Security Council Resumes Debate Today Arabs Trying to Expand It to Full Scale Middle East Confrontat

The Security Council will resume debate tomorrow on Israel’s commando raids on terrorist headquarters and installations in Beirut and Sidon, Lebanon last Tuesday. The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mohammed H. el-Zayyat. arrived over the weekend, apparently to take charge of Arab diplomatic strategy which seems aimed at expanding the Security Council’s deliberations into a full scale Middle East debate beyond the immediate issue of the attacks on Lebanon.

The Security Council opened debate late Thursday afternoon at the request of the Lebanese government, and continued Friday. Israel’s United Nations Ambassador, Yosef Tekoah, charged at the opening session that Lebanon was “a center for the planning and execution of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and elsewhere and provides refuge to the perpetrators of these dastardly crimes.”

(Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan hinted in a Jerusalem television interview Friday night that Israel may in the future aim its attacks not only at terrorists but at the states that grant them haven. “We cannot release Lebanon from responsibility for the deeds of the terrorists solely in an individual manner as we did in the raid on Beirut,” Gen. Dayan said.)

(The latest Middle East crisis was exacerbated yesterday when unidentified armed men attacked an American-owned oil terminal at Sidon. A previously unknown group calling itself the Lebanese Revolutionary Guard took credit for the attack which set fire to the installation. But Palestinian guerrilla groups in Lebanon said they were not involved and charged that “Israeli agents” carried out the assault in an effort to worsen U.S. relations with the Arabs. The Lebanese government said today it had no evidence that Israeli agents were operating in its territory.)

MALIK: WOULD EXPEL ISRAEL FROM UN

The Security Council debate was especially bitter, with Arab spokesmen lumping Israel and the U.S. together as aggressors and Israel defending its right to self-defense at home and to project its citizens and installations from terrorist outrages abroad. The acrimony reached a new peak Friday when the Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik accuses Israel of “hare-faced aggression.” “bloody crimes,” and “bestial murder.” He startled even case-hardened observers of the UN scene when he declared that the Soviet Union would support sanctions against Israel, “up to and including expulsion

Ambassador Tekoah, who spoke the day before, said “We do not come to the Council to justify our actions” because “they need no justification.” He said “We come to charge that Lebanon has convened the Security Council to ask license for the continuance of terrorism.”

Tekoah said that official statements in Beirut, communiques “by terror organizations” and international news agencies reports from Lebanon “have confirmed that the targets struck were terrorist centers and hideouts and that the casualties were members of the murder groups.” He charged that most of the attacks carried out by the Fatah Black September terrorists and other terrorists “have originated in Beirut” from which terrorists “are dispatched on their missions of death to different parts of the world.” Citing nine incidents of the past five weeks, Tekoah said that “Beirut’s sinister role was particularly evident in the seizure and murder of the American and Belgian diplomats in Khartoum.” He said that in the preceding months “almost all Arab terror agents involved in murder attacks, including the Lod Airport massacre and the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, had come from Beirut.”

TEKOAH BLASTS LEBANON

The envoy said that “the international community is weary of the sanctimonious protestations of innocence and of the sterile falsehoods with which the Lebanese government and its representatives try to cover up Lebanon’s grave responsibility for turning Beirut into the capital of international terrorism.” He said after many denials, “the mask is dropped. Lebanon tries to justify the terrorist operations in and from its soil and even has the audacity to claim immunity for itself and impunity for the terrorists.”