Israeli Jets Hit Guerrilla Base in East Lebanon

Israeli warplanes streaked across eastern Lebanon and blew up a suspected Palestinian guerrilla base Wednesday, three days after 12 Israeli soldiers died in a suicide bomb attack in southern Lebanon.

In the Bekaa Valley, a Lebanese police spokesman said Israeli warplanes attacked a target around noon about a mile west of the village of Bar Elias, 22 miles east of Beirut. Casualty figures were not immediately available.

In Israel, the military said its planes scored “accurate hits” on a two-story building serving as a base for Saika, a Palestinian dissident faction, before returning safely to their base in Israel.

The Syrian-backed Saika faction is headed by Samini Attari and is opposed to Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

‘Concentration of Terrorists’

The Israeli planes “bombed one base on which there was concrete information of a concentration of terrorists,” Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres told a group of police in Jerusalem.

“We don’t have to wait until the terrorists start toward us. We have done it in the past and we will in the future if we have concrete information as we had this morning.”

The raid came as the U.S. Embassy in a Christian East Beirut suburb increased security precautions following the American veto Tuesday of a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for “barbaric policies” in Lebanon.

‘Anything Can Happen’

“We tightened security,” an embassy official said. “But with those bombings, the troubles in the south and a whole air of tension, all on top of the veto, the embassy feels anything can happen.”

A suicide truck bomber destroyed the U.S. Embassy annex in the Beirut suburb of Aukar last Sept. 20, killing 14 people, including two Americans, two weeks after the United States vetoed a similar U.N. resolution.

Wednesday’s raid followed a suicide bomb attack that killed 12 Israeli soldiers and wounded 14 others Sunday just north of the Israeli border.