Another Rocket Attack Greets Israeli Pullback : Lebanon: A child is killed in the shelling. It could spark new reprisal raids against Hezbollah guerrillas.

Hours after the Israelis ended a tank-led attack on a pair of Muslim villages in southern Lebanon, another shower of Katyusha rockets sprayed Israel’s northern frontier on Friday. One exploded in the courtyard of a rural border home, killing a small girl.

The death of the 5-year-old child was the first inside Israel from a Katyusha blast in more than a decade and the first since the current round of tit-for-tat shelling began Sunday. The fatality also was likely to spark another round of reprisal raids.

Israel’s government, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, has been weighing the value of expanding the Israeli-controlled buffer zone in southern Lebanon against the danger of getting bogged down in a wider conflict in the territory of its embattled neighbor.

Israeli armor had withdrawn back into the buffer zone after a one-day assault Thursday on Kafra and Yater, two villages that had been singled out as sources of the rocket fire. Officers claimed they had wiped out the Katyusha threat.

“The operation went exactly according to plan and according to the timetable. The targets were hit just as we wanted them to be,” an Israeli military official told army radio.

But as friendly artillery covered the Israeli withdrawal, Katyusha fire from beyond the villages landed first in the security belt, then inside a panhandle region of Israel that juts toward the Lebanese hills.

The slain Israeli girl, who lived at the Ramot Hagalil cooperative farm, was running toward her father when a shell exploded at her feet; her father and another man were slightly wounded.

The assault on the Lebanese villages cost the lives of two Israeli soldiers and at least seven Shiite guerrillas from the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement.

Reports from Lebanon said that Shiite militiamen had rushed back into Kafra and Yater as soon as the Israelis withdrew, celebrating by firing guns in the air. “We will teach them a lesson,” said one Hezbollah member, according to a news report from Lebanon. “The Israelis were defeated in this battle.”

The euphoria was short-lived as Israeli artillery soon began to crash into the already battered villages.

The escalation of violence was a textbook example of how the cycle of battle, once set rolling, can easily spin into uncertainty.

Last Saturday, Palestinian infiltrators killed three Israeli soldiers inside an army camp in Israel. Israel first struck back by hitting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon from the air. Then, in an attack that had more to do with Israeli-Hezbollah hostility than with the Palestinian raid, an Israeli helicopter rocketed a convoy carrying Sheik Abbas Moussawi, a top Hezbollah leader. He was killed, as were his wife and 5-year-old son.

Hezbollah then began to fire the mobile Katyusha rockets into the buffer zone and northern Israel itself. Most fell harmlessly. Israel responded with tank and artillery fire, then with Thursday’s incursion north of the narrow strip.

In the end, the raid on the two villages was more of a punitive thrust than a serious means of ending the threat from the rockets. Military observers here said that the goal was to send Hezbollah and the Lebanese government a message. “Continued Katyusha firing on Israel carries with it the risk of losing the area to occupation,” wrote the liberal Al Hamishmar newspaper.

The message was not taken immediately to heart, although Shiite leaders on Friday called for an end to the rocket firings to deprive Israel of a rationale for further warfare.

The next step for the Israel Defense Forces is unclear. “The main problem facing the (force) in operating against Hezbollah in south Lebanon is not to lose control over events and, thereby, prevent the actions against the Katyushas from becoming too wide of an operation, which will obligate (the Israelis) to remain a considerable length of time north of the security zone,” wrote military columnist Zeev Schiff in the Haaretz newspaper.

Hezbollah coalesced during the Israeli occupation of the southern half of Lebanon, a period that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of that country. Shiite guerrillas then were instrumental in pounding Israeli troops with ambushes and car bomb blasts. A domestic outcry in Israel forced the government to bring the Israeli troops home. Israel, however, continues to maintain a narrow buffer zone with the aid of an allied Lebanese militia.

Since October, when Middle East peace talks began in Madrid, Hezbollah and its Iranian backers have pledged to step up attacks on the buffer zone and Israel. Israel has warned that such attacks will not be tolerated.

Meanwhile, in Israel, there was another outbreak of vengeance-related violence. In the town of Kfar Saba northeast of Tel Aviv, a Palestinian fatally stabbed a recently arrived Soviet immigrant woman and wounded three of her companions, also immigrants, before being shot four times by a bystander.

Spontaneous rage by Israelis was the first reaction at the scene. “I saw the man who had been shot lying on the ground surrounded by people hitting him, so I said, ‘He’s been shot. You don’t have to hit him,’ ” recounted a witness on army radio.

BACKGROUND: The Katyusha Rocket

The Soviet-made Katyusha rockets used by Hezbollah guerrillas are known for their mobility but not their accuracy. They can be trucked around quickly, making them difficult to find and destroy. The weapon has been nicknamed the “Stalin Organ” because it has pipe-like multiple launchers arrayed on a square frame. More than 100 of the small rockets have been fired at Israel this week, and a third of them have fallen in the northern part of the country. United Nations officials say it could be almost impossible for the Israeli army to stop the Katyusha attacks if Hezbollah is determined to continue launching them. One official noted that the launchers can be carried on a donkey and quickly set up on the ground and fired.

A Week of Raids and Rocket Attacks

Here is a chronology of the violence between Lebanon and Israel that began last Saturday: Saturday, Feb. 15: Arabs armed with knives and axes kill three Israeli soldiers at an army cam near the West Bank. Sunday: Israeli helicopters attack convoy killing Hezbollah leader Sheik Abbas Moussawi. Sunday-Wednesday: Muslim militants and Israeli forces trade rocket and artillery barrages on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border. Thursday: A tank-led Israeli force storms two south Lebanon villages looking for Shiite Muslim guerrillas. Friday: Militants’ rocket attacks continue.