Representatives of the International Red Cross visited six Israeli prisoners of war held by the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tripoli, Lebanon, last week where Yasir Arafat and his loyalists were making a desperate last stand against attacking PLO dissidents backed by Syria.
According to reports from Geneva, the six Israelis are well and are in the hands of pro-Arafat elements. But the Red Cross has not been able to visit two other Israeli POWs held captive by Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command an extremist, anti-Arafat terrorist group under the PLO umbrella. According to IRC spokesman Jean-Jacques Kurz, those two prisoners were last visited by the Red Cross on September 16.
Kurz told Israel Radio today that the IRC has a 14-member team in Tripoli which is concerned mainly with the 10,000 refugees from the PLO’s civil war. About 60 percent of them are Lebanese whom the IRC is supplying with food and blankets.
Meanwhile, Israeli security forces are investigating a bomb explosion which killed two Shiite Moslem residents of the south Lebanon village of Tibnin today. The Israelis are trying to determine whether the bombing was motivated by a private feud or was another in a series of attacks on members of the local home guard in south Lebanon villages.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
