Israel was “strongly condemned” today by the chairman of the Israel-Syria Mixed Armistice Commission for a “retaliatory” raid on Syria which, the United Nations official charged, had been carried out across the Syrian border near Al-Mine last night by two units comprising 20 or 30 Israelis.
A communique issued by the MAC head stated that preliminary investigations by UN teams showed Israel markings on pieces of equipment and ammunition. The UN official said three Syrian vehicles had been burned. Syria charged that one Syrian officer and two soldiers were killed, six Syrian soldiers were wounded, and an officer and five soldiers are missing.
Earlier in the weekend, Syrian troops had fired on United Nations observers and Israel police who were trying to trace the disappearance of a young Israel soldier, Yaakov Migovsky, who has been missing since October 18 when he left Kibbutz Gonen, near the Syrian border.
(At the United Nations, in New York, Israel sent a letter Sunday to the Security Council, informing the Council of a series of Syrian violations of the armistice agreement. The letter protested the Migovsky kidnapping, attacks on innocent Israeli fishermen and villagers, as well as against the continued Syrian imprisonment of four soldiers apprehended on the border December 8, 1954. In that incident five Israelis were captured; one later committed suicide in a Damascus prison.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.