Israelis Halt Vessel With 50 Palestinians

An Israeli naval patrol seized a small merchant vessel off the Lebanese coast that was ferrying 50 Palestinian guerrillas to Lebanon, an Israeli military spokesman said Saturday.

He said that the ship was forced to go to an Israeli port after its seizure early Friday and that the passengers were arrested for carrying false passports.

All of the suspected guerrillas belonged to Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s main faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Israeli military spokesman said.

Israel’s navy chief, Adm. Avraham Ben Shoshan, rejected a claim by the PLO that the ship’s passengers were innocent civilians ferrying medical equipment to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Suspicions Raised

“The large number of passengers on such a small merchant vessel raised suspicions which led to further examination of the boat,” an Israeli Defense Forces statement said, explaining why the vessel was stopped.

“The inquiry revealed that all the passengers were terrorists belonging to the Fatah organization and were traveling with forged passports,” the IDF statement said.

According to Shoshan, there was no doubt that the documents were forged or that the men on the ship were members of Fatah. “There were commanders among them, but at this time we don’t know at what level,” he said.

Honduran Registry

Shoshan said the ship was of Honduran registry but “probably of Lebanese ownership.” He said the crew was Egyptian and the vessel was sailing from Cyprus to the Lebanese port of Khalde, south of Beirut.

“Cyprus has turned into the center for the transfer of terrorists to Lebanon,” Shoshan said. “Large forces are active there. That’s the place where they exchange documents, where they organize and where they choose the best available path to get into Lebanon.”

Neither Shoshan nor the military spokesman would reveal where the ship and its passengers were being held.

Shoshan denied that Israeli patrol boats have in effect placed a quarantine along the Lebanese coast, but he said that his naval units would continue “preventing arms and terrorists” from reaching the country.

Israel has for some time been conducting naval sweeps off the shoreline aimed at barring Palestinian infiltrators from returning to Lebanon by sea.

Another Israeli patrol boat intercepted a Cypriot ferry Jan. 2 as it sailed toward the Lebanese port of Juniyah, north of Beirut, with 64 passengers. The ferry was forced to return to Cyprus, and Israeli officials charged that the ferry service was being used to move PLO guerrillas to Lebanon under a secret deal made by Arafat and Lebanon’s President Amin Gemayel.

The ferry was allowed to sail to Juniyah two days later, after Cyprus and the United States complained. At the time, Moshe Levy, the Israeli armed forces chief of staff, warned that Israel would use any means to bar the PLO from returning to Lebanon and rebuilding the power base that was shattered when Israel invaded the country in 1982.