Four Arab saboteurs were killed in a clash with an Israeli patrol near Umm Sidra Pass in the Jordan Valley today. The gang was wiped out when they refused orders to surrender and continued shooting from a hideout in a cave, a military spokesman reported. He said the encounter brought to nine the number of saboteurs killed near the Jordan River in the past few days. There were no Israeli casualties.
Israeli security forces rounded up an El Fatah gang operating out of the West Bank town of Nablus yesterday and seized an arsenal which, according to one Israeli officer, was sufficient to arm a regiment. The round-up was one of a series of measures taken to forestall threatened terrorist attacks during Israel’s Independence Day celebrations tomorrow. El Fatah had announced that it would launch a “spring offensive” on Yom Haatzmaut which comes a little more than a month short of the second anniversary of the Six-Day War.
Terrorists have been making desperate attempts to infiltrate Israeli territory in the past few days and have been trying to persuade local Arabs to join them in sabotage. But one local Arab whom they recruited to transport guns turned informer and led Israeli forces to the arms cache. Several score Arabs were arrested in what was described as one of the largest-anti terrorist operations on the West Bank. The El Fatah gang was given away by two Arabs who were captured while transporting 18 Russian-made Kalachnikof assault rifles by donkey near Nablus. They implicated a local Arab taxi driver who lead Israeli soldiers to the hideout where he admitted bringing arms. The raid yielded scores of machineguns, submachine guns, rifles and bazookas.
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