Three more terrorists were killed in another encounter with Israel Defense Force troops in the southern Lebanon security zone Sunday, bringing to five the number killed over the weekend trying to infiltrate Israel.
Twenty terrorists have been killed in encounters inside and just north of the security zone during the past month alone. A total of 30 have been killed there this year. Not one has managed to cross the Israeli border.
The three killed Sunday night were spotted by an IDF patrol near Meis el-Jabal, in the central sector of the zone, about a half mile from Kibbutz Manara.
The gang was said to have been on its way to attack a village inside Israel.
A general security alert was ordered in Israeli villages near the border, and the residents were kept informed of the progress of the chase. But nobody was ordered to take shelter.
The three killed were members of a group calling itself the Palestine Liberation Front-Talaat Yacub faction, which had claimed responsibility for previous infiltration attempts recently. Yacub’s group in the past has been known as the Palestine Popular Struggle Front.
JABRIL GROUP TAKES CREDIT
Meanwhile, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command has claimed responsibility for an infiltration attempt on Saturday, in which the IDF killed two terrorists. The radical faction, led by Ahmed Jabril, is opposed to Yasir Arafat’s leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The two terrorists, who were killed north of Hasbaya on Saturday night, have been identified as a Palestinian and a Lebanese. In an announcement made in the Lebanese Druse town of Rashaya, Jabril’s group acknowledged the two were “killed while on a mission to attack a target in Palestine.”
The statement said the abortive raid was planned “in retaliation for the submissive policies” of Arafat.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin pointed out Sunday that the recent increase in the number of terrorist attacks against the IDF and the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army follows a halt in fighting between the Shiite Amal militia and the extremist Hezbollah, or Party of God, which is backed by Iran.
“They have stopped attacking each other inside Lebanon, and now have more time and energy to attack us,” he said.
Rabin noted that Israel’s war in Lebanon, known in Israel as Operation Peace for Galilee, had failed to wipe out Palestinian terrorism. He said that during the past year, there have been more attempted terrorist attacks against Israel than there had been in the year before the start of the Lebanon war in 1982.
Addressing an election rally before Tuesday’s municipal runoff elections, Rabin disclosed that 48 IDF soldiers had been killed defending Israeli citizens since the army set up the security zone and withdrew most of its forces from Lebanon in 1985.
But since then, no Israeli civilians have been killed by action from across the border.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
