Israel Attacks Guerrilla Bases in S. Lebanon

Israel attacked Lebanese guerrilla bases by air and on land in southern Lebanon on Tuesday in a pair of strikes amid continuing factional warfare in the battered region.

Israeli military officials said that a squad of six F-4 Phantom jets bombed a command post of the Lebanese Communist Party in the village of Rmaile, about 20 miles south of Beirut. Reports from Beirut said a five-story building was destroyed and that there were at least two fatalities.

“At the terrorist target, there are dead and wounded,” an Israeli army statement said. The jets returned safely to Israel, the statement concluded.

The jet strike was the 17th air raid on Lebanon this year and came only hours after a 100-member Israeli commando unit carried by helicopters attacked a base of the Lebanese Communist Party in Nabi Safa, a Lebanese village north of Hasbayya. Three guerrillas were killed, reports from Lebanon said.

The Nabi Safa attack was the Israeli army’s biggest ground operation in Lebanon in more than a year. Israeli military officials claimed the village was a staging area for attacks on a buffer zone inside Lebanon that Israel maintains along its northern border.

The 10- to 12-mile-wide buffer is manned by an allied Christian militia numbering 2,500 troops, backed by a force of at least 1,000 Israeli soldiers. The zone is meant to prevent terrorist infiltrations into Israel and is a source of resentment among a variety of nationalist Lebanese factions. The Lebanese Communist Party had spearheaded several raids into the zone, Israeli military officials said.

While Israeli ground troops and jets went into action, pitched battles took place between rival Muslim militias in southern Lebanon. Fighters for Hezbollah, a militia backed by Iran, reportedly overran the village of Kfar Melki, which until Tuesday was held by Amal, a secular-oriented Shiite group supported by Syria.

Four days of fighting in Kfar Melki and nearby villages have resulted in 38 deaths and scores of wounded, news reports from Lebanon said.

In recent days, Hezbollah forces have overrun four other Amal villages. All lie between Israel’s buffer zone and the embattled port city of Sidon. The fighting evidently spells the end of a tenuous year-old truce between the two factions in southern Lebanon.

A significant weakening of Amal in southern Lebanon could influence Israel’s police role along its northern border. Amal has been willing to curtail the activities of Palestinian guerrillas.