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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 NEWS WEER ISRAEL SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM 11 June 1984 Pg. 52 A Case of Terror for Terror he photograph had been known to newsmen in Israel for weeks, although its publication was forbidden by the mili- tary censor. The picture, taken before dawn in the Gaza Strip, showed Israeli security men leading away a dazed but apparently uninjured Palestinian named Majdi Abu Jumaa. The guards had cap- tured him during an assault on a bus that he and three other Arabs had hijacked. Two of the hijackers died in the gunfire. Abu Jumaa and another Palestinian sur- vived. But a few hours later their bodies were turned over to rela- tives for burial. Israeli officials maintained repeatedly that the two men “died on the way to the hospital.” But a commission of inquiry finally conceded that the terrorists were murdered. Securi- ty men led them into a nearby field for questioning, beat them— then bashed in their heads with a blunt instrument. The gruesome story came to light last week when the Defense Ministry, after an eight-day de- lay, released a summary of the investigators’ findings. No sus- pects were named in the heavily expurgated version of the com- mission report that was made public. But Maj. Gen. Moshe Bar-Kochba, head of the Army’s southern command, received an official reprimand for failing to be at the scene where the killings occurred. Israeli Defense Minis- ter Moshe Arens condemned the bludgeonings as a “clear contra- distinction to the basic rules and norms incumbent on all, and especially on . the security forces.” He promised legal action would be taken against “those sus- pected ‘of illegal acts or behavior.” Arens could eventually find his own reputation damaged by the hijacker affair. He was present when Isracli troops stormed the bus before dawn on April 13, killing a woman passenger and freeing 34 other Israelis who had been held hostage throughout the night. Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Levy and two brigadier generals were with him. Arens insisted that he had left the scene without knowing that two of the four hijackers had been beaten to death. On Israeli television last week he said that “neither the chief of staff nor I was at the site when it happened. If we had known we would not have had to wait for a commission of inquiry in order to investi- gate these events.” But the Tel Aviv tab- loid Hadashot disputed Arens’s story. Ha- dashot photographer Alex Levac—whose picture of Abu Jumaa, suppressed by the censor for six weeks, had broken open the story—said he had been standing next to Arens and his aides when he took the photograph. “It can’t be that they did not see what I saw,”’ Levac said. Whatever the case, about an hour after the assault on the bus, Arens told an Israeli radio reporter that ‘two of the terrorists were killed, and two others were cap- tured.” But for reasons that have never been explained, the Israeli military censor held up the tape of the defense minister’s remarks, and the interview was never broadcast. Instead, the Israeli Army spokesman issued a statement saying that the two had died “on the way to the hospital”—implying that they had died of wounds received during the rescue opera- tion itself. Hadashot had challenged that account from the start. After the two hijackers who had initially survived the commando as- sault were buried, Hadashot reporters showed Levac’s photograph to the dead men’s relatives in the Gaza Strip. The relatives confirmed that the man in the picture was Majdi Abu Jumaa. The other hijacker who had been captured alive was his cousin, Subhi Abu Jumaa. Both were 18. The relatives said that both bodies showed signs of severe beating. The Israeli inilitary censor refused to allow Hadashot to print Levac’s photograph of Majdi Abu Jumaa (the ban was finally lifted last week, 26 JUNE 1984 but with the faces of the security men blanked out) or the story confirming his identity. But The New York Times broke the censorship ban and described both the photograph and the disturbing questions it had raised about what really happened during the capture of the hijacked bus. Even then, Israeli officials tried to keep the story bottled up. Arens urged Israeli editors to play down foreign press reports about the atrocity, on the ground they might jeopardize the lives of Israeli prison- ers held by Palestinian guerrillas. He did not order an inquiry until 13 days after the killings. When two prominent Knesset deputies--Yossi Sarid of the Labor Party and Ehud Olmert of the Likud—demand- ed an investigation, Arens finally asked Meir Zorea, a reserve Army general, to conduct one. But when Hadashot broke censorship and reported Zorea’s appoint- ment, Arens ordered the censor to close down Hadashot’s printing plant for four days, opened a police investigation against Hadashot editor Yossi Klein and banned distribution of the tabloid to Israeli mili- tary units—the most severe punishment ever meted out to an Israeli newspaper. Polls: If the murders shocked sensitive Israelis, the affair did not set off much soul-searching. A straw poll in Tel Aviv— the point of origin of the hijacked bus— showed that 84 percent of those questioned regarded the murder of the captured hi- jackers as “acceptable.” Only 10 percent found the incident “serious and worri- some,” and a mere 6 percent thought it was “against the law.” A subsequent poll among a broad segment of the populace indicated that 65 percent of the Israeli public saw no need for an investigation of the killing of the two Arabs and that 57 percent did not believe the results of the inquiry should have been made public. The hard-line attitude revealed in those soundings coincided with a growing public backlash against the recent arrests of 27 Israelis accused of belonging to a “Jewish terrorist underground.” The alleged ex- tremists have been charged with a number of crimes against West Bank Palestinians, including the 1980 booby-trapping of the cars of three Arab mayors and a conspir- acy to blow up the Dome of the Rock, one of the most sacred shrines in Islam. But last week Meir Cohen-Avidov, the contro- versial deputy speaker of the Knesset, voiced the sympathy that at least some Israelis feel for the alleged Jewish terrorists now on trial in Jerusalem. “My heart goes out to the detainees,” he said. ““These boys are the pride of Israel. They are the best.” That kind of extremist talk encourages violations of the “basic rules and norms” on which Israel has prided itself for so long. Until the bludgeon murders of the two hijackers, Israel was able to say that it neither tortured nor executed terrorists who surrendered. Now, Israelis have lost that moral high ground. ANGUS DEMING with MILAN J. KUBIC in Jerusalem Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5