U.S. Urges Israel Not to Impede Arafat’s Departure from Tripoli

The United States has urged Israel not to do anything to impede the departure of Yasir Arafat and some 4,000 of his Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists from Tripoli.

State Department sources said today that Israel has been officially notified that the U.S. supports the arrangement to allow the PLO to leave Tripoli in ships carrying the United Nations flag.

Department deputy spokesman Alan Romberg did not mention Israel by name in his statement today stressing U.S. support for Arafat’s departure. But when asked if the U.S. had conveyed its views to Israel, he replied, “Our views are quite clear and quite well known to the Israelis. They are aware that we are in favor of the departure from Lebanon of Arafat.”

Secretary of State George Shultz, after ending two days of talks in Tunisia and Morocco in which the U.S. was strongly criticized for its new strategic alliance with Israel, said last night in Rabat that the U.S. “expects” Arafat’s evacuation to be peaceful.

Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir has strongly objected to the use of UN flags to protect Arafat, particularly in the wake of last Tuesday’s bus bombing in Jerusalem which killed five Israelis and for which the PLO first took credit and then denied it. However, the Israelis have not actually said that they will fire on the ships carrying the PLO to North Africa.

SEEKS TO SPARE TRIPOLI RESIDENTS FURTHER TRAGEDY

Romberg, in statements last Friday and today, made clear the U.S. supports the evacuation of the PLO in order to spare the residents of Tripoli further death, injury and destruction which has been an almost daily occurrence in that northern Lebanon port city as a result of the fighting between Arafat’s forces and a Syrian-backed PLO group seeking to gain control of the terrorist organization.

In a terse statement Friday, Romberg said: “We hope that plans to evacuate the PLO to Tripoli will proceed unimpaired in order to resolve expeditiously a situation that has already led to many civilian casualties.”

Today’s statement was longer. “We support sparing the city of Tripoli from further bloodshed caused by fighting by PLO factions,” Romberg said. He noted that “the Arabs have worked out an arrangement whereby Arafat would depart from Tripoli by ship. Arafat has asked that the ships fly the UN flag.”

Romberg said the U.S. “joined the United Nations Security Council consensus endorsing the use of the UN flag” for “humanitarian concern.” He said the U.S. also supported the decision because it viewed “the departure of a large number of PLO fighters as a step consistent with our objective of the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon.”

BOMB EXPLOSION AT U.S. EMBASSY IN KUWAIT

Meanwhile, Romberg said that the bomb which exploded today at the American Embassy in Kuwait, “will not deter us from pursuing a steady policy in the Middle East.” Four non-American personnel of the Embassy were killed and 37 others injured after a truck crashed through the main gate of the Embassy compound, went 50 yards, to the Embassy annex where a large bomb was detonated.

The explosion collapsed part of the annex, the largest building in the compound and caused extensive damage to the chancery and to other buildings in the compound. Romberg said that some of the 65 Americans employed at the Embassy were injured but none of them had to be hospitalized.

“We don’t know who is responsible” for the attacks which included several other locations in Kuwait, including the French Embassy, Romberg said. He said an organization calling itself “Islamic Jihad” claimed responsibility. He said this was the same name used by the group claiming responsibility for the bombings at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the marine headquarters there last month. “We have no idea whether they are related,” Romberg said.

Meanwhile, Romberg said that Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, is in Abu Dhabi. He denied a report that Rumsfeld was to have been in Kuwait today.