Lebanon: The Siege of Beirut: Week Six

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The focus of the negotiations to end the Beirut stalemate shifted to Washington, where President Reagan met with Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal and Syria's Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam. Then Reagan's special Middle East envoy, Philip Habib, set off on a mission to Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in an attempt to find a new home for the P.L.O. guerrillas, who have conditionally promised to leave Lebanon. But the Israeli government was showing increasing signs of impatience with the stalemate. Prime Minister Menachem Begin charged that the P.L.O. was taking advantage of the standoff to advance its own cause. "Arafat is trying to be smart," he told a group of disabled Israeli war veterans. "But it won't take long for us to wipe him out."

If the Israelis decide to launch an all-out assault on West Beirut, they may have a tougher time than if they had invaded the city in early June. The Palestinian and left-wing Lebanese fighters in the city have used the past six weeks to transform West Beirut into a fortress. Western diplomats expect the Palestinians to put up a spirited defense, if only because they have no choice. By surrounding the city, the Israelis have cut off all escape routes. Meanwhile, the perception that a few thousand guerrillas have stood off the Israeli army for more than a month, longer than any Arab army since the 1948 war, has boosted P.L.O. morale.

The P.L.O. cannot hope to keep the Israelis out of West Beirut once a major offensive begins. But the Palestinians' aim is to inflict enough casualties on the Israelis to persuade them that the effort is too costly. Says a P.L.O. commander: "If they attack, everyone will be the loser. Beirut will be destroyed. We will be destroyed, and the Israelis will be destroyed." Another Palestinian officer notes that the Israelis like to fight in the open, where they can make use of their air superiority. Says he: "We will get them in the streets, where we can fight man to man." Armed with anti-tank weapons, machine guns and assault rifles, P.L.O. squads have been assigned to specific positions in apartment buildings. Earthen barricades have been bulldozed all over the city. Many roads are mined; others have holes dug, waiting to receive mines. The Israeli bombardment has helped the effort by creating numerous bomb craters and piles of rubble. Perhaps the best P.L.O. fortification is the city itself, a dense warren of apartment buildings and houses that provides ideal cover for urban guerrilla warfare.

Israeli military and government officials are contemplating the costs of an assault. Still, they insist that Israel is not bluffing when it threatens to destroy West Beirut. At a meeting of air force officers last week, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon recited a list of occasions on which Begin has carried out his threats. Two examples: the decision to send Israeli planes to destroy an Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad last year, and the Israeli air force's bombing of the Syrian SA-6 missiles in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley during Israel's invasion of Lebanon. One theory last week was that the Israelis might concentrate their attack on P.L.O. strongholds in the southern suburbs of Beirut, instead of risking a bruising head-on battle in the city's center, where they would be at a greater disadvantage.