Israel Deports 400 Palestinians : Mideast: Arabs accused of supporting militant Islamic groups are moved to border. But a stalemate develops when they are blocked by Lebanese troops.

Israel deported about 400 Palestinians to Lebanon on Thursday, accusing them of being supporters of militant Islamic groups responsible for attacks on its forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The unprecedented expulsions were the most sweeping since the early 1970s and the largest outside of wartime.

Blindfolded and with their hands bound, the Palestinians were driven into Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone in southern Lebanon through pelting rain in a convoy of buses accompanied by armored vehicles. The convoy departed just minutes after Israel’s Supreme Court upheld military orders expelling the Palestinians for two years.

Handed copies of deportation orders describing them as a threat to Israeli security and to stability in the occupied territories, the deportees were put aboard trucks and driven north toward Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley by the South Lebanese Army, a pro-Israeli militia, military sources said.

But Lebanese troops at the Marj as-Zohour checkpoint early today refused on instructions from Beirut to allow the deportees to cross from the Israeli-controlled zone, according to military sources here. Earthen barriers had been erected to prevent the trucks from advancing, and the Lebanese soldiers lowered their weapons as if prepared to open fire.

However, Israeli forces backing up the militia would not allow the convoy to return to the zone, the sources said. And, at dawn, the deportees remained trapped aboard the trucks in the Lebanese no-man’s-land in the freezing rain, according to correspondents for the Reuters and Agence France-Presse news agencies at Marj as-Zohour.

During the standoff, Israeli troops fired over the heads of the deportees, witnesses said.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin acknowledged earlier that the deportations will bring widespread international criticism--which indeed came swiftly from the United States--and could jeopardize Israel’s peace negotiations with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states.

But Rabin, under intense domestic pressure to retaliate for attacks that have resulted in the death of six Israeli soldiers and policemen this month, contended it was the “most humane” option his government had in hitting back at the militant Muslim groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“We did not harm anyone, we did not kill anyone, we did not damage anyone’s property,” Rabin said, expressing hope that the measure will cripple the Islamic fundamentalists and deter further attacks while encouraging Palestinian moderates to pursue negotiations with Israel. “Don’t forget the alternatives--the death penalty, demolishing houses, mass arrests.”

But Sari Nusseibeh, deputy head of the Palestinian negotiating team, denounced the deportation, as a “collective punishment . . . that is beyond all justice.”

“This will make people (on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip) extremely angry and frustrated, beyond what they already are,” Nusseibeh continued. “This government is not serious about the negotiations but is trying to undermine the standing of the (Palestinian) delegation in the community.”

In Washington, the Bush Administration said it “strongly condemns” the deportations. President Bush, in remarks before the Israeli court ruled, expressed concern that deportation would “risk complicating” the peace process.

President-elect Bill Clinton also expressed deep concern about the deportations, which prompted the Palestinian delegation to the Mideast talks to announce that it would boycott further negotiations until Israel reversed its action.

Even before the deportations were carried out, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza Strip called in a leaflet for “escalating the confrontations” in the occupied territories and kindling “a struggle of fire and a volcano under the feet of the occupiers.”

Despite this criticism, Israeli officials harbored hopes that the negotiations might in time be accelerated by the removal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as rivals to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“I am convinced that with Clinton’s accession to the presidency and the renewal of the peace talks, you will see them coming back,” Rabin said of Palestinian threats to pull out of the negotiations.

The deportations, far exceeding the 73 carried out in the last five years, were delayed 19 hours while Israel’s Supreme Court heard objections from civil rights lawyers that none of the deportees had been charged with a crime, convicted in a court or afforded an opportunity to defend themselves himself.

Lawyers for the Palestinians argued that not only did the deportations violate basic human rights but that the government was also violating Israeli law, which assures a deportee the right of appeal to military and civilian tribunals.

Rabin said that the usual legal procedures were bypassed because they have proved to be too slow.

Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, told the court that the surge in attacks, particularly the abduction and killing this week of a paramilitary police sergeant, was pushing the country toward a crisis that would be difficult to contain.

Where Israeli military and police fatalities in the first five years of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, totaled 29, Barak said, there have been six in the past month. “Israel’s defense forces must act,” he told the court, and if the government was forced by the court to back down, the situation would become worse.