The tip came from an Israeli police source. When he heard the news, TIME'S David Halevy rushed from his home outside Tel Aviv and reached the scene of action before the bus captured by Palestinian terrorists burst into flames. The first journalist to arrive, Halevy got an eyewitness account of the battle with the terrorists that provoked last week's crisis in the Middle East.

Five days later, Halevy again raced to a scene of bloodshed, this time in southern Lebanon, as the Israeli army retaliated against Palestinian terrorist bases. Again he had a vantage point: he and Photographer David Rubinger were among the first newsmen who managed to get to the battlefield during the actual invasion. Rubinger's pictures and Halevy's reporting--along with the files of six other TIME correspondents who covered the combat--are part of this week's cover story, the 14th on the Middle East that we have run during the past four years.

While the fighting flared in Lebanon, TIME'S congressional correspondent, Neil MacNeil, was using his own experience and contacts to cover an equally historic, if quite different, event: the Senate's vote on the first of two Panama Canal treaties. In the tense days that preceded the vote, MacNeil spent much of his time walking the corridors and working the back rooms of the Senate, dogging key figures he has known over the years and listening to their speculations. MacNeil also had access to the head counts of both sides, and constantly compared them with his own as Jimmy Carter launched his full-scale assault on wavering Senators that finally carried the day.

As the debate went on, reports MacNeil, "I was struck by a the extraordinary range, for good and ill, of the talents and tempers of the Senators. On one hand, there were members who scarcely concealed their fears sand self-serving cravenness on this difficult vote. On the other hand, there were men of patience, understanding and quiet courage in both camps."

But when the final arguments had been heard and the lobbying had ceased, all of the Senators were swept up by the same realization. Says MacNeil: "The mood in the great hall as the roll was called was one of awe. Rarely is a vote so important that those present fall into such a silence, and there has not been one in Congress like this since the House Judiciary Committee, in a similar hush, voted the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon."

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