Parting Shot?

New Year's Eve in Tel Aviv wound up with a bang. As celebrants of the foreign colony danced the New Year in at seaside hotels, two Egyptian corvettes, which had slipped up the coast in the dark, opened fire on the city. Israeli shore batteries fired back. A quarter of an hour later, as Israeli planes roared out to attack, the corvettes slunk off to the south.

Israelis threatened to bomb Cairo in retaliation. Before they got around to it, the Jewish part of Jerusalem suffered its first air raid in six months.

The Egyptian sea and air raid, which did little damage, looked like a grandstand act to save face at home. On the battlefronts in the Negeb desert, the Christmas war was grinding to a halt, and the Jews once more were the victors. In ten days they had driven the last Egyptian from the territory assigned them by the original U.N. partition plan, and occupied almost all the southern desert up to Egypt's border. Only at Gaza and the Faluja pocket were the Egyptians able to hold out.

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