Israeli Planes Hit Militia Housing Area in Bekaa

Four Israeli warplanes Friday rocketed a villa housing families of leftist Syrian-backed militiamen in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Police said 13 people, including 10 civilians, were wounded.

An Associated Press reporter in the Bekaa Valley said the jets fired 16 rockets in 15 minutes into the two-story building near the Christian village of Ammiq, 20 miles east of Beirut, inflicting heavy damage.

In Tel Aviv, the Israeli military command said the planes attacked three buildings that served “as a base where terrorist attacks were organized and launched.” It said the planes returned safely.

The 12:20 p.m. air strike was the 19th by Israeli jets on guerrilla targets in Lebanon this year.

The villa, owned by Information Minister Joseph Skaf, houses families of Syrian National Social Party militiamen based nearby, the reporter said in a telephone dispatch from the Syrian-controlled Bekaa.

The casualties included three militiamen who were at the villa. The reporter said five children and three women were among the 10 wounded civilians.

Ambulances took the casualties to hospitals in the nearby market town of Chtoura, the reporter said.

The reporter said the militia base, surrounded by pine woods, was not hit in the attack.

Militia fighters fired on the jets with twin-barreled 23-millimeter anti-aircraft guns deployed on hills overlooking the villa, but no hits were reported.

Israeli military sources said the air raid appeared to be retaliation for an attempt by Syrian-backed Palestinian guerrillas to infiltrate Israel by sea earlier in the day.

The sources said militiamen of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army killed two guerrillas of the Syrian-based Saika movement who were spotted aboard a dinghy heading for Israel by an SLA patrol.

The Syrian National Social Party is a leftist Lebanese faction allied with Syrian President Hafez Assad’s government. It has carried out several guerrilla attacks, including six suicide bombings, against Israeli forces and their allies in southern Lebanon.

Syria is the main power broker in Lebanon. It maintains 25,000 troops in the Bekaa and northern Lebanon under a 1976 Arab League peacekeeping mandate. It also deployed about 7,500 troops in Muslim West Beirut in February to quell inter-militia street battles.