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In the meantime, commandos were attacking the southern Lebanese coastline. Missile boats strafed the port of Tyre, and air force planes bombed the Palestinian strongholds at Damur, Tyre and Ouzai. Frogmen landed at several points along the coast and attacked Palestinian command posts, killing several officials. In most cases, however, the Palestinian leadership had already left. In Beirut, top P.L.O. leaders had learned of the
Israeli attack a day before it began and had hastily moved to new hideouts.
The Israelis' tactics seemed to be successful in holding down their own casualties. At week's end the death toll stood at 14 Israeli troops, v. some 450 Palestinians. (About 20 Palestinians were taken prisoner; their disposition was still to be settled at week's end.) Yet for all of Washington's urging that the Israelis minimize the impact on the civilian population, the results appeared to be devastating. By the third day of the invasion, TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis reported, "the exodus of Lebanese from the area was both enormous and pitiful. As many as 200,000 people fled their homes, clogging the roads heading north toward Beirut. On the coastal highway, tractors pulled wagons filled with livestock; children could be seen riding in the trunks of crowded automobiles, sitting with the open trunk doors curving over their heads like umbrellas. At Aadloun, a town well north of the Litani River, two Mercedes taxis packed with families fleeing the fighting were ambushed by an Israeli reconnaissance party; men, women and children—14 in all—were slaughtered by machine guns and rockets (a fin from one of them was found, bearing Hebrew letters). The sight was ghastly: flesh hanging out of windows, bullet holes gouged in the doors, a child's charred arm on the road. Palestinians guided traffic while others went about the grisly task of removing the dead.
Farther south in Tyre, all that remained of a population that once numbered 45,000 was a few hundred aged Lebanese civilians and scores of teen-age Palestinian fighters. Smoke rose from the ruins of a building hit by Israeli bombs. Palestinians and Lebanese dug through rubble in search of bodies. The bombardment seemed to have been indiscriminate, both from the air and from ships offshore. Except for one Palestinian antiaircraft gun on the outskirts of town, no military targets had been hit. The port remained undamaged. What had been hit, and hard, was the civilian dwellings. Was this deliberate counterterror on the part of the Israelis? It certainly looked that way."