Israel Rockets Amal Militia in S. Lebanon After Guerrilla Raids

Two Israeli helicopter gunships rocketed positions of the Shia Muslim Amal militia in southern Lebanon on Thursday, destroying a command post and wounding at least eight in retaliation for a series of cross-border guerrilla raids earlier this week, officials said.

The attack came one day after Israeli troops shot and killed six Palestinian guerrillas trying to infiltrate from the north as well as the south--two incidents that brought to four the number of attempted raids since last weekend.

An Israeli military spokesman in Jerusalem said the three Palestinian guerrillas killed at the Lebanon border in one of Wednesday’s clashes had used the Amal base as their starting point in what was to be an attack on an Israeli settlement in the north.

The guerrillas belonged to the Palestine Liberation Front, a small leftist faction supported by Syria, which also backs Amal, the spokesman added.

The Israeli Cobra gunships made pre-dawn sweeps over the vast southern area before opening fire around 8 a.m. north of the village of Tibnin, leveling a four-story hilltop building used as an Amal command post, according to Lebanese police in the southern port city of Sidon.

Militiamen returned fire, Beirut Radio said, but the Israeli army reported that all its aircraft returned safely to base.

Tibnin is about half a mile north of Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone and is the headquarters of the Irish battalion serving with the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon.

Timur Goksel, spokesman for the U.N. forces, said eight Amal militiamen were wounded in the helicopter attack, although an Amal source put the number at between 10 and 12.

Also on Thursday, Israeli troops were searching for a fourth guerrilla in connection with Wednesday’s other infiltration attempt--this one in the southern Negev Desert in which three guerrillas were shot and killed after crossing the border from Egypt, a military spokesman said.

In that clash, it was not immediately clear if the infiltration involved guerrillas or, possibly, smugglers. The Israeli army said no identification papers or weapons were found on the three bodies. One military official said, however, that the possibility they were terrorists “has not been ruled out.”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Wednesday night that the U.S. decision to open a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization had created a climate for such increased attacks.

“It is a fact that the latest American decision to have talks with the PLO has encouraged the tendency of violent acts against Israel,” he said.