Red Cross Visits Arab Deportees, Evacuates 2 Men

Red Cross representatives, making their first visit to the 415 Palestinians expelled by Israel to southern Lebanon last month, evacuated two of the men Saturday from their freezing mountain camp as sheets of snow and rain fell for the third straight day.

One of the Palestinians, Zuheir Labbadeh, 31, has suffered for days from severe kidney problems, according to physicians in the camp, and was taken by helicopter to a U.N. base at Naqoura on the Lebanese coast. An Israeli army doctor will decide today where he will be treated.

The other, Bassem Siyuri, 16, the youngest deportee, had been arrested for writing anti-Israeli slogans on a wall in the West Bank town of Hebron. Israeli authorities said that he was expelled in error and could return home.

“We just completed our assessment of the general and medical condition of the 415 Palestinian deportees,” Georges Comninos, a senior delegate of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, told reporters at the camp after the four-hour visit.

“The aim of this assessment is to transmit it urgently to the authorities concerned and reply to the needs we identified. I am confident the next step will be to come back very soon, perhaps tomorrow.”

Aziz Dweik, the spokesman at the camp for Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, praised the Red Cross for its sustained effort to visit the camp and said the two relief workers realized “the urgent need of those patients who should be hospitalized.”

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced that nine other Palestinians mistakenly deported would be permitted to return today by U.N. helicopter to Naqoura and then to the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Most are expected to face criminal charges once they are back in Israeli-controlled territory.

As the two Red Cross representatives arrived by helicopter through heavy fog, hundreds of the deportees rushed from their tents on the barren mountainside, shouting “ Allahu akhbar! “ or “God is great!” to welcome them.

Delayed for a day by miserable weather that has blanketed Israel and Lebanon, the Red Cross workers were the first representatives from an international relief agency to visit the deportees in the no-man’s-land between Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon and Lebanese army lines.

“I sure am glad you are here--I was about to lose hope,” Dr. Abdulaziz Rantisi, a physician from the Gaza Strip and a Hamas leader, told Comninos and Dr. Cordula Wolfisberg as the Red Cross representatives trudged through the snow to the camp.

The visit broke a three-week standoff in which Lebanon and Israel have refused access for both food supplies and medical help to the deportees, each saying they were the other’s responsibility.

The Palestinians, suspected by Israeli military authorities of supporting militant Islamic groups, were expelled Dec. 17 in retaliation for the killing of six Israeli soldiers and police officers.

Lebanon, in an unexpected show of defiance, refused to admit the men through its lines and barred supplies of food, water and medicine to them from its territory, demanding that Israel take them back.

Despite mounting international pressure to assist the men, who in the freezing weather are said to be developing serious respiratory diseases, skin ailments and diarrhea, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said Saturday that he will not relent.

“They might die,” Hariri conceded in an interview in Beirut. “It is not my responsibility. It is the responsibility of the country which deported them from their own homes. We cannot be responsible for all the deaths that might happen on the planet. . . .

“I feel with them. I cry for them. But that’s it.”

Lebanon has refused to allow the Red Cross or other international relief agencies to visit the camp from Lebanese territory, fearing that aid from Beirut would amount to accepting responsibility for the deportees.

Hariri consented to Saturday’s flight from Israel only on the condition that the flight “will not fly over liberated Lebanese land--it will fly over occupied land,” he said, referring to Israel’s “security zone.”

“It is the principle,” he said. “First of all, it is a question of international law. You cannot deport anyone to a country they do not want. This cannot happen. It should not happen. . . .

“It happened in the past, it’s true,” Hariri added. “But from now on, as long as I am the prime minister, it will never happen.”

Lebanese officials said they will ask for an Arab summit to help resolve the issue when Arab foreign ministers meet to discuss the deportation question Monday in Cairo.

Foreign Minister Faris Bouez said he would also press the United Nations for a specific mechanism and a deadline for implementing a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel immediately rescind the deportations.

Hoping to ease international criticism of the mass deportation, Israel agreed to allow the Red Cross to visit the encampment “on a one-time basis” to assess the men’s needs, but not to deliver food, water, medicine or other supplies to the camp.

En route to the camp aboard a U.N. helicopter with Red Cross markings, Comninos and Wolfisberg were forced by heavy rain to land in Israeli-controlled territory for about an hour before moving on to Marj Zohour at the south end of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The deportees lighted three huge bonfires to help the helicopter find the camp in the dense fog.

As the helicopter touched down at the camp, covered in 10 inches of snow, Rantisi called through a bullhorn to the men:

“We shall now meet with the International Red Cross to tell them that our plight cannot end except with our return to our homes. Medicines, food, water and protection from the cold are temporary solutions for a prolonged agony.”

Dweik told the Red Cross officials, “We have been waiting for you for a long time. We would like to emphasize our problem is how we go home. . . . It is not food or medicine that we need; our return home is more urgent than anything.”

Health conditions at the camp have been deteriorating, Rantisi said, because of the biting cold, heavy rain and snowfalls. Most of the tents are soaked, and many are flooded.

Of the 415 deportees, he said, 209 were sick, including 60 with such chronic ailments as peptic ulcers, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and gastroenteritis. Two of the exiles are blind.

Labbadeh was described by Wolfisberg as a “very urgent case,” suffering from potential kidney failure. He was turned back at the Israeli border, however, when the Red Cross attempted to bring him from Lebanon, U.N. officials said. An Israeli army physician will examine him today and decide whether he can be treated at a hospital in Marjayoun in Israeli-controlled territory in southern Lebanon.

Siyuri, carrying his few belongings in a bag, first wept but then was full of smiles as he shook hands with some of those he was leaving behind. Before boarding the helicopter, he kissed the ground and prayed.

About 30 friends and relatives gave the Palestinian youth an emotional welcome today after he was escorted home by the Israeli army, Reuters news agency said.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said the deportation of the 415 Palestinians had hurt Israel’s chances for peace.

“There is no doubt the deportation caused damage,” Peres told Israel army radio. “For the future I think that our prime consideration must be to ensure that the deportation must not conflict with the chances to make peace.”

Murphy reported from Beirut, and Parks reported from Jerusalem.