ISRAEL: Two Teeth for a Tooth!

Arab mayors are maimed as West Bank violence takes a grisly turn

Early one morning last week in the israeli-occupied territory of the west Bank, Karim Khalaf, mayor of the resort town of Ramallah, left his rambling stone house to drive 1½ miles to his city hall office. As Khalaf, 43, turned the ignition switch of his green 1980 Cadillac, a bomb exploded beneath his feet. A gardener working in the rear courtyard ran to the car and pulled the screaming mayor from it.

Exactly 30 minutes later, in the Arab industrial city of Nablus, 35 miles north of Ramallah, Mayor Bassam Shaka'a, 49, said goodbye to his wife Anaya and his son Nidal, 18. Ordinarily, Nidal performed the chore of starting up the engine on his father's battered 1966 Opel, which was parked in the family courtyard, but on this morning the youth was studying for his high school exams. As the mayor started the ignition and depressed the clutch, a bomb exploded, severing both of his legs. Nidal ran to the car, and cradling his father in his arms, carried him to a neighbor's automobile for the half-mile drive to Rifediya Hospital.

At about the same time, a municipal driver in the city of El-Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, arrived at the home of Mayor Ibrahim Tawil, 41. He told Tawil of the explosion of Khalaf's car and warned the mayor not to use his own car. Later, when an Israeli army demolition expert approached the locked garage where Tawil's Peugeot was kept, a bomb planted in front of the door exploded, blinding the soldier.

The car bombs that maimed the two Palestinian mayors and the Israeli soldier had been preceded, after dawn, by the detonation of a time bomb in the Arab marketplace of Hebron, 30 miles south of Ramallah. Seven Palestinians were injured in the explosion. Said one Hebron resident: "God blinded the criminals and made them set it at 6 a.m. instead of 8. Otherwise many more of us would have been killed or injured."

In terms of casualties, last week's West Bank bombings were not nearly as serious as countless acts of Arab terrorism against Israel, or countless Israeli military strikes against Palestinian bases. At the end of last week, in fact, Israeli jets and armored units launched still another raid against Palestinian bases and refugee camps in southern Lebanon. In several other respects, however, the assassination attempts were, without question, among the most shocking and ominous developments in the West Bank since the Israeli conquest of that region in 1967.

In Washington, the Carter Administration reacted with alarm and anger, fearing that the bombings could lead to a more serious unrest. At the U.N., the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the bombings. In every Arab capital, from Cairo to Baghdad, governments attacked Israel for its domination of the Palestinians. And within the West Bank, the local population reacted with rage. Strikes were called, but were quickly broken by Israeli soldiers, who ordered shopkeepers not to close, and in some cases broke open locked doors. When Mayor Shaka'a was moved to a hospital in Jordan, crowds of Palestinians cheered him and threw flowers on the ambulance in a show of emotion that combined sympathy with protest.