MIDDLE EAST: Cease-Fire Strains

The most difficult border for Israel to defend, ironically, is the one where it abuts the only neighbor against which it has never deliberately gone to war. Despite wire fences, roving military patrols and sand strips designed to pick up footprints, fedayeen have apparently managed to sneak unobserved over the border from Lebanon to carry out terror attacks inside Israel. Although at least 25 Palestinians have been spotted and killed within the past month, other commandos killed 46 Israelis in attacks on Qiryat Shemona and Ma’alot. Last week the Palestinians struck again, this time at a border kibbutz called Shamir eleven miles from Qiryat Shemona. The four fedayeen died in a battle with kibbutzniks, but not before they had slain three women in the community of 500.

The attack, which was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, had been timed to coincide with President Nixon’s Middle Eastern trip. The raiders hoped to capture hostages whom they could exchange for comrades held in Israeli jails. They also wanted to demonstrate to Nixon that hard-core Palestinians will reject any peace settlement that does not return their former homeland to them.

The commandos who took part in the raid were dressed in the headbands and cloaks that many young Western hippies wear when they stop to work at such kibbutzim. The four emerged from a grove of eucalyptus trees as the kibbutz was finishing breakfast and split into two pairs. Two fedayeen went into an apiary where two women, Edna Mor, 28, and Shoshana Galili, 58, were at work taking honey from beehives. The other guerrillas, believing that they had been spotted, opened fire and killed Judith Sinton, 18, a young New Zealander who had been living in the kibbutz for three weeks.

The two terrorists were killed almost immediately by men of the kibbutz. The other two inside the apiary refused calls to surrender. Instead they shot the two women to death, then killed themselves with grenades.

Many Arabs approved the raid, despite its outcome, on the ground that it would show Nixon the determination of the militant fedayeen. Israel, which had reacted strongly to the previous Palestinian raids, did no more last week than shell Lebanese border villages on the presumption that the four fedayeen had prepared there for their raid.

Torture Incidents. Israelis nonetheless were quite bitter about the incident; it showed how far from tranquillity the area remains despite Henry Kissinger’s cease-fire negotiations. Another indication of ill will was the series of charges and countercharges last week between Israel and Syria concerning the torture of prisoners of war who had been held by either side until the cease-fire accord was signed. In the Knesset, Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres detailed a long list of torture incidents. He charged that some of the repatriated Israeli P.O.W.s had had fingernails ripped out by Syrian captors, while others had been beaten, burned and maimed. At least two P.O.W.s, said Peres, died after being tortured.

Syria responded that some of its 367 prisoners held in Israeli compounds since the October war had been tortured too and three had died. The accusations of both sides were difficult to substantiate. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral source in a position to know anything, said that it had no reports of Syrian deaths. Privately, some Swiss observers pointed out that Israel had let Red Cross inspectors into its camps immediately after the war, while Syria refused until cease-fire negotiations began three months ago.