15,000 Palestinians Vow Revenge for Israeli Air Attack

About 15,000 angry Palestinians vowed revenge Sunday as they buried victims of Israel’s deadliest air raid into Lebanon this year.

Police put the final casualty toll at 49 killed and 60 wounded in Saturday’s air attack on Palestinian guerrilla bases on Sidon’s outskirts. They said eight bodies were recovered from the rubble overnight.

It was the highest toll of Israel’s 22 air raids in Lebanon this year and Israel’s deadliest attack on Palestinians since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“We shall avenge our martyrs!” chanted the mourners as the bodies of 40 victims were buried in a mass grave in Sidon’s Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el Hilwa.

Police said two Lebanese victims were buried separately in Sidon, provincial capital of south Lebanon 25 miles south of Beirut.

Burials Being Arranged

Officials were arranging the burial of seven other Palestinian victims in the vast Rashidiyeh refugee camp at Lebanon’s southern port city of Tyre, police said. The seven came from Rashidiyeh camp, which houses 30,000 people.

Two Israeli gunboats came under fire off Tyre on Sunday.

A Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman said the gunboats shelled the Rashidiyeh camp, but both Lebanese police and U.N. peace force sources in south Lebanon denied this.

A police spokesman said Shia Muslim militia positions fired on the gunboats with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades “when they came alarmingly close to Rashidiyeh.”

All Shutters Closed

All shutters were closed during the funeral procession in the teeming Ein el Hilwa camp, the biggest in Lebanon with a population of 60,000.

Mourners waved Palestinian and Lebanese flags as they marched ahead of a convoy of 17 ambulances carrying the bodies to the cemetery. They were led by representatives of Yasser Arafat’s PLO, Syrian-backed guerrilla groups and the Abu Nidal faction.

“We Shall Die With Our Boots On. We Shall Never Knuckle Under,” said one placard carried by mourners. “Armed Struggle Against Our Enemy Will Be Escalated in All Spheres,” said another.

Bases hit Saturday included three of Arafat’s main Fatah guerrilla group, one of George Habash’s Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and one of Abu Nidal’s Revolutionary Council of Fatah faction.

Police said most of the casualties were Palestinian guerrillas killed when Israeli jets carried out a second strike while guerrillas were rescuing comrades from the rubble of buildings hit in the first raid.

Preemptive, Not Retaliatory

In Jerusalem, an Israeli military analyst said the raid was preemptive, not retaliatory.

Aaron Levran said the death toll was unusually high because the guerrillas apparently had not expected Israeli jets to attack on the Jewish Sabbath.

“Maybe they thought they were immune on the Sabbath,” said Levran, a retired Israeli brigadier general and senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

Levran said the raid was part of the continuing Israeli campaign to stop Palestinian guerrilla activities in southern Lebanon and did not signify a change in strategy.

He said the attack was launched because Israel apparently had detailed information about the target and there were no military or diplomatic reasons to refrain from action.

“When you have a good target and your information says there are people about to attack, you preempt,” he said.

He said that in response to the raid, he expects an increase in the number of Soviet-made Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon into Israel.