Palestinian terrorist attacks spread to the generally quiet eastern border with Jordan on Friday, when an Israeli soldier was killed and a Bedouin tracker wounded by gunmen who crossed into the Arava and set up an ambush.
Jordan announced over the weekend that it had captured the attackers, who managed to slip back into Jordan without injury.
In Damascus, the Fatah Uprising, led by Col. Saed (Abu) Musa, claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred just inside the Israeli border, some three miles south of Moshav Hatzeva, in the desert valley that stretches from the Dead Sea to Eilat.
The dead IDF soldier, a reservist identified as Sgt. Maj. Oren Lior, 24, of Kfar Sava, was laid to rest in his home town Sunday.
The incident occurred as a five-member Israel Defense Force unit went on a routine patrol of the dirt track that runs alongside the rudimentary double barbed-wire fence marking the Israeli-Jordanian border.
Jordan’s main Arava road runs parallel to the border some 200 yards to the east, while Israel’s main road to Eilat at this point is two or so miles to the west.
The Bedouin tracker suddenly told the command care driver to halt and back up, as he wanted to investigate what he thought were tracks leading from the fence to the dirt path.
The vehicle reversed, and as the tracker got out to investigate, he was suddenly told to stop in English. A gunman hidden in a stunted bush some yards away opened fire on the tracker and the vehicle. As the IDF soldiers returned the fire, another gunman hidden in another bush some 50 yards away also opened fire, mortally wounding Lior.
PLANS TO ATTACK CIVILIANS
The exchange of fire lasted about a minute and a half, but when the gunmen’s fire fell silent, the soldiers, believing they had killed the attackers, put the wounded men aboard the army vehicle and sped off to get help and treatment for them.
But in the dark, the two gunmen slipped back through the wire fence into Jordan, where they were subsequently picked up by Jordanian troops.
Although first reports spoke of a cleverly planned ambush against Israeli soldiers, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and senior army officers all later said the gunmen may have been on their way to attack civilian settlements in the Arava.
This would strengthen Israeli contentions that the rising number of attempts to infiltrate Israel’s borders are terrorist actions.
Yasir Arafat and other officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization say that, while they may have agreed to halt terrorist actions against Israeli civilians, attacks against IDF soldiers are part of legitimate guerrilla warfare against the Israel army and will continue.
Rabin also said Israel holds Jordan responsible for the incident and that Jordan should take energetic measures to detain the attackers.
In response, the Jordanian Petra news agency announced officially that the gunmen had been captured and that Jordanian policy was to prevent or reduce such actions against Israel.
Israeli officials point out that Israel holds Jordan and Egypt to a different standard than Lebanon, where there is no stable government to prevent such attacks or take action against those who commit them.
QUIETEST AND LONGEST BORDER
Last week, two teen-age gunmen crossed into the Gaza Strip from Egypt and threw grenades at an Israeli army base. Israeli troops shot at the infiltrators and eventually took them into custody.
The attack, which occurred near Rafah, apparently took Egyptian officials by surprise. Throughout the weekend, Egyptian security forces were reported to be conducting searches for additional suspects in the Canada refugee camps, where the two teen-agers were said to have been trained.
A preliminary army investigation of the incident has uncovered irregularities in the Israeli army’s handling of the incident, Ha’aretz reported Sunday. The outpost commander and the head of the squad on alert reportedly have already been reprimanded for the army’s failure to return fire immediately.
The group responsible for Friday’s ambush, Fatah Uprising, is a Syrian-backed splinter group that broke with Arafat in 1983. Abu Musa and his breakaway Palestinian allies succeeded in forcing Arafat to flee Lebanon in 1985.
The Jordanian border with Israel is regarded as the quietest of all frontiers, with very few incidents of attempted infiltration reported in recent years.
It is also Israel’s longest border, and because of its relative safety, the installation of an electronic fence, similar to that in place along the Lebanese border, has never been considered worthwhile. Instead, the international boundary is marked by two strands of barbed wire, some 20 yards apart.
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