View from the Guns

As the Israelis attacked West Beirut on Wednesday, TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Aikman watched from the seventh-floor balcony of the Hotel Alexandre in East Beirut and then visited Israeli positions in various sections of the city. His report:

At around 2 a.m. Wednesday, loudspeakers on Israeli vehicles boomed warnings to Palestine Liberation Organization soldiers only a few hundred meters away: "This is the big thing. The planes will come in about 90 minutes." By dawn the artillery exchanges had become so fierce that it was dangerous for us to stay in so exposed a position at the Hotel Alexandre. Palestinian mortars and 130-mm shells exploded near by, sending shards of steel shrapnel onto the hotel roof.

Away in the hills behind the southern Beirut suburb of Baabda, the boom of Israeli heavy artillery was sending shells whistling into the area of the Hippodrome and the park called the 1,001-Pine Forest. This huge region is riddled with P.L.O. bunkers and tunnels, and houses several Katyusha rocket launchers and fieldpieces. In response, P.L.O. Katyushas came crashing down on suspected Israeli positions in East Beirut. Fires flared up along the skyline competing with the flashes and sparks of the artillery The noise level became stupendous: the whoosh-whoosh of the Katyushas, the brazen bark of the tanks, the gossipy chatter of machine guns.

At 4:30 a.m. there was an unexpected lull. Again the Israeli loudspeakers bellowed in Arabic, "Don't be afraid. Go where we told you to. Leave your houses." This was evidently addressed to West Beirut civilians. But if anyone had been far enough aboveground to hear the exhortation, he or she could hardly have complied: anything waving a finger in the 60-meter-wide alley at the so-called museum crossing would have been killed instantly. Amid all this, roosters began to crow.

As daylight spread across the urban battlefield, the fires died down over West Beirut, but huge columns of smoke in amazingly varied tints of white, gray and black roiled sky ward. The shelling continued, moving forward into West Beirut just ahead of the advancing Israeli troops.

In Baabda, tank and heavy artillery shells were slashing into P.L.O. positions in the huts and deserted buildings near the edge of the Burj al Barajneh refugee camp. "In many places we were in the open," explained an Israeli briefing officer. "For that reason we had to improve our position." The 'improvement" involved firing volleys of artillery and Soviet-built BM-21 rockets captured from the P.L.O.

In the no man's land of the museum crossing, a group of exhausted Israeli soldiers were sprawled in sleep on the patio of an elegant apartment house. Others wearing helmets and flak jackets waited patiently in a few lined-up tanks and armored personnel carriers. Machine gun, tank and mortar fire were crashing back and forth down the Avenue Abdallah Yafi. Wandering pensively behind two tanks, Bruce, 23, a Brooklyn-born yeshiva student, was clutching a Hebrew Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. "I back the government 100%," he said. "We've suffered so much from the terrorists for years. I feel we have no choice but to do this."

A bulldozer was brought up from the rear to build earthen protective ramparts for tanks. As an Israeli infantry squad ran to provide covering fire, the great diesel engine snarled into acceleration and the bulldozer disappeared around the corner of sandbags. Three minutes later it was back, its task accomplished. There was a cheer from the soldiers, but the youth at the wheel concentrated wholly on maneuvering the cumbersome machine back into the alley. Near by, an Israeli senior officer gave his impression of the fighting. "We don't want to give up at this point," he said. "I must say, the P.L.O. does fight. But we are squeezing them, and we can see that they are going to break."

At 5:40 p.m. the Israelis launched a bombing raid that went on for more than an hour. Watching from a balcony of the Alexandre, we could see the planes roar in one by one releasing flares to deflect enemy SA-7 missiles. As the bombs' landed, they caused a great splash of gray smoke over the honeycombed 1,001-Pine Forest and the Hippodrome.

In a terrifying way the roar of the aircraft, the popping flares, the symmetry of the bombs' impact, all had a sort of grim, choreographed beauty. As darkness finally descended, the bombing stopped and even the shelling eased off. We did not know what had brought on this unofficial, though doubtless temporary, ceasefire. Yet it seemed to stand for something: unannounced but very welcome.

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