Israeli Forces Kill 4 Arab Gunmen

Israeli army and naval forces clashed Thursday with four Arab gunmen on the Lebanon coast less than a mile north of the Israeli border, killing the four while suffering two dead and nine wounded in a three-hour firefight, the Israeli military said.

It said the gunmen were trying to infiltrate into Israel in order to carry out a pre-dawn terrorist attack.

A few hours later, Israeli warplanes struck what the military command described as terrorist targets in and around the Ein el Hilwa Palestinian refugee camp south of Sidon. It said all its planes returned safely to base after damaging buildings “used as forward operations bases for attacks against Israel.”

The incidents were the most serious involving Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in Southern Lebanon since last February, when 15 combatants died during a six-day Israeli search-and-destroy mission following the capture of two of its soldiers by guerrillas.

Apparently Palestinians

An army spokesman said the four gunmen slain near the Rosh Hanikra border crossing into Lebanon were believed to be Palestinians, “apparently from the Sidon area.”

However, the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it had carried out the operation jointly with Lebanese members of the Syrian National Socialist Party.

According to the Israeli account, one of its naval patrol boats spotted a rubber dinghy carrying the four gunmen about 2 a.m. as it sailed southwards in Lebanese waters, about half a mile from Rosh Hanikra.

The patrol boat opened fire, and the gunmen put ashore on the rocky Mediterranean coast. While the navy pinned the would-be infiltrators down, helicopter-borne army troops were rushed to the scene.

Soldier Interviewed

According to one of the wounded Israeli soldiers, interviewed by Israel radio at a hospital in nearby Nahariya: “The patrol boat started shooting at the dinghy so we couldn’t go towards it because we were frightened that they would fire at us.”

When the navy ceased fire, said the soldier, identified only as Gideon, “we went for the terrorists . . . .A hand grenade was thrown at us. I flew from the blast.”

With shrapnel wounds in the arm and forehead, Gideon said, “I couldn’t shoot because I couldn’t use my left arm. So I carried a friend of mine--this boy was lying in the water and there was shooting toward him. So I pulled him towards shore . . . I just hid him by a rock and gave him first aid.”

The military said two of the nine wounded Israelis sustained “moderate” injuries, while the others were only slightly hurt. One of the two dead Israelis, a Bedouin, was buried Thursday and services for the second are scheduled for today.

Weapons, Equipment Found

The military said that “a large amount of weapons and terrorist equipment” was found on the dead gunmen and in their dinghy.

Residents as far away as Nahariya, less than 10 miles south of Rosh Hanikra, said they could hear the gunfire and see Israeli flares used to illuminate the area of the fire-fight.

All the men at the Rosh Hanikra kibbutz near the border crossing were awakened at about 2:30 a.m. and asked to stand guard, according to a secretary at the collective community. “You could hear the shooting and shelling very clearly,” she said.

In the first comment on the incident by a government official, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Thursday that the attack was a reminder that Israel should concentrate its efforts on the continuing terrorist threat “and not on fraternal strife that is directed against those who are fighting the terrorists.”

Trying to Block Probe

His reference was to the so-called Shin Bet affair, in which two Palestinian prisoners were beaten to death in 1984 and security police involvement in the incident covered up. Shamir, who was prime minister at the time of the incident and therefore directly responsible for the Shin Bet security police, is leading the fight to head off a state inquiry into the affair.

Meanwhile, Israel’s attorney general, Yosef Harish, said in an opinion submitted to Prime Minister Shimon Peres on Thursday that he now favors calling a commission of inquiry into the Shin Bet affair.

In another development, the Israeli Supreme Court released affidavits filed by two Israeli security officials that said they helped suppress evidence relating to the killing of the two prisoners, Reuters news agency reported.

The court is hearing challenges to the presidential pardon granted to the men and Avraham Shalom, the former head of Shin Bet, who quit in the face of allegations that he had ordered the killings and then covered up his agency’s role in them.

One of the security officials, who took part in a previous inquiry into the killings of the hijackers, said “in accordance with his position” he suppressed information on the role of Shin Bet.

The other said he “helped witnesses coordinate their testimony” to conceal the part played by the agency in the killings of the two men. The names of the security officials were not released, Reuters said.

The court said it would hear more evidence on July 20 before deciding whether to order the government to investigate the role of political leaders in the scandal.