PLO Indirectly Condemns Abbas’ Abortive Attack on Israeli Beach : Diplomacy: The U.S. is ‘disappointed’ in the statement. But Palestinians hope it will help preserve their dialogue with Washington.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, moving to safeguard its contacts with the United States, on Monday issued an indirect condemnation of a PLO faction’s failed raid on a crowded Israeli beach last month.

The statement, released simultaneously in Baghdad, Iraq; Amman, Jordan, and the organization’s headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, declared: “The PLO position remains unchanged. We are against any military action that targets civilians, whatever form it may take.”

But it did not specify the May 30 seaborne attack by heavily armed guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Front, a radical faction headed by Abul Abbas. Four guerrillas were killed by Israeli troops when they landed May 30 on a beach near Tel Aviv, and 12 were captured.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the Bush Administration is “disappointed” that the PLO has not “explicitly condemned the Tel Aviv raid and refrained from any public comment on Abul Abbas.”

Other U.S. officials confirmed that the United States is pressing behind the scenes for a more explicit statement from PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on the front’s foiled attack. In effect, the Bush Administration is giving the PLO a second chance to elaborate, in specific terms, on its statement before deciding whether to continue diplomatic contacts.

“No decision has been made yet. We continue to talk to them through established channels. We’re also continuing to see what more we can learn about the May 30 incident,” one official said.

The Administration, he said, is “not looking to drag out this process, but we also don’t want to rush it. Too much is at stake. . . . There is no deadline for a decision.”

Secretary of State James A. Baker III is expected to address the issue today in testimony before a congressional committee considering his department’s budget, but he may not announce a decision, officials said.

Israeli officials charged that the Palestinians’ targets were throngs of civilians who had gone to the Mediterranean shore to celebrate a Jewish holiday, and they demanded that the United States break off its direct talks with the PLO, which began 18 months ago.

Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis has disavowed any connection with the abortive raid, and Monday’s statement made no direct mention of it, despite rising calls in Congress that the U.S.-PLO contacts be abandoned and President Bush’s expressions of concern on the matter.

“Our dialogue is predicated on a renunciation of terror,” the President said last week. “In my view, this was sheer terror.”

The brief PLO statement, distributed over its WAFA news agency, set out its position on military action in two sentences, then went on to lash the new government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as “a government of war and oppression of our people and a government for extremists.”

A PLO spokesman in Baghdad added, “We also condemn the Israeli crimes and massacres against our workers and children that increase day by day.”

Arafat and the PLO leadership have been rocked by increasingly radical demands for action against Israel, intensified by the stalled peace process and an upsurge in the bitter Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

PLO officials in Tunis, isolated by the radicalization of Palestinian movements elsewhere in the Middle East, have insisted that Arafat’s 1988 denunciation of terrorism and implicit recognition of Israel do not preclude military action but just oppose raids against civilian targets. Monday’s statement, clearly aimed at American threats to break off the dialogue, appeared to add nothing to that position.

On the stalled peace process, the statement said: “We are still committed to working with all local and regional powers to achieve a just, fair and comprehensive peace in the region on the basis of international legitimacy, the Palestinian peace initiative and other international initiatives.”

The efforts to salvage the contacts with the United States, which have been carried out between ranking PLO officials--but not Arafat--and the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, Robert H. Pelletreau Jr., picked up over the weekend through the mediation of a Swedish envoy, Mathias Mossberg. The envoy, acting on instructions of Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Sture Andersson, met with Arafat in Baghdad three times in the last two days, according to an Associated Press report from the Iraqi capital.

Andersson was instrumental in convincing Arafat to make his original denunciation of terrorism, which, together with an acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist, were the key conditions that the American government demanded for opening contacts with the PLO in the face of vehement and continuing Israeli opposition.

Tutwiler, in Washington, said Pelletreau met during the weekend in Tunis with representatives of the PLO, but she declined to give details about those discussions.

Abbas, based in Baghdad, had promptly claimed responsibility for the raid but insisted that “Israeli military officers” were the target. As the mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and other actions, Abbas has been branded a terrorist by U.S. and Israeli authorities. During the ship hijacking, a crippled American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, was fatally shot and his body pushed overboard in his wheelchair.

In the aftermath of the beach raid, PLO officials rejected U.S. demands that Abbas be expelled from his seat on the PLO Executive Committee, on which he has been an inactive member, according to PLO spokesmen.

Times staff writer Robin Wright, in Washington, contributed to this report.