Rabin Pledges Continued Talks in Wake of Katyusha Attacks

As life returned to normal for residents of northern Israel in the wake of last Friday’s rocket attacks launched by the fundamentalist Hezbollah movement, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said the only solution of fight terrorist activities is a political one.

Rabin told the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday that despite the Hezbollah attacks, negotiations with Syria would continue.

Rabin and other government officials have repeatedly blamed Syria, the major power broker in Lebanon, for not doing enough to stop the activities of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the two Israelis who were killed last Friday were laid to rest in their hometowns.

Staff Sgt. Liron Lang, 20, who was killed in a clash with Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, was buried in Kibbutz Givat Haim Ihud, near Hadera.

Benny Yunassi, 17, was buried in Nahariya. Yunassi was killed by a Katyusha rocket last Friday evening while running on the beach as part of his training before entering the army.

The rocket was one of some 30 to 40 that Hezbollah terrorists fired from the Tyre and Nabatiya areas in Lebanon toward Israel, 12 of which landed within the Israeli border.

The first salvos landed near the northern towns of Kiryat Shemona and Nahariya a little after 6 p.m. Other Katyushas fell in the Galilee region an hour later.

In addition to the one Katyusha fatality, nine people were treated for light injuries and shock. There was also damage to apartment buildings.

The government sent assessors and service crews to hard-hit areas to estimate damage and begin repair work.

But Israel’s northern border was quiet over the weekend, after U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher reportedly appealed to Syria and Lebanon to clam the situation.

Israeli diplomatic sources in Washington said that Christopher met over the weekend with Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, who conveyed the message that Israel still stands by the agreements reached with Hezbollah in July 1993.

According to that understanding, which brought to an end Israel’s massive weeklong shelling of civilian areas in Lebanon, Israel agreed not to shell civilian targets and Hezbollah vowed not to shell targets in northern Israel.

The sources said Christopher passed on Rabinovich’s message during phone conversations with the foreign ministers of Syria and Lebanon.

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa assured Christopher that Syria also stands by the agreements, adding that his country viewed last Friday’s rocket assaults by Hezbollah as an aberration.

The rocket attacks came in response to an Israeli precision air strike in southern Lebanon. The strike killed a senior Hezbollah leader, Rida Mahsoun Yassin, also known as Abu Ali. Two Israeli attack helicopters fired two rockets at the car in which Yassin was travelling, killing him and two others.

That Israeli air attack came in retaliation for the killing of Lang during a ground clash earlier in the day with Hezbollah forces.

In the wake of the rocket attacks, several leaders of communities in northern Israel complained that no warning had been issued of a possible retaliation by Hezbollah. As a result, they said, the region was caught unprepared.

They maintained that several public shelters had been locked, and no official came to open them.

Kiryat Shemona Mayor Prosper Azran said a senior officer in the homefront common gave instructions last Friday morning to open the shelters, but the officer in charge of the northern command, Maj. Gen. Amiram Levine, canceled the directive out of concern it would cause panic.

Residents of the north, including Yunassi’s sister, Miriam, said that had they known of a possible attack, they would have taken precautions and perhaps averted the tragedy of his death.

“I don’t know whose mess-up this is,” Miriam Yunassi told Israel Television, “but I know for sure that if Benny knew something could happen, he never would have gone running. Now I don’t have a brother.”

At Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Rabin and Israel Defense Force Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak agreed that the shelters should have been opened.

Meanwhile, Christopher said he was pleased with the progress shown in the recently resumed Israeli-Syrian negotiations.

Rabinovich resumed negotiations with his Syrian counterpart, Walid Muallem, in Washington on March 20 after Assad abruptly broke off the negotiations in December.

“I’m somewhat encouraged by what I see developing there in the last few days and weeks,” Christopher said on the CBS Television news show “Face the Nation.”

“What I can tell you is the parties are seriously engaged across a broad spectrum of issues,” he said.

Christopher would not comment on recent reports that Syrian President Hafez Assad was willing to adopt low-level diplomatic relations with Israel in return for a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Assad in the past had demanded that Israel withdraw completely from the Golan before the issue of establishing diplomatic relations would be addressed.