Border Battle

A waxing moon silvered the green hillside fields and sand dunes that make up the Gaza strip -- the 6-mile by 30-mile sliver of Palestine crowded with 200,000 Arab refugees which Egypt rules under the armistice. Captain Mahmoud Ahmed Sadek, commander of a 35-man garrison guarding the ancient city of Gaza, had put his chair under a tree beside the trenches along the road. At the outpost up the hill toward the Israeli border, guards heard voices calling out in Arabic.

Suddenly, out of the calling dark, a burst of bullets smashed into the outpost. Five men crumbled and died. The sixth, badly wounded, lurched down the hill to warn Captain Sadek's garrison below. He never made it.

The Raiders. The Israeli band, an estimated 200, burst across the border in three columns. One drove swiftly to the diesel pumping station, which supplies a major part of Gaza's water, and blew it up. While the center column attacked Captain Sadek's men, the third slipped along the railway track, fell upon the Egyptian barracks from the rear, and blew its steel-and-concrete buildings into twisted ruins. In the railway station, the marauders found two civilians. They shot them dead.

Egyptian headquarters dispatched-reinforcements. Two miles south of Gaza, the Israelis lay in ambush, waiting. As a truck carrying 36 soldiers approached, they hurled a bomb. Blinded, the driver swerved off the road. The hidden Israelis opened a withering fire on the truck's open back, threw hand grenades at the soldiers who tried to scramble out. Twenty-two were killed; no one escaped unwounded.

Frustrated Fury. It was the bloodiest incident in the six bloody years of armistice along the troubled Egyptian-Israeli border. On the Egyptian side, Captain Sadek and 38 others were dead, including 19 Palestinian Arabs serving in the border guard. Eight Israelis were killed. 13 wounded. Said one Egyptian officer :"This must have been planned in a conference room, and on maps."

The 200,000 Arab refugees in the Gaza strip erupted in fury. In Gaza, rioters cursed the U.S., the U.N. and their Egyptian rulers, who keep them from going back home to Palestine. They stoned U.N. headquarters, burned U.N. vehicles, pulled down a U.N. flag. Crowds charged the U.N. relief-agency supply depots outside Khan Yunis, set fire to storehouses holding enough food and clothing to supply 50,000 refugees for one month. Said the Egyptian governor sadly: "These people were fed for six years by the United Nations, doing no work themselves. They got fed up with their lives."

Egypt's Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser made a show of patience. "We took the usual nonsense measures of submitting a complaint to the Security Council," he told reporters. To new U.S. Ambassador Henry Byroade, who was presenting his credentials, Egypt's Foreign Minister

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