Lebanon Asks U.N. Action Over Reported Israel Raid

President Amin Gemayel sought U.N. Security Council intervention Friday after Israeli troops reportedly destroyed houses in a southern Lebanese village where they claim Shia Muslim guerrillas have been living.

A military source in Tel Aviv said that several houses were demolished in the town of Arnoun.

Beirut radio stations reported that Israel was threatening to raze the town, but journalists in south Lebanon and Lebanese security officials could not confirm the report.

Arnoun’s mayor, Rida Marouni, said that an armored Israeli force entered the village Thursday and demanded that the inhabitants leave within 72 hours. Most of Arnoun’s predominantly Shia population, once totaling 3,000, fled after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Only 100 people still live there.

“The Israeli force warned it was about to knock down all houses in the village,” Marouni said in a telegram to the Lebanese government and police in Beirut. The military command in Israel denied issuing the threat.

The hilltop village is only a half-mile north of a security zone that Israel established for itself after withdrawing the bulk of its forces from Lebanon in June, 1985. The village houses the strategic, Crusader-built Beaufort Castle that overlooks the buffer zone.

A presidential spokesman said that Gemayel, a Maronite Christian, instructed Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations, Rashid Fakhoury, to seek action by the 15-member U.N. Security Council.

Gemayel and the Foreign Ministry also scheduled meetings with the ambassadors of the five permanent Security Council members--the United States, Soviet Union, China, Britain and France--to urge “swift action” to deter Israel, the spokesman said.

Muslim militias, meanwhile, called a daylong strike in the Shia neighborhoods of southern Beirut to mark “Jerusalem Day,” an observation called for by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. In 1979, Khomeini proclaimed the last Friday of Islam’s holy fasting month of Ramadan to be a day of “solidarity with Jerusalem.” Muslims marched in the streets here, chanting vows to “liberate Jerusalem from the Israeli usurpers.”