Sharett Protests to U.N. Head on Killing of Israelis by Egyptian Raiders

Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett today sent a message to United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who is now seeking to reduce Arab-Israel tension, informing him of a series of raids by Egyptian suicide squads last night resulting in the killing of three Israeli teen-age boys and one adult the wounding of 16 persons inside Israel.

The three teen-agers and their religious teacher were killed by the “fedayeen” raiders while praying their evening service in the agricultural school at Habad, a religious settlement south-east of Tel Aviv. Some 40 boys; between nine and 13 years of age, were gathered in the school. Praying with them were five religious instructors.

As they finished reciting Shmonch Esreh, Meir Friedman, an instructor in the room recalled the lights went out, the door of the hall was kicked open and a long burst of automatic fire blasted loose. After a moment of stunned silence, the instructors called to the children to follow them and started leaving the room through windows. Settlers in nearby homes and a passerby who had witnessed the attack by three Arabs helped evacuate the children who took refuge in nearby ditches until police arrived on the scene.

The children who had died and a number of others who had been wounded seriously, mostly in the upper parts of their bodies, were lying in one huge pool of blood when rescuers arrived. The blood stained their clothing, their headgear and the prayer books they had been reading. A lone kerosene lamp illuminated the scene late last night when reporters were allowed into the bloodstained room. Instructor Friedman described the attack and showed reporters the room in which the tragedy had occurred.

In the hospital at nearby Assaf Harofeh reporters saw the wounded children, six of whom were waiting to be operated upon. Also in the hospital was Moshe Zacharia, head of a Yemenite family, whose three members had been wounded in another fedayeen attack at the settlement of Achiezer, near Habaad, when a hand grenade was tossed into the room The father, on whose hand the grenade exploded, was asking “who will take care of my family now that I have lost a hand. His wife and infant daughter were also wounded, but less seriously.

These were the worst attacks of last night, which have aroused the Israel people as almost nothing else has done recently. In an ambush of a crowded Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus near Ramleh six persons were wounded, while a policeman was wounded when he was ambushed in a car near Lydda.