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By week's end the Israeli forces had strengthened their grip on the southern sector of West Beirut, where most of the P.L.O. guerrillas are believed to be based. Some authorities, noting the intensity of last week's military action, thought the Israelis had abandoned the idea of an all-out onslaught on West Beirut in favor of a series of limited attacks aimed at defeating the P.L.O. guerrillas step by step. In the Habib negotiations, many details concerning the P.L.O. withdrawal from Lebanon remained to be settled, but at midweek the P.L.O. sent Habib a new set of proposals that seemed promising. President Reagan asked Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to withdraw Israeli forces to the positions they had held the previous week and to maintain a ceasefire long enough to allow Habib to work out an agreement. But the Israelis refused to pull back, either because they doubted the good faith of the P.L.O. in the negotiations or because they were determined to score further gains against the P.L.O. before world pressure obliged them to accept some sort of settlement.
The week of action began on Sunday with a large-scale Israeli attack. For 14 hours Israeli forces bombarded West Beirut with the fiercest shelling since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon began. Israeli artillery, warplanes and gunboats struck at wide sections of West Beirut, including many districts that contained few guerrillas and indeed hardly any Palestinians.
After the ferocity of the Sunday attack and the worldwide condemnation that it produced, many diplomats in Lebanon expected a few days of respite. They were wrong. On Tuesday, reports reached West Beirut that the Israelis were massing tanks and armored personnel carriers at various points near the port and along the Green Line separating Muslim West Beirut and predominantly Christian East Beirut. The attack began at midnight Tuesday with exchanges of artillery and tank fire, and increased in intensity. By 2 a.m. the entire city rocked to the sound of the big guns.
In the Wednesday attack, the Israelis made four separate thrusts. One jabbed at the site of the Lebanese National Museum. As tanks rumbled up, ominously gunning their engines, the Israelis used loudspeakers to urge civilians to flee for their lives. The tanks surged on to attack the Hippodrome, a race track in a once elegant park, dominated by pine trees. Israeli M48 Patton tanks lined up on the border of the park, and troops seized nearby high-rise buildings. The assault blocked the P.L.O.'s access to ammunition depots and nearby bunkers, and gave the Israelis a staging area for future operations.
Israeli tanks also spearheaded the attack against the Beirut port region in the north of the city, but the real drive came from the south. Pushing north from International Airport, which they had seized three days earlier, the Israelis went on to take the P.L.O. military stronghold inside the Ouzai area and surround the Burj al Barajneh refugee camp. "From here the road is open to the main P.L.O. stronghold at Fakhani," said a paratrooper colonel. The area contains most of the P.L.O.'s main headquarters, including that of Chairman Yasser Arafat. The fourth thrust moved from East Beirut through Taiuni toward the important refugee camp of Shatila. The overall Israeli strategy appeared to be a pincer movement, driving west and north.