The Israel-Jordan Mixed Armistice Commission condemned Jordan last night for an unprovoked attack on Israeli troops which inspired a sharp cross-border retaliatory raid by Israeli forces last week.
With United Nations chairman Col. Finn Moe supporting the Israeli position, the MAC rejected Jordan charges that Israeli troops had crossed the border Sept. 10 and instigated an exchange of fire in which six Israelis were killed. He said he did not believe that the Israelis fired first or crossed the border.
Col. Moe cited a report by UN observers which offered evidence–bloodstains and bits of human brain–that the Israeli charges were true: that Jordan troops had opened fire on a party of 30 Israelis who were engaged in map-reading exercises inside Israel territory. The Jordanians, the UN report said, used rifles, automatic weapons and mortars. The bodies of the six killed Israelis were dragged across the border into Jordan to make it appear that the Israelis had invaded Arab territory.
The MAC resolution called on Jordan to end forth with all aggressive action against Israel, insisting that such action was “imperative.” It also expressed the commission’s regret that Jordan had not heeded its earlier calls for ceasing all aggression.
(Jordan is not only responsible for the recent sequence of frontier clashes along the Israeli border, but further has “compounded its aggression by an act of deceit,” Abba Eban, chairman of the Israel delegation, charged in a statement issued to the press at the United Nations today.)
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