Middle East Death Before Daybreak

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In the predawn darkness, Israeli naval officers spotted the rubber dinghy heading south toward the northern Israeli resort town of Nahariya. Ducking fire, the craft made for the Lebanese shore near the border, where the crew leaped onto the limestone rocks, scrambled to the cliffs above and deployed for battle. As illumination flares from Israeli helicopters lit up the area, the would-be invaders attacked Israeli troops with Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades. When the shooting ended three hours later, two Israeli soldiers were dead and nine wounded. The bodies of four terrorists, one of them clad in blue jeans and a Che Guevara T shirt, lay sprawled on the white cliffs.

It was one of the worst incidents in the border area since Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces from Lebanon in June 1985 and established a narrow security zone in southern Lebanon. Two Syrian-backed groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the allied Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, claimed joint responsibility for the "seaborne suicide operation." Twelve hours later, Israel countered with a bombing raid that blew up an ammunition dump and several buildings at Ein el Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Sidon on the Lebanese coast.

The timing of the aborted terrorist raid came as no surprise. Only three days before, Jordan's King Hussein abruptly closed 25 offices of Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the capital city of Amman. The terrorist operation was a clear reminder of the P.L.O.'s determination to continue its struggle against Israel in spite of the stinging blow from Hussein. Said an Israeli official: "The P.L.O. wants to demonstrate that it's still powerful in the West Bank and that peace cannot be achieved without it."

Hussein's crackdown caught Palestinian leaders unawares. Without warning, squads of the blue-uniformed Central Security Force spread through Amman shutting down Fatah offices, including the house in the Al Nuzha district that the Tunis-based Arafat used during visits. Jordanian agents seized Fatah documents and applied a seal of red wax to office doors. Arafat's top aide, Khalil Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jihad, was told to leave the country within 48 hours when he arrived at his office in the Jebel Amman district. Before embarking on a 450-mile auto journey across the desert to Baghdad, Wazir said, "We are sorry about this decision because we wanted to strengthen Palestinian-Jordanian relations." He added defiantly, "We are not in a cage. We still have bases everywhere, doing the P.L.O.'s work."