Tunis Raid Criticized by Reagan : He Assails Attack, Other Violence as Equally Abhorrent

President Reagan, joining the Administration effort to make amends for his earlier defense of Israel’s retaliatory air strike against a Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia, condemned all such violence Saturday as “abhorrent” and “useless.”

In his weekly radio address from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., Reagan denounced equally the latest round of hostage-taking and violence in Lebanon, Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians and the retaliatory Israeli attack on a target “in a country that is an old friend of the United States.”

In its initial reaction to the Israeli bombing last Tuesday, in which at least 60 people, including 12 Tunisians, were killed, the White House defended the attack as justifiable retaliation against terrorism, a response that angered the pro-Western government in Tunis and other Arab governments friendly to the United States.

Clarification Issued

A clarification was issued the following day when White House spokesman Larry Speakes read a formal statement of regret for the Tunisian dead, while still approving “self-defense against terrorists, wherever terrorists may be, wherever they may be harbored.”

The American position shifted another step Friday, when U.N. Ambassador Vernon A. Walters abstained in a 14-0 Security Council vote condemning the Israeli action. The U.S. refusal to veto the resolution was hailed Saturday in Tunis, where President Habib Bourguiba was quoted as saying that he had personally urged the Reagan Administration not to block a U.N. rebuke of the attack on a target in the outskirts of his capital.

From Tunis on Saturday, the Reuters news agency reported that the Bourguiba government was prepared to sever diplomatic relations with Washington if the United States had vetoed the Security Council resolution.

Tunisian Capital Quiet

The agency also reported that Tunisian officials expressed concern that a U.S. veto might unleash massive anti-American demonstrations in the streets of the capital. Extra police were deployed around Tunis, and armored vehicles were detailed to guard the U.S. Embassy following protests in the capital on Wednesday and Thursday. Non-essential American personnel were instructed to stay at home. However, the Tunisian capital was reported relatively quiet on Saturday.

Meanwhile, 17 of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli raid were buried Saturday in a suburban Tunis cemetery. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat headed his organization’s delegation to the funeral and delivered a 15-minute eulogy. Tunisia was represented by President Bourguiba’s wife, Wassila.

Israeli Response

The U.S. decision to abstain from the Security Council vote drew a quite different response from Israeli officials. In Washington, Israeli Ambassador Meir Rosenne telephoned his government’s objections to the White House and the State Department.

Sources, declining to be identified, said Rosenne contrasted the U.S. abstention with its veto of a similar Security Council resolution in 1976 condemning the Israeli raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in which hijacked airliner passengers were freed.

Rosenne said the latest action represented U.S. acquiescence to terrorism and would be interpreted by extremists as a green light to continue assaults on Israeli citizens, the sources said.

Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir is expected to raise the issue when he arrives here next Wednesday. The abstention particularly irritated the Israeli government because it preceded Shamir’s talks and the arrival here 10 days later by Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Reagan in his statement Saturday warmly complimented Bourguiba as “far sighted and wise, . . . a true friend of America for decades.”

” Our hearts go out to him and to the innocent Tunisians swept up in this violence,” Reagan said.

Negotiations Urged

Reagan also made a strong plea for “direct peaceful negotiations among the parties concerned” as the solution to the Arab-Israel conflict--a course Israel has urged for decades, as long as the PLO is excluded from the talks. For months the Reagan Administration has been seeking to nurture a negotiating formula, proposed by King Hussein of Jordan, that would include some kind of Palestinian representation in talks on the future of the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

“In shock and dismay, we have watched murderous attacks on Israeli civilians and in response an Israeli military raid on a PLO headquarters in a country that is an old friend of the United States,” Reagan said. “Now we hear that one of our American hostages in Lebanon may have been murdered, as was a Soviet citizen earlier this week.

“This return to violence is abhorrent--all the more so because it is so useless. . . . There is no military option for solving the difficult conflicts of the Middle East.”

Earlier Saturday, Administration officials said that they are assuming that William Buckley, a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut when he was kidnaped 19 months ago, is still alive and held captive by Shia Muslim radicals. They said that there has been no information to corroborate a claim that Buckley has been “executed” in retaliation for the Israeli air strike. The claim was advanced in a statement circulated in Beirut by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War).