Israel charged here that the latest incursions by terrorists had provided fresh evidence that the governments of Lebanon and Syria “continue to permit terror and murder actions to be planned and carried out from their territory against Israeli citizens and localities.” The charge was made by Ambassador Jacob Doron, acting permanent representative of Israel at the UN, in a letter to Charles Maina, this month’s president of the Security Council.
Doron cited the tracking down of a group of eight terrorists last Thursday, in which an Israeli patrol captured two and killed the other six. Doron said that the terrorists, who belonged to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, crossed the cease-fire line from Syria and two points north and south of a village on the Golan Heights.
The Israel envoy reported that the heavily-armed terrorists had a list of names of 30 Arab terrorists in Israeli prisons and that initial questioning of the two captured terrorists, Abdallah Medhi, a Syrian from Aleppo, and Mahamada Hillalo, a Palestinian from Jordan, showed that the murder squad had been sent to seize two houses at Kibbutz Haon and Kibbutz Ein Gev on the Lake Kinneret eastern shore, to take a maximum number of hostages “and then demand the release of the 30 terrorists and the return of the bodies of the three murderers of Maalot.”
NO INTERFERENCE BY SYRIA, LEBANON
Doron said that the two terrorists had said that if the Israeli authorities had refused to yield to their demands, “the terrorists were under orders to kill all the hostages and to blow themselves up, as was also laid down in the plan for the outrage at Maalot.” He quoted the two terrorists as telling their captors that they crossed the Lebanese-Syrian border without interference from Syrian border guards and were given three code words for negotiations with Israeli army officers through the ambassadors of Japan, Austria and Rumania.
Doron stressed that “the murder squad had set out from its base in Lebanon, crossed into Syria without interference of either the Lebanese or Syrian border guards and penetrated from Syria into the Golan, with the assistance of the Syrian army.”
The envoy also declared that, “in addition to the bases and headquarters which the murder organization of Ahmed Jabril (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command)–responsible for the outrage at Kiryat Shemona–and the murder organization of Nayef Hawatmeh (Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine)–responsible for the Maalot outrage–have in Lebanon, they likewise have bases and headquarters in Syria.” Doron asked that his letter be circulated as an official document of the Security Council.
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