FOR the second time in less than a month, the pleasure capital of the Middle East was racked last week by deadly gun battles. The fighting in Beirut this time was more widespread, more prolonged and bloodier. The combatants also were different. Three weeks ago, it was Jews against Arabs, as Israeli commandos slipped ashore from gunboats, assassinated three Palestinian leaders and killed at least 14 other people in a carefully coordinated attack on fedayeen installations. Last week it was Arab against Arab, as the Lebanese army fought Palestinian guerrillas on scattered fronts in and around Beirut for two days. By the time the fighting subsided, at least 60 Palestinians and Lebanese soldiers and civilians were dead. Scores more had been wounded.
The battles marked the toughest crackdown by an Arab nation on the fedayeen since King Hussein crushed the Palestinian movement in Jordan in 1970. With a military ferocity they have seldom displayed before, the Lebanese used planes, tanks, armored vehicles, mortars and machine guns. Ironically, the fierce attack on the fedayeen came from a nation that has consistently been among the Arab states most hospitable to Palestinians.
With a population of its own of fewer than 3,000,000, Lebanon supports 300,000 Palestinian refugees, many in special camps. But relations between the Lebanese and the Palestinians have recently become increasingly uneasy. To the Lebanese, the Israeli raids in April demonstrated again the dangers they face by harboring the fedayeen. To the guerrillas, the raids showed that they are virtually unprotected in Lebanon from Israeli reprisals.
Tension built rapidly toward the start of last week. The Lebanese arrested two fedayeen at the Beirut International Airport after finding explosives in their luggage. The murderous Black September movement then planted a bomb at the airport in an effort to secure the release of the two Nice-bound travelers and an accused accomplice. Luckily, the bomb was found and defused. Then, early last week, four members of the radical Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine were arrested for carrying explosives. The army accused them of planning to blow up the U.S. embassy. The small P.D.F.L.P., which lost five members in the Israeli raids, promptly kidnaped two soldiers and threatened to hold them as hostages until its men were freed. The army refused the trade, and early Wednesday the fighting began.
The shooting apparently started near a refugee camp between the city and the airport. By midmorning it had spread to other camps around Beirut and to various sections of the city itself. Nada Khaled Yashruti, 33, the widow of a former Al-Fatah leader, was fatally riddled with twelve bullets as she entered her home in the well-to-do district of Raouche. She had just come from trying to help negotiate a cease-fire with Lebanon's President Suleiman Franjieh. A Lebanese newsman was killed when soldiers raked the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a nearby area.