Israel Relents, Will Let Red Cross Help Deportees : Mideast: Rabin allows food, medicine and mail for expelled Palestinians in bid to avert sanctions.

In an effort to avert international sanctions for its deportation a month ago of more than 400 Palestinians, Israel reversed itself Friday and agreed to allow the Red Cross to take food, medicine and mail to the men in their frozen, mountainside camp in southern Lebanon.

After doggedly insisting that Lebanon was responsible for the deportees, dumped blindfolded and bound on its territory, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he would permit the Red Cross to carry in supplies by helicopter this weekend and to repatriate nine men exiled in error.

Oded Ben-Ami, a Rabin spokesman, said the agreement would let the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross take in medical supplies, water purification tablets, mail and legal documents for appealing the expulsions.

The Palestinians were deported Dec. 17, accused of being supporters of militant Islamic groups.

Israel will also let the Red Cross and an Israeli military doctor determine whether seven sick deportees the Red Cross wants to hospitalize will be taken to Marjayoun in Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon for treatment. Israel will let them leave, but only if their lives are in danger, Ben-Ami said.

Although Israel continues to insist that it will not take back the Palestinians until their two-year period of exile is over, officials here portrayed the Red Cross flight as the first in a continuing relief effort--and a move toward resolving the impasse over the deportees.

“For us, this is a first step,” said Pierre Ryter, deputy chief of the Red Cross delegation in Israel, “and we have grounds to expect there will be further steps . . . toward bringing assistance to these people and resolving the crisis over their status.”

Ryter said Red Cross representatives, including a physician, would visit the deportees, probably today or Sunday, after Lebanon agrees to the visit and U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon provide a helicopter.

Rabin had previously barred any humanitarian aid from Israeli-controlled territory to the Palestinians, whom he described as endangering Israeli security after six soldiers and policemen were killed in just over a week. After a bitter debate, he won Cabinet endorsement of his adamant stand.

On Friday morning in Tel Aviv, a 23-year-old Palestinian from the occupied Gaza Strip stabbed four men at the central bus station in what police said was an apparent effort to avenge the expulsions. He was shot and killed.

Fakhry Dahdouh, 23, a Islamic Jihad supporter who was carrying pages from the Koran, attacked a Russian immigrant, who reportedly was seriously injured, a Polish technician, a Lebanese construction worker and a 50-year-old Israeli with butcher knives as he shouted “ Allahu akbar! “ or “God is great.”

Although the attack was the first on civilians since the mass deportation, Israeli officials said that it underscored the continuing security threat posed by Islamic militants not only in the occupied territories but in Israel itself.

In the face of mounting international pressure over the deportations, Rabin relented slightly a week ago and permitted a Red Cross visit on what he described as a “one-time-only basis.” In its wake, and as pressure from the United States and Europe mounted, Israeli officials began to hint that the relief effort could become permanent.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a critic in the Cabinet of the mass expulsion, sought this week to prevent further debate at the U.N. Security Council of Israel’s action--and the possible sanctions that might flow from that discussion for Israel’s refusal to repatriate the Palestinians.

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had indicated that he would push for firmer U.N. action, possibly including sanctions, if Israel were not more flexible, and Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger told Peres in Paris this week that Israel should not count on an American veto of such a resolution.

Two special U.N. envoys came to Jerusalem for talks with Rabin but failed to persuade him to comply with a Security Council resolution, adopted unanimously, demanding the deportees’ immediate return.

Rabin is also concerned about the nine petitions pending before Israel’s supreme court seeking annulment of the expulsions; officials believe the government’s case will be strengthened if the court finds that the men are not in danger.

The deportees are trapped in a no-man’s-land between Israel’s “security zone” and Lebanese military lines. Despite freezing weather and heavy snows, they have continued to live in a tent camp after the Beirut government refused to permit them to head north and Israel refused to repatriate them. After both Israel and Lebanon blocked the Red Cross from providing food, water and medicine, the men have survived on supplies smuggled into the camp by Lebanese villagers.