Five die in dawn raid on Israeli resort

Press, 23 April 1979, Page 1

Five die in dawn raid on Israeli resort

NZPA-Reuter Tel Aviv Arab guerrillas attacked the northern Israeli seaside resort of Nahariya before dawn yesterday and killed four civilians, two of them children, an Army spokesman said. Two of the guerrillas were shot dead and two captured in a gunbattle with security forces. Four Israeli civilians were wounded in the fighting. Ambulancemen said the dead included a child aged two. Onlookers said the guerrilla band of four men landed on the beach after sailing from Lebanon in a rubber dinghy and exploded a bomb in the en-

trance hall of a big block of flats near the shore. Residents, who thought they had come under rocket fire from Lebanon, left their beds and hurried to a shelter but some of them were caught by the attackers. One resident, armed with a revolver, shot dead one of the guerrillas, the onlookers said. The remaining guerrillas then dragged a number of hostages into the basement of the apartment block and then across the road towards the beach. In the meantime, security forces had been alerted. A patrol discovered the guerrillas’s rubber boat and

ripped it apart with machine-gun fire. In a short gunbattle with the guerrillas, one of the attackers was killed and the two others were wounded and captured. In the apartment building, the guerrillas shot dead an Israeli civilian and his two daughters, and an Israeli policeman was killed in the gunbattle on the beach, onlookers said. Four other Israelis were hurt and were taken to the same hospital as the wounded guerrillas. An Associated Press photographer, Max Nash, spoke to one of the first persons in Nahariya to be awakened by the attack.

Larry Shapira, aged 36, said he had heard pounding on the doors of his apartment building. “I got my revolver and I waited,” Mr Shapira said, “First they shot through my door and then they started knocking it down. I let the first terrorist get in and then I shot him.” Mr Shapira said he saw two other terrorists in the apartment opposite his ground-floor flat. “They had taken a man and his small daughter hostage,” Mr Shapira said. He had held his fire, fearing he might hit his neighbour. Israel’s Defence Minister, Mr Ezer Weizman, has postponed his trip to Cairo

because of the guerrilla attack. Defence Ministry sources said it was not clear whether Mr Weizman would go to Cairo this week. During his three-day visit Mr Weizman was to have discussed final details of the Israeli withdrawal from El Arish next month and subsequent withdrawals from Sinai. The Marxist Palestine Liberation Front said in a statement issued in Damascus that the guerrillas, using automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, killed and wounded an unknown number of Israeli police and soldiers during a four-hour clash.