world waited anxiously for Israel’s reaction, which in the past has been to retaliate for terrorism on its soil with severe blows against the Palestinians. Begin finished a grim TV and radio report to the Israeli nation by vowing: “We shall not forget.”

The timing of the attack left no doubt about the terrorists’ purpose: to sabotage any attempt by Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to move toward a peace that would ignore or bypass Palestinian interests. In fact, the attack will make any peace at all more difficult. Certainly, it will reinforce Israel’s resistance to any kind of Palestinian state on its borders, make the Israelis distrust all Arabs more than ever, and stiffen Begin’s stance toward making further Israeli concessions in any peace talks. The attack seemed to be the opening salvo of a new policy by Palestinian leaders, launched in Tripoli last December at the Arab states’ rejectionist summit, to carry to Israel’s soil the war against Sadat’s peace initiative. Sure enough, shortly after Saturday’s bloodbath, Al-Fatah, the commando group within Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed responsibility for the operation from its headquarters in Beirut.

The commandos were carefully chosen and highly trained for their suicidal mission. The plan called for them to seize a bus and use it as a shooting platform to aim at anybody, civilian or military, who happened to come along the highway. Their only purpose was to kill as many Israelis as possible. If they could carry it off, they were to take the bus into the very center of Tel Aviv and continue the carnage until they were wiped out.

The death squad, consisting of 11 terrorists, two of them women, is believed to have been launched from a ship offshore, from which they put out in two Zodiak commando boats, loaded down with Kalashnikov rifles, RPG light montars and high explosives. In late afternoon they beached near a kibbutz called Ma’agan Mikha’el, then walked less than a mile up to the four-lane highway. After opening fire at passing traffic, they hijacked a white Mercedes taxi, killing its occupants. Setting off down the highway toward Tel Aviv, they met a bus on its way to Haifa. They fired at the bus, wounding its driver and some passengers and forcing it to a stop. One of the passengers on the bus was Avraham Shamir, 42, who was returning to his home in Haifa from a visit to the stalactite caves near Jerusalem. After first ordering everyone off the bus, said Shamir, the terrorists “ordered us all back on, turned the bus around by crossing the traffic island dividing the highway, and headed southward, yelling ‘To Tel Aviv, to Tel Aviv!’ ”

The pattern of random terror continued for nearly 30 miles. Witnesses said the gunmen fired machine guns and threw grenades at passing cars from the hijacked bus. Some passengers inside the bus were fired on, and at least one body was dumped along the way. An American youth who was driving from Tel Aviv to Haifa with his family reported seeing “a car standing on the other side of the highway and a body lying near by. Moments later,” he said, “I saw a bus zigzagging toward our side of the highway. When we came close it stopped. Somebody came down from the front door of the bus with a submachine gun and shot at us. All the windows were smashed and the glass fell on us. My father shouted, ‘Look at my arm!’ I pushed him aside and took the wheel. He had a huge hole in his chest. My brother, who had been sleeping in the back seat, was in terrible condition. When we reached the hospital, I asked the doctor if my father and brother had a chance. He said, ‘Sorry, son. Both are dead.’ ”

Farther down the highway, the commandeered bus met another bus, also heading toward Haifa. The terrorists stopped this bus too, and forced its passengers to crowd onto the first one. The hostages now numbered 71, and the police were on the trail. The bus approached one hastily erected checkpoint and careened right through it. Then, just outside Tel Aviv, police set up a roadblock, seeded the highway with nails, and positioned themselves alongside. There the wild trail of terror finally came to an end. By that time, reported TIME Correspondent David Halevy, who was the only reporter on the scene, “the highway looked like a slaughterhouse. It was worse than anything I saw at the school shot up by terrorists in Ma’alot.”

There had not been time to order in Israel’s crack antiterrorist squads. So the task of stopping the terrorists fell to some 30 traffic cops, armed only with .38 revolvers and UZI submachine guns. When the bus finally skidded into a ditch with all its tires flat, the police rushed it. Said Arza Tazor, 24, a passenger: “I remember police breaking the windows of the bus and telling us to jump. I jumped.”

Passenger Shamir said he took the pistol of one of the terrorists lying near him, apparently wounded, and shot two others who were firing from the front of the bus at the police outside. “Meanwhile,” he said, “another terrorist behind me fired at me and my daughter. The terrorists near me took out four hand grenades and dropped them in the bus. I shouted: ‘Escape! Escape!’ The bus was in flames. My daughter was hit again. Outside, there was a terrorist who was firing at everybody who was escaping from the bus. A few managed to escape. Some were caught in the fire.” Later, 25 charred bodies were found in the bus.

TIME’s Halevy managed to get past the Israeli guards and observe the shooting and explosions at first hand. Reports he: “I finally got close enough to the bus to see at least five bodies burning inside. The rear windows were blasted out and the barrel of a machine-gun was poking out. A child aged seven or eight was lying on the asphalt, a bullet hole in its head. Three women in a nearby ditch screamed for help. I helped them limp to waiting ambulances. A young couple emerged from the ditch screaming, ‘We had two children in the bus.’ The woman was hysterical. ‘Where are my children, my children?’ she cried. The husband was steely calm. ‘If my children are dead,’ he said with eerie softness, ‘I’ll kill all the Arabs in the world.’ ”

Six terrorists and one Israeli policeman died in the action. Coincidentally, Shaul Weizman, 26, the son of Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who was later called home from a visit to Washington because of the attack, happened to be walking along the beach with an army colonel in the area of the gun battle. Weizman and the colonel grabbed their weapons (it is not unusual for Israelis to carry weapons) and helped capture two of the terrorists. By that time, heavily armed Israeli troops had moved into the region in force. Police clamped a curfew on northern Tel Aviv and launched an intensive man hunt for three commandos who were still missing.

News of the attack broke in Israel just as Deputy Chief of the U.S. Mission Richard Viets delivered Anwar Sadat’s reply to Premier Begin’s last letter. Begin made no immediate comment about Israeli response to the terrorist attack. But at a press conference in New York before taking off for Israel, Defense Minister Weizman admitted that retaliatory air strikes in southern Lebanon were “a possibility.” That, of course, has been the pattern in the past, and Israel might well seize on the provocation as an excuse to put into action a plan to knock out encampments of the 5,000 Palestinians dug in near the border area.

In Washington, Administration officials seemed resigned to the fact that Israel would retaliate. Still, said one, “the hope is that they won’t do it in an indiscriminate way that will result in a lot of Lebanese civilian deaths. The thing we don’t want is to have the emotional level raised to such a point that it will affect the already delicate negotiations that are going on.” But President Carter sent Begin a message saying he was still looking forward to their meeting. “Criminal acts such as this,” said the President in a statement, “advance no cause or political belief. They inspire only revulsion at the lack of respect for innocent human life.”

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