About 220 boys between the ages of 12 and 15, who were captured by the Israel Defense force during the fighting in Lebanon, were released yesterday to the International Red Cross (IRC). The youths had been captured after they fought Israeli troops with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades. Some of them told Israeli reporters that they had been shanghaied by the Palestine Liberation Organization while on school outings and forced to serve with the PLO.
The IRC had arranged to collect the youths Sunday, and buses were standing by to take them away from a prison camp the Israelis had erected outside Sidon. But the IRC said it would first have to trace their families, some of them in Lebanon and others in Damascus and other Syrian, towns. Those whose homes were in Sidon and Tyre were returned to their parents yesterday. The others will be returned home later. Israel agreed to release all the teenagers because it does not wish to keep juveniles in jail.
Beginning last Sunday, IRC representatives were allowed their first visits to some of the estimated 9,000 prisoners held in a detention camp near Nabatiya in south Lebanon. According to the officials in Geneva, where the organization is headquartered, 253 prisoners were registered during their visits yesterday and Sunday at the prison camp.
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