Terrorist Targeting of Soldiers Worries Israelis : 10 Killed in 18 Months; Palestinian Fear of Army Retaliation May Be Eroding

Members of the Israeli army at least twice have received, along with their pay slips, written reminders of the need to stay alert against possible personal attack.

A reservist assigned to duty in the West Bank city of Hebron not long ago said that for the first time in memory, he was briefed on the need to tuck the legs of his pants into his boots, to wear his beret, and otherwise to “look like a soldier”--all to counter an apparent erosion in Palestinian respect for the Israel Defense Forces.

And under arrangements designed to cut down on hitchhiking by soldiers, women in uniform can now ride buses free. Men in uniform are advised to borrow the intercity bus fare from the army if they’re short of cash.

Deaths in Occupied Areas

These and other measures reflect concern in Israel’s military organizations about an unusually large number of soldiers killed and wounded by Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the last 18 months.

The latest casualties came in late January, when a man believed to have been a Jordanian soldier of Palestinian origin crossed the Jordan River to the West Bank and ambushed an Israeli patrol along the border fence. Two Israeli soldiers and the infiltrator were killed in an exchange of fire, and two other Israelis were wounded.

About three weeks earlier, a member of the Israeli border police was shot to death and a colleague was wounded in a daylight attack in Nablus, another major West Bank town.

In all, 10 soldiers have been killed by Arabs here in the last 18 months, compared to only one in more than two years before that. Eight have died in the last year, according to published reports, and a score of others have been wounded.

Attacks on Patrols

In addition, there have been at least three dozen nonfatal attacks with Molotov cocktails, grenades, bombs or rifles on Israeli military patrols in the West Bank and Gaza in the last year. On the night of Feb. 2, an unknown assailant hurled a grenade at a troop bus in Jericho, and someone threw a firebomb at an army patrol in a Palestinian refugee camp near Nablus.

Arab attacks on the military are an extremely sensitive subject in Israel, and even recent statistics on such incidents are difficult to obtain. Those that are available often conflict, even when the sources are different branches of the military. And there is little agreement about what the casualty figures mean.

A Voice of Palestine radio broadcast from Baghdad, Iraq, last June said that Fatah, the main Palestinian guerrilla group, had decided to step up the pace of attacks on military targets.

But according to military sources here, there has been an increase in Palestinian attacks on Israelis in general. They question the suggestion that the Palestinians may be shifting toward classic guerrilla warfare tactics--against military targets and away from attacks on civilians.

At least 15 civilians have died in terrorist incidents in the last 18 months, more than in any comparable period since 1979-1980. A spokesman for the military command said that on the basis of the most recent figures, there has been an average of more than 40 attacks a month in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

New Boldness

In spite of official reticence over casualty figures, the deaths of 10 soldiers since August, 1984, have been confirmed by several sources, and there is general agreement that this is a sharp increase over what has been the norm in recent years. Also, military spokesmen concede that if nothing else the casualty toll reflects a new boldness on the part of the attackers.

“The percentage (of attacks on military vs. civilian targets) didn’t change really,” said an officer who monitors events on the West Bank, “but the nature changed, in that the attacks are not by remote control. These are attacks where the attackers see eye-to-eye the victim--whether by shooting or knives. Stuff like this we never had before. Because of that, there is a much higher rate of success.”

Both sides, knowing the importance of how the outside world views the Arab-Israeli conflict, are acutely sensitive to the distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

A “Chronicle of Last Year’s Events,” published last June by the pro-PLO East Jerusalem daily Al Fajr, lists a number of attacks against military targets but fails to mention the execution-style terrorist killings of three Israeli couples in 1985. And Palestinian resistance groups often say that the civilian victims of terrorist attacks were really Israeli soldiers or intelligence operatives.

“Hitting civilian targets doesn’t make people respect you, but hitting military targets does,” a Palestinian source close to Fatah said.

Choice of Targets Crucial

Another prominent Palestinian commented, “I think that the man who chooses his targets from those khaki-uniform people is always conscious about that aim--to show the outside world that he is not indiscriminate.”

Some of the recent incidents in which soldiers have been killed are not easy to categorize. For example, five of the 10 military victims were apparently hitchhikers whose bodies were dumped in remote areas. One of the five, slain in December, 1984, was a young woman who was raped before she was killed. The other five were victims of daylight attacks, often in the middle of West Bank cities.

In addition to the three soldiers killed last month, one soldier was shot to death in Ramallah in February a year ago and another fatally stabbed in Hebron in September. Both were standing guard duty at the time.

Israeli military sources point to the influence of the Lebanon war as a possible spur to attacks. Rightly or wrongly, armed resistance by the southern Lebanese against Israeli occupation troops is widely seen in the Arab world as an important factor in the Jerusalem authorities’ decision to withdraw most of their troops from Lebanon in three stages completed last June. This perceived success is an inspiration to some Palestinians.

Attacks by Individuals

The surge in military casualties here coincides with another worrisome trend acknowledged by the army--an increase in the proportion of anti-Israeli attacks by individual residents of the occupied territories operating on their own, as opposed to those inspired by outside Palestinian groups.

“We can talk about greater audacity (in attacks against military targets), and perhaps this is because a lot of these incidents are local initiatives,” an Israeli military source said.

After almost 19 years of Israeli military rule over the 1.3 million Palestinian Arab residents of the territories, “the people here know us well and therefore they don’t have fear of the legendary, invincible Israeli soldier,” this source said.

One of the attackers who acted on his own was Hani Said, 21, who in December was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing to death a reserve soldier named Avraham Sorek while Sorek and a companion stood guard outside a Jewish-owned apartment building in Hebron.

Given the chance for a final statement, Said told the court: “I am a prisoner of war. I killed for Hebron, the place of my father and my grandfather. I shall fight until the victory.”