12 Israelis Killed by Truck Bomb : Southern Lebanon Suicide Attack Also Injures 14 Soldiers

A suicide bomber drove a small truck loaded with explosives into an Israeli troop transport near the Israeli border in southern Lebanon on Sunday afternoon, killing 12 Israeli soldiers and wounding 14, three of them critically.

The bombing--the latest incident in an escalating war between Israeli occupation troops and Muslim-led guerrilla movements fighting their continued presence in Lebanon--was the costliest attack against the Israelis since the suicide truck-bombing of their military headquarters in Tyre in November, 1983. That bombing killed 29 Israelis and 32 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners.

Beirut radio said Sunday’s suicide bombing was carried out to retaliate for a car-bomb explosion at a mosque outside the Lebanese capital last Friday in which at least 75 people were killed and more than 250 wounded.

Israelis Blamed

The Shia Muslim militia group Amal and Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual adviser to the radical Shia group Hezbollah (Party of God), both blamed Israel for the Friday bombing and threatened revenge. Israel has denied responsibility for that incident and for another mosque bombing last week that killed two Amal leaders in the southern Lebanese village of Maarake.

It was not immediately clear who carried out Sunday’s attack on the Israelis. The radio of the Murabitoun, a Sunni Muslim militia, reported that an anonymous caller said the pro-Iranian Islamic Resistance Front claimed responsibility for the bombing. The group is one of those that recently threatened to launch suicide-bomb attacks to hasten Israel’s troop withdrawal from Lebanon.

However, in Beirut, a caller to Western news agencies said the shadowy Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War) was responsible for the attack. Islamic Jihad has also claimed responsibility for the deadly Tyre bombing and the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Marine and French military compounds in Beirut in October, 1983, in which nearly 300 servicemen were killed.

‘Shock’ at Defense Ministry

A senior government source described the atmosphere at Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening as “shock” but said little could be done to speed up the pullout of Israeli forces from Lebanon, even if Israel wanted to do so.

“In all those years of fighting the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), we never had anything like this,” the source said.

“There’s almost no way to fight those car bombs. If the driver is willing to commit suicide, the sky is the limit.”

Security sources said there was apparently only one man in the GMC truck used in Sunday’s attack. The Israeli troop transport that was hit in the attack was part of a convoy that had just crossed the border from Israel into Lebanon, the sources said.

According to the official account of the attack, an Israeli officer waved the truck off to the side as the convoy passed, but as the troop transport went by, the truck picked up speed beside the Israeli transport vehicle, and the bomber detonated his load of explosives. Security sources estimated that the truck contained 200 pounds of explosives.

Villages Searched

The Voice of Lebanon, the radio station of the Christian Falangist Party, reported that Israeli troops sealed off the area near the Metulla border crossing immediately after the 2 p.m. attack and began searching nearby villages.

The wounded troops, most suffering burns, were taken by helicopter to hospitals in Haifa and Safed in northern Israel.

The attack occurred near the spot where a roadside bomb killed two Israeli soldiers Feb. 10.

While Israel has announced plans to pull most of its troops out of Lebanon, the attack site is well within a so-called “security zone” where, according to Israeli defense sources, some Israeli troops will maintain a presence indefinitely.

On Jan. 14, Israel’s Cabinet approved a three-stage plan to withdraw from Lebanon, and the army completed the first phase, involving the evacuation of Sidon, on Feb. 16. Last week, the Cabinet gave the go-ahead for the army to begin the second stage of the withdrawal, in which it is to pull out of the Bekaa Valley, Mt. Barouk and the largely Christian villages around Jezzine.

No Deadline for Pullout

The government set no deadline for completion of Phase 2, and defense sources say much will depend on the weather. Mt. Barouk, particularly, is still covered with several feet of snow, and the military says it cannot remove all the sensitive electronic equipment from Israeli intelligence-gathering stations there until the snow melts.

However, defense sources say the goal is to complete the second phase of the pullout by the beginning of June.

The timing and details of the final stage of the withdrawal must still be approved by the Cabinet, and there is already some speculation here that hard-liners in the government will use that occasion to argue that the Shia Muslims pose too great a threat to Israel’s northern settlements to allow the completion of the military’s pullout plan.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has recommended that most Israeli troops be returned to Israel by September, with only a token force left north of the border to assist the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army, a Christian-led militia, in preventing infiltration by PLO guerrillas.

Given their announced intention to get out, Israeli leaders have been surprised at the ferocity of continued guerrilla resistance in southern Lebanon.

25 Israelis Killed

Sunday’s incident brought to 25 the number of Israeli soldiers who have been killed since the government approved the withdrawal plan less than two months ago. Well over 100 soldiers have been wounded in that period.

Israel responded to the escalating attacks last month with a new “iron fist” policy aimed at southern Lebanese villages considered to be strongholds of the guerrilla resistance. Shia Muslim villages throughout Israeli-held territory in the south were put under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and in a series of raids during one 10-day period, Israeli troops killed 16 guerrillas, wounded 22 and arrested more than 200 southern Lebanese.

New regulations also banned motorcyclists and cars with fewer than two passengers from the roads in hopes of preventing suicide bombing attacks. However, those regulations were apparently not enforced in the mainly Christian area where Sunday’s attack occurred.

Asked what steps Israel might take in response to the latest attack, a senior defense source commented, “I don’t think we can do much more than we do right now.”

Residents of Metulla, which is Israel’s northernmost settlement, said Sunday’s blast broke windows in the town.

“At the beginning, we thought it was a Katyusha rocket” such as those that used to be fired by Palestinian terrorists into the northern settlements, said Ayana Belsky, owner of Metulla’s Arazim Hotel. “We ran outside to get our children.”

Belsky said that from her hotel, which is about 300 yards from the border, she could see flames from the burning wreckage.