Assault Angers Jordan, PLO; Israel Issues Restrained Praise : Mideast: ‘Our hearts are with the fighters of the coalition,’ Shamir says. Iraq supporters hold protests throughout the region.

The Palestine Liberation Organization and Jordan, hotbeds of support for Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, broke with the majority of Arab nations Sunday to sharply condemn the U.S.-led ground offensive in Kuwait. The allied effort, however, won restrained praise in Israel.

A Jordanian spokesman said the Amman government “denounces this aggression and expresses the anger and pain of its people and calls upon the international community to . . . put an end to this fighting.”

Jordan, the spokesman said, “sincerely felt that there was a real chance for peace in the discussions held at the U.N. Security Council” hours before allied infantry and mechanized battalions smashed into the Iraqi-occupied sheikdom.

Earlier, Information Minister Ibrahim Izzeddine told reporters, “I think we are going to see a rather prolonged period of suspicion, tension and bad feeling” on the part of many Arabs toward the Arab nations within the anti-Iraq coalition.

The anger articulated by King Hussein’s government also was expressed in the streets of Amman. Police had to rescue Spanish television crewmen who were beaten by a crowd in a downtown district. Later, an emotional but peaceful demonstration was staged in front of the American Embassy, with the chant “U.S.A., go away!” heard well into the night.

In Egypt, Cairo University students protesting the ground war reportedly pelted riot police with stones on Sunday when the officers, armed with bamboo sticks and tear gas, prevented about 200 students at the university from marching off campus and into busy city streets. No injuries or arrests were reported in the early morning incident.

In Damascus, Syria, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical PLO faction, termed the counter-invasion of Kuwait a criminal act and called on pro-Iraqi Arab nations to break relations with the Western countries and their Arab allies whose armies led the assault.

In Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir voiced support for the ground offensive and suggested that, for the moment, Israel would make no move to hit Iraqi missile launchers, the source of sporadic Scud rocket attacks on the country.

“Today, our hearts are with the fighters of the coalition that is fighting against the dictatorship of Iraq,” Shamir said. “We wish them swift victory with as low a cost as possible.

“I hope there is no need for Israeli intervention,” he added. “We have common interests with the big coalition headed by the United States to put an end to the Scuds that cloud our life. At any rate, the United States is not stopping its attacks on the area where the rockets are launched.”

He said Israeli officials are satisfied that the allies have embarked on an offensive that they believe promises to produce a two-pronged result: the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the crippling of his army.

“The outcome of this war has to be the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad and the dismantling of his military machine, so he will not have at his disposal an armed force of the magnitude and the aggressiveness that he now has,” said Avi Pazner, a Shamir spokesman. “Otherwise, Iraq would constitute a danger not only to Israel but all the states of the Middle East.”

Israeli military officials warned that Hussein still might order a desperation missile attack on Israel. “Every one of us should show special alertness today,” advised an army radio broadcast. “We need to check that we are ready to protect ourselves against conventional attack and, of course, especially against a possible chemical attack.”

Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction of the PLO, which banked on a kind of diplomatic linkage with the Persian Gulf crisis to further the Palestinian cause, made no immediate comment on the offensive.

Arafat had supported the failed effort to settle the crisis in political negotiations at the United Nations and had hoped that President Hussein could use a promised withdrawal from Kuwait to bargain for an Israeli pullout from the Palestinian-populated occupied territories.

That deal was rejected by Washington and its allies since President Hussein first proposed it 10 days after his troops invaded neighboring Kuwait on Aug. 2. It was further dashed last week when the Soviet peace initiative, Baghdad’s last chance for a possible political settlement, dropped all references to linkage of the Gulf crisis with the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

In Amman, King Hussein, who had supported the Iraqi-proposed bargain, also suggested at a press conference last week that Baghdad’s weakened diplomatic position had weakened the notion of linkage. “I believe that the Palestinian problem is a problem that should be addressed on its own merits,” he said.

The PLO and the Palestinians both were wounded by the Iraqi invasion, despite President Hussein’s insistence that it would foster the Palestinian cause. The Persian Gulf states, rallying behind Kuwait, cut off financial support for the PLO and for Arafat, who had quickly embraced the Iraqi move and was a frequent visitor to Baghdad during the crisis.

More than 300,000 Palestinians lived in Kuwait when the Iraqi army struck last August. Only one in four is still there, Palestinian officials say, and most of those who fled lost their savings from well-paying Kuwaiti jobs. Kuwaiti officials accuse some of those who stayed behind of supporting Iraqi oppression of the oil sheikdom.

On Saturday, with the prospect that U.S.-led coalition forces would clear out the Iraqi occupation army, a PLO official here warned against retaliation.

“There is a big possibility that some revengeful Kuwaitis will start attacking and massacring Palestinians once they return,” Mohammed Milhem, a member of the PLO executive committee, told Reuters news agency. “We will cut off the hands of any Kuwaiti who attacks our people. Palestinians in Kuwait are not soldiers. They are masons and workers and should not pay the price for the deeds of some others.”

Government officials in Tunisia and Yemen and Algerian political leaders also denounced the outbreak of ground fighting. “This is proof that the United States had no other goal except to destroy Iraq,” declared Algerian political leader Hocine Ait Ahmed.

But the overpowering assault brought satisfaction to the Arab members of the coalition, none more than the ousted government of beleaguered Kuwait. “We’re very happy,” said Adnan Shawaihan of the Kuwaiti Information Office in Dhahran, a city in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province where many of the allied warplanes that carried the air war are based.