Another Battle of Beirut

FOR the second time in less than a month, the pleasure capital of the Middle East was racked last week by deadly gun battles. The fighting in Beirut this time was more widespread, more prolonged and bloodier. The combatants also were different. Three weeks ago, it was Jews against Arabs, as Israeli commandos slipped ashore from gunboats, assassinated three Palestinian leaders and killed at least 14 other people in a carefully coordinated attack on fedayeen installations. Last week it was Arab against Arab, as the Lebanese army fought Palestinian guerrillas on scattered fronts in and around Beirut for two days. By the time the fighting subsided, at least 60 Palestinians and Lebanese soldiers and civilians were dead. Scores more had been wounded.

The battles marked the toughest crackdown by an Arab nation on the fedayeen since King Hussein crushed the Palestinian movement in Jordan in 1970. With a military ferocity they have seldom displayed before, the Lebanese used planes, tanks, armored vehicles, mortars and machine guns. Ironically, the fierce attack on the fedayeen came from a nation that has consistently been among the Arab states most hospitable to Palestinians.

With a population of its own of fewer than 3,000,000, Lebanon supports 300,000 Palestinian refugees, many in special camps. But relations between the Lebanese and the Palestinians have recently become increasingly uneasy. To the Lebanese, the Israeli raids in April demonstrated again the dangers they face by harboring the fedayeen. To the guerrillas, the raids showed that they are virtually unprotected in Lebanon from Israeli reprisals.

Tension built rapidly toward the start of last week. The Lebanese arrested two fedayeen at the Beirut International Airport after finding explosives in their luggage. The murderous Black September movement then planted a bomb at the airport in an effort to secure the release of the two Nice-bound travelers and an accused accomplice. Luckily, the bomb was found and defused. Then, early last week, four members of the radical Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine were arrested for carrying explosives. The army accused them of planning to blow up the U.S. embassy. The small P.D.F.L.P., which lost five members in the Israeli raids, promptly kidnaped two soldiers and threatened to hold them as hostages until its men were freed. The army refused the trade, and early Wednesday the fighting began.

The shooting apparently started near a refugee camp between the city and the airport. By midmorning it had spread to other camps around Beirut and to various sections of the city itself. Nada Khaled Yashruti, 33, the widow of a former Al-Fatah leader, was fatally riddled with twelve bullets as she entered her home in the well-to-do district of Raouche. She had just come from trying to help negotiate a cease-fire with Lebanon's President Suleiman Franjieh. A Lebanese newsman was killed when soldiers raked the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a nearby area.

By late afternoon the government nervously imposed a curfew on all of Beirut. Children at the British School, used by the foreign community, were kept overnight. Authorities decided that they were safer sleeping in the basement than venturing into the streets to go home. Before the airport was closed, incoming tourists were conveyed into the city by armored police vehicles. Some motorists who ignored the curfew were hauled from their cars by troops and butted in the back with rifles.

With the streets eerily deserted except for government troops, Lebanese Premier Amin Hafez, accompanied by three Cabinet ministers and ten bodyguards, met with Fedayeen Leader Yasser Arafat, who had 50 armed guerrillas with him. During the night, on neutral ground at the Makassed Hospital, they worked out a cease-fire agreement under which the army hostages were released. Before dawn, however, heavy firing broke out anew at a Palestinian refugee camp at Dbayeh, across St. George's Bay. Soon sporadic shooting resumed in other areas and spread well beyond Beirut.

The most ominous flare-up occurred in southeast Lebanon, when some 1,000 fedayeen crossed over the border from Syria. The troops belong to a fighting unit known as the Yarmuk Brigade, which has the backing of the Syrian government. But after brief skirmishes with Lebanese soldiers, the Palestinian invaders withdrew. Their sortie seemed to have been a largely symbolic demonstration of support for their embattled brothers in Beirut.

The government lifted the curfew for two hours during the morning, and Beirut citizens made a quick run on foodstuffs. Lebanese television, which normally broadcasts only at night, stayed on all day. Instead of providing live coverage of the battles, though, it tried to divert viewers with cartoons and reruns of soccer matches and Hogan's Heroes. The radio carried army communiques but dropped its usual programs of Arab music in favor of such soothing Western classics as Gounod's Ave Maria and Brahms' Lullaby.

Lull. The shooting did not noticeably subside until the government ordered rocket attacks by air on a Palestinian camp near the airport shortly before sunset on Thursday. Two Hunter jet fighter-bombers of the Lebanese air force made 14 low-level sweeps over the camp. It was the first time that Arab planes had bombed a Palestinian refugee camp. President Franjieh doubtless felt that the end justified his means. As smoke from the rockets rose over the camp, the ground fighting abruptly died down, not only in the camp area but, seemingly by coincidence, elsewhere as well. Soon after, another ceasefire agreement was reached.

Regardless of how long the ceasefire would last, major doubts already were raised about the future of the fedayeen. President Franjieh summed up their status in Lebanon bluntly. "I do not believe that any Arab government has given our brothers the Palestinians more than we have," he said. "We must therefore wonder: What do our Palestinian brothers living among us want of Lebanon? Do they want residence and hospitality? If this is what they want, they are welcome . . . Do they want coordination in the service of the common cause [the fight against Israel]? We also welcome this idea. But that there should be an occupation army in Lebanon is something that no Lebanese would accept."

Driven out of their own country and then ousted from Jordan, the fedayeen were clearly in danger of losing another home.

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