Middle East: Incident at Samu

For two years, Arab terrorists had been averaging three raids a month inside Israel, blowing up a house here, a bridge or water pipeline there. Last month, in their most daring exploit yet, they even reached the outskirts of Jerusalem, where they bombed an apartment building only a mile from the home of Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol. Sometimes they crossed over from Lebanon, sometimes from Syria, where they were actually based. But more often, they sneaked in through Jordan, where King Hussein seemed powerless to stop them. Last week, Israel finally struck back with the white-hot fury of the desert sun itself, launching its biggest, bloodiest, boldest reprisal since the Suez campaign ten years ago.

Bullhorns & Hot Coffee. The target was the tiny (pop. 4,000) village of Samu, three miles north of the Israeli border, a frequent staging area for terrorists. At dawn one morning last week, 4,000 Israeli troops, riding in Jeeps, personnel carriers and five Patton tanks, rumbled across the frontier, overwhelmed an eight-man police post and swept into Samu, routing sleepy-eyed residents out of their homes with booming bullhorns. While Israeli troops calmly sipped hot coffee on Samu's main street, demolition teams dynamited 46 empty houses, and three tanks reduced the local mosque to rubble.

Outside of town, meantime, troops barricaded the main highway and waited for the Jordanian soldiers they knew would be rushing over from nearby Hebron. Sure enough, 20 truckloads soon roared into view, slowed down for the barricades and ran into a murderous ambush. Not one truck got through. Overhead, four Jordanian Hawker Hunter jets rushing to the rescue suddenly found four faster Israeli Mirages on their tails; one Hawker Hunter was shot down, the others beat a retreat. Four hours after the invasion began, the Israelis finally withdrew, sowing a path of land mines all the way back to the border. Both sides claimed only minor casualties, but total dead and wounded amounted to 100 or more, almost all of them Jordanians.

A "Regrettable" Target. Why did Israel attack Jordan rather than Syria, which was the guerrilla home base? That was what Israel's angry opposition parties demanded of Eshkol after the invasion. In a special parliamentary debate, Eshkol ticked off 14 major acts of sabotage carried out from Jordan in the past year, climaxed by a land-mine explosion that killed three Israeli troops on Nov. 12. "It is regrettable," said Eshkol, "that this particular act of aggression came from Jordan." But since it did, he picked Jordan as his target. "No country where the saboteurs find shelter and through whose territory they pass on their way to Israel can be exempt from responsibility."