While Secretary of State Alexander Haig said yesterday that the United States understood Israel’s concern with terrorist infiltration from Jordan, a State Department spokesman refused to say today whether this was a violation of the cease-fire.
“The basic element of the understanding of the cessation of hostilities was that there should be no hostile action from Lebanon into Israel or from Israel into Lebanon,” the spokesman, Dean Fischer, said.
Haig, answering questions from the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, noted that terrorists were going from Lebanon through Syria and then to Jordan in order to infiltrate into the West Bank.
Fischer said today that “it would not be fruitful for me to get into details of what constitutes a cease fire” while President Reagan’s special envoy Philip Habib is in the Middle East now discussing violations of the cease-fire of which he helped establish last July. “We continue to believe the continuation of the cessation of hostilities is essential,” Fischer stressed.
Habib, who was in Beirut and Jerusalem earlier this week, met with Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus this morning and later today went to Jordan. Fischer said that no details of Habib’s discussion would be given until he returns to Washington and reports to Reagan. He added that, therefore, any news reports, such as one today that Habib was seeking to get Persian Gulf states to convince Syria to reduce its forces in Lebanon, were “misleading by their very nature.”
However, Fischer seemed to backtrack on his statement last Friday that the “infusion of arms” to the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon could not be “construed as significantly altering the balance of force.”
Haig, in his testimony to the Congressional Committee yesterday, said the PLO has received artillery, sophisticated rocketry, and some “antiquated” tanks. “We oppose any military build-up of armaments that would significantly alter the military situation in the region of southern Lebanon,” Fischer said today. “We are aware, as the Secretary acknowledged, that equipment has been added to the PLO inventories in Lebanon within the past eight months.” But Fischer refused to add the statement he made Friday that this increase in arms has not changed the balance of force.
On another subject, Fischer refused to comment on the controversy over Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s refusal to visit Jerusalem when he makes his first official visit to Israel and the Israeli warning that if he does not go to Jerusalem, he should stay home. “We don’t think it appropriate for the United States to take a position on what we regard as a bilateral issue,” Fischer said today.
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.
