Washington Report, June 28, 1982, Page 3

The Blitz

Israel's three-pronged ground attack brought Israeli troops to the gates of Lebanon's presidential palace, just outside Beirut, in only six days, and once again—as had been the case after the 1967 war—many Americans were oohing and aahing over Israel's military prowess. No one, least of all Israel's enemies, has ever doubted that the Israelis are skillful and highly-motivated soldiers. But the public admiration for the perceived military genius of the Israelis tended to obscure an important fact: the Israelis were able to win with the help of the most sophisticated military equipment in the world, provided to them in large quantities by the U.S. (and paid for in the main by U.S. taxpayers). Without it, as a number of Israeli officers on the battlefields acknowledged to Western correspondents, they might have had big problems.

The key military advantage for the Israelis was their complete mastery of the air, which could not have been achieved without their U.S.-built F-15s and F-16s, equipped with the latest of U.S. technological marvels. These included computerized electronic countermeasure (ECM) devices to protect them from enemy missiles; the latest model of the Sidewinder, the AIM9L, to home in on enemy aircraft; and Shrike and Maverick missiles for destroying ground-based anti-aircraft facilities. The fighter planes were backed up by E-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, with radar able to detect takeoffs of enemy jets hundreds of miles away. Without all this equipment—far superior to anything put up by the Syrians—it is very doubtful that even Israel's crack pilots could have knocked Syria's airforce out of the sky, destroyed its SAM sites and gone ahead to bomb and strafe the Palestinians, who have no planes at all, with impunity.

The Overkill

By the most conservative of estimates, ten thousand people were killed or wounded during the first week of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. By other accounts, at least ten thousand died, and tens of thousands more suffered injuries. Whichever estimates are correct, there is general agreement that only a very small number of the people who became casualties had ever fired a weapon at an Israeli or lobbed a shell into Israel. The great majority of them were housewives, construction workers, farmers, schoolchildren, and other ordinary people who got caught in the wrong place or happened to live in the wrong place. A substantial number of the victims were Palestinians, but most of them, as might be expected in Lebanon, were Lebanese—people with whom the Israelis say they have no quarrel. In addition to those who were killed or maimed, hundreds of thousands of others were made homeless. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Lebanon put the number at 600,000—about one fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.

Most of the Lebanese and Palestinian victims lived in urban areas or refugee camps where Israel carried out saturation bombing and shelling to soften up or destroy "Palestinian strongholds." Some camps, particularly in the south, were completely leveled. A number of towns and cities were reduced in large measure to rubble. There were, it is true, PLO offices, ammunition dumps or other facilities in these areas (just as there are U.S. military facilities in Washington and New York, and a British military presence in London and Southampton). But the proverbial sledgehammer was used to kill the proverbial gnat—never mind that the gnat was sitting on a man's neck.

Other civilians died when Israeli aircraft, operating on the same sledgehammer principle, swooped down on key roads and strafed anything that moved: passenger cars, pickup trucks, donkey carts. Fifteen Lebanese construction workers who were unlucky enough to be riding a bus during the initial, unexpected attacks, were killed by a rocket. In the north, far away from the scene of the fighting, a bus full of Turkish workers fleeing Lebanon to escape the war was picked off by another rocket at a frontier post, just before they were to cross into safety. At least a dozen of the workers were killed.

Countless people were killed by random attacks.Some may well have been "mistakes," as claimed by the Israelis—such as the bomb which was dropped on a Beirut apartment building five minutes after a declared ceasefire, burying nearly one hundred people in the ruins. Or the attack with 11 cluster bombs"—a particularly lethal weapon which explodes above the ground and spreads small "anti-personnel" bomblets over a wide radiuson a sanitarium in the mountains above Beirut. The pilots may have mistaken it for a "Palestinian stronghold," although there was a red cross painted on the roof. But much of the random action was clearly designed to intimidate and terrorize. From the waters off Beirut, day after day, Israeli naval vessels fired shells aimlessly into the center of the city: one shell killed a number of children on a playground. Palestinian refugee camps were also peppered regularly. Western correspondents visiting one saw bodies being buried 30 deep in mass graves. Almost anything might be a target. A U.S. correspondent, watching from the hills overlooking Beirut airport, described this sequence of Israeli bombing runs: "warplanes hit a Datsun car depot, the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, a farm equipment warehouse and a tin-can factory." They later moved on to raid two refugee camps.

Large numbers of civilians who came under Israeli control were also terrorized. In Tyre, several thousand of them were left on the beach without food, water or shelter for two days while the Israeli army refused to allow any United Nations relief convoys to cross the border into Lebanon. A New York Times dispatch from Jerusalem on June 6, commenting on the takeover of Tyre, said: "The army has clamped unparalleled secrecy on the entire operation, partly for security reasons and partly out of embarrassment at the immense suffering that appears to have been inflicted on the Lebanese population." Palestinians, however, were the main target of intimidation. Palestinian doctors at the hospital of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Sidon were arrested when Israeli troops moved in, as were some foreign doctors working there. The newly-installed Israeli military governor of Sidon, Major Arnon Mozer, announced: "We are closing this hospital. All the doctors are PLO. It's obvious it is not a good hospital."