Israeli Troops Storm 2 Villages in S. Lebanon, Witnesses Say

Israeli troops in helicopter gunships and armored personnel carriers stormed two villages in southern Lebanon on Sunday, killing and capturing civilians suspected of supporting anti-Israeli Muslim militiamen, witnesses said.

Lebanon’s state radio said Israeli troops descended by helicopter on the Shia Muslim village of Qabrikha and conducted a house-to-house raid that left at least three villagers dead.

Qabrikha is on the fringe of an Israeli-designated buffer zone in southern Lebanon set up after Israel formally completed its troop pullout from the country last month.

In Tel Aviv, military sources said one guerrilla was killed in a clash between Israeli troops and “a terrorist squad” at Qabrikha.

In a second attack, 11 miles northeast of Qabrikha, Israeli troops firing automatic weapons and backed by militiamen of the South Lebanon Army swept through Sejoud village in armored personnel carriers and jeeps mounted with machine guns, witnesses said.

Witnesses told Lebanese state radio that the troops and Israeli-backed militiamen burned down a mosque, houses and stores and looted homes of money and jewelry. They said about 100 inhabitants fled to nearby hills, leaving a few elderly men behind. No casualties were reported.

An Israeli army spokesman in Tel Aviv said he had no information about a second raid.

Timur Goskel, spokesman for the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon, said Israeli soldiers confronted five men before dawn in the Qabrikha area and killed three of them.

Israel withdrew most of its forces from its northern neighbor after invading Lebanon three years ago to smash Palestinian guerrilla strongholds. Several hundred Israelis remain in the buffer zone to support the South Lebanon Army.

Police in the Lebanese capital, meanwhile, reported that at least eight people were killed and 19 wounded in a two-day battle between rival Druze factions in southeastern Lebanon.

Syrian troops, who have maintained a presence in Lebanon since the close of the Lebanese civil war in 1976, intervened and organized a truce in the Bekaa Valley, a police statement said.

The Beirut newspaper of President Amin Gemayel’s rightist Christian Falangist Party said the battle involved newly formed pro-Syrian Druze irregulars and militiamen of Transport Minister Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party.

The party is the military arm of Lebanon’s 200,000-strong Druze community, an offshoot sect of the Islamic faith. The Druze have the best-armed militia in this Mediterranean nation of 4 million.