Declaring that “the situation remains tense in the Middle East, ” the White House announced today that Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel is being sent to Israel to confer with Premier Menachem Begin over concerns here that an Israeli strike into Lebanon may be imminent.
Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes said this morning that Stoessel’s mission would be to “do what he can to reduce tensions” through discussions with the top level Israeli leadership. The announcement came only hours after the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, emerged from a three-hour meeting with Begin in Jerusalem last night saying he had the Prime Minister’s personal assurance that Israel has taken “no decision to go into Lebanon in any way, shape or form.”
Stoessel is the ranking official at the State Department in the absence of Secretary of State Alexander Haig who is currently attempting to mediate the British-Argentine crisis over the Falkland Islands. Concern was expressed here over the weekend that Israel might attack Palestine Liberation Organization bases in south Lebanon while world attention is turned toward a possible Anglo-Argentine war in the South Atlantic.
Speakes said the U.S. is “in relatively constant contact” with Middle Eastern governments urging them “to use maximum restraint.” Appeals to all parties to exercise restraint were made by the State Department over the weekend. The Department’s Deputy spokesman, Alan Romberg warned Friday that “This is a time for maxiumum caution.”
NEW TENSION BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT
Meanwhile, Nicholos Veliotes, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs, arrived in Israel from Cairo today for a series of conferences with government leaders in Jerusalem. Veliotes is reportedly seeking to ease new strains said to have developed between Israel and Egypt as the April 25 deadline for Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai approaches.
Israel has raised complaints against Egypt in recent days but it was not certain if any of them were sufficiently serious to delay the withdrawal. Israel has accused Egypt of cooperating with the PLO and helping it smuggle weapons from Sinai to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has also expressed concern that the Egyptian delegate to the non-aligned conference in Kuwait failed to refer to the Camp David accords and the autonomy negotiations in his speech there over the weekend.
Finally, Israel has alleged that the Egyptians have deployed more troops than allowed under the peace treaty terms in the sectors of Sinai they now control. There is, in addition, the unsettled dispute over the Sinai-Israel border. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was scheduled to go to Cairo tomorrow in another attempt to resolve the border dispute. (See separate story, P.4.)
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