President Chaim Herzog today sharply criticized the CBS television network for holding Israel to blame in the deaths of two CBS news cameramen during a battle in south Lebanon last Thursday. He accused the network of attacking Israel while remaining silent when the same terrorists Israel was fighting, attacked Americans.
But CBS appeared today to be backing away from its charge. Ernest Leiser, CBS vice president of news who flew to Israel to discuss the matter, said after a 90-minute meeting today with Premier Shimon Peres’media adviser, Uri Savir, that the deaths may have been the result of a “tragic mistake.” Savir remarked to reporters later that it still was regretable that CBS had been so hasty to condemn Israel.
The two CBS crewmen killed and a third who was wounded by Israeli tank fire in Milki village, about 13 kilometers southwest of Sidon, were Lebanese employes of the American network. CBS immediately cancelled a series of broadcasts from Israel during Passover-Easter week next month. The network’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Warren Lewis, confirmed this over the weekend.
Leiser said today that the decision still stood. He insisted it was not meant as “punishment” of Israel but as gesture of mourning for the two CBS employes who were killed.
REPORTERS KNOW THE DANGER
Herzog, speaking to reporters during a tour of Kiryat Motzkin in the Haifa Bay area today, observed that any journalist who entered a combat zone knew his life was in danger. He demanded to know why CBS never protested or halted its broadcasts from Lebanon after 250 U.S. marines were killed in a carbomb attack in west Beirut in 1983 by the same terrorists now harassing the Israel Defense Force.
The government and the military are standing by their first account of the incident — that the tank fired rockets which killed the CBS cameramen were aimed at armed terrorist in civilian clothes from whom the television men were indistinguishable.
The IDF maintained that a preliminary investigation confirmed that the tank crew acted according to regulations governing military operations and decided not to establish a commission of inquiry into the incident.
Premier Shimon Peres, who supported the IDF’s decision, expressed regrets for the deaths of the CBS employes but denied categorically that they were deliberately shot at, as CBS officials in New York have claimed.
(President Reagan, at a White House press conference Thursday night, called the deaths of the cameramen a “tragedy” but said he was “quite sure” that this was not “a deliberate killing.”)
The IDF, meanwhile, has banned journalists from the north from entering the areas of south Lebanon still under Israeli control. Israeli Embassies in foreign capitals have been instructed to stress to the heads of foreign news agencies that they would be placing their personnel in grave danger if they tried to contravene the ban.
Last Thursday’s incident occured in the course of an IDF search of Milki village for terrorists and weapons. A military spokesman said afterwards that the CBS television crew was stationed in the middle of a group of armed terrorists.
They were Lebanese citizens, replacing American employes of the network who have been pulled out of Lebanon because of death threats from terrorist groups. Western journalists presently file Beirut-datelined dispatches from the safety of Cyprus.
IDF spokesmen stressed the difficulty of distinguishing terrorists dressed as civilians with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders from civilian journalists with cameras and sound equipment on their shoulders.
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