Israel Yields, OKs Red Cross Visit to 415 Arab Deportees

Relenting in the face of pressure at home and abroad, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed Thursday to permit two Red Cross representatives to visit the 415 Palestinians expelled last month to southern Lebanon as members of militant Islamic groups.

Rabin said he will allow, on “a one-time basis,” the Red Cross to send two representatives by U.N. helicopter across Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon to the deportees’ tent camp to check their health and conditions.

Reto Meister, chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel, said that, weather permitting, a senior delegate and a physician will fly from a U.N. base at Nakura on the Lebanese coast today to make a “survey and assessment” at the mountainside encampment at Marj Zohour.

He praised the agreement as “an important first step in the right direction” in resolving the three-week stalemate over the deportees’ future.

Under the agreement with Israel, the Red Cross representatives will not take food, water, medicine or other supplies to the deportees, Meister said. News reports from the camp indicated “there is no absolute emergency situation where we would need to bring in large amounts of supplies immediately,” he added.

“Some humanitarian needs will have to be covered,” he said, “and we go to identify them. We will then make proposals to the authorities in Israel on how to cover them.”

The Red Cross made a similar request to Lebanon for access to the camp, which lies in a no-man’s-land between Lebanese army lines and Israeli-controlled territory.

Reuters news agency reported late Thursday from Beirut that Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said that Lebanon, too, will allow the Red Cross in “for one time only.”

In Marj Zohour, the deportees said they see nothing in the moves that will resolve their plight. “If this is the only step, it will not be enough because we have serious cases which need hospitalization,” said Dr. Abdulaziz Rantisi, a physician from the Gaza Strip and a spokesman for the deportees. “Our needs are very clear--continuous help and emergency medical help in case of casualties.”

Rantisi rejected any suggestion that Israel is showing new flexibility. “It may be part of a plan by Israel to shift the sight of the U.N. from the central problem--the implementation of Security Council Resolution 799,” he said, referring to the U.N. demand for the deportees’ immediate repatriation.

Even with all the restrictions, however, the Israeli move reflects a major policy shift. Only on Wednesday, Rabin had declared that Israel’s position--refusing to take back the deportees and barring assistance to them through Israeli-controlled territory--would not change “one bit.”

In relaxing its stand against assistance to the deportees from Israel, Jerusalem hopes the gesture will deflect international criticism and avert possible sanctions by the U.N. Security Council. The Foreign Ministry warned Rabin that the sanctions threat is serious and that the Bush Administration in its waning days might not veto such a resolution.

Rabin is also attempting to counter criticism of the expulsion that is welling up in Israel, including inside his own government, and to strengthen the legal defense of the action in the face of 12 separate court challenges.

But his greatest concern may have been to prevent a Cabinet revolt. Uzi Baram, the tourism minister, said he is prepared to propose that the Cabinet on Sunday call for humanitarian aid to the deportees; political commentators said he might get a majority among the 18 ministers.

“It’s not Rabin’s nature to give in, but the pressures on him were building from many sides,” one senior Israeli official remarked. “He was more than prepared to tough it out against the U.N. and the whole world, and he has shown a frightening readiness to curb dissent within the Cabinet and (government). But everything coming together as it has made him reassess.”

Shimon Peres, the foreign minister, had urged Rabin in a meeting late Wednesday to yield on humanitarian assistance with the aim of holding the Cabinet together, halting the erosion of Israel’s international position and encouraging the Palestinian delegation to return to the Arab-Israeli peace talks in Washington next month.

“They remain rivals even now, but only Peres has the experience and stature to make Rabin rethink something,” another official commented.

After Rabin’s decision on Thursday, Peres suggested there might be further movement as he and other Israeli officials conferred today with Chinmaya Gharekhan, a special envoy sent by U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, to discuss implementation of a Security Council resolution calling for the return of the deportees.

In a message that shocked the government into its overnight policy review, Boutros-Ghali warned earlier this week that he might have to recommend “further steps” to the Security Council if the deportees were not returned--and that was read here as implying international sanctions.

Israel was already finding that it was paying the diplomatic cost of the expulsions. In the past week, the director general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the foreign minister of Canada, a delegation of French mayors, a delegation from the Socialist International and the Dutch justice minister all canceled visits in apparent protests over the mass deportation.

But Gad Ben-Ari, a Rabin adviser, portrayed the policy shift as “without special significance. . . . This is not a convoy of supplies, but a once-only visit,” he said. “It has nothing to do with international pressure or domestic pressure. It is a response to a humanitarian request.”

Ben-Ari stressed that Israel’s decision to expel the men, believed to be supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement and of Islamic Jihad, stands and that there will be no retreat from it. “The government’s decision has vast support here as a proper and necessary action,” he said.