Eye for an Eye

It was just after dusk, and 46 skull-capped youngsters stood at their evening prayers in the synagogue of the Shafrir village farm school just outside Tel Aviv. They prayed: "If any design evil against me, speedily make their counsel of no effect and frustrate their designs. Do it for the sake of Thy . . ."

From outside came the sound of a scuffled foot. The door burst in with a crash; the lights went out. It was the fedayeen (self-sacrificers), members of specially trained Arab assassin squads, who had crept north from the Egyptian-held Gaza strip. Submachine guns thundered in the room, and ten-year-olds went down in windrows. Three boys and a teacher died almost instantly; three others fell badly wounded. Others jumped out of windows, took shelter in a ditch. The killers fled. It was minutes before a teacher broke open the lock on the school telephone and called police.

"Surrender, Donkeys." The raid was the deadliest of many launched last week by fedayeen irregulars as Egypt and Israel verged on war across the tensest frontier in the world. Nine Jews were killed, more than 50 were injured in some 30 reported attacks. The raiders, mainly Palestinian Arabs recruited from the Gaza border camps (and not technically in the Egyptian army), struck hardest in the coastal plain, always at night. No citizen of the tiny republic was safe from the "Nights of Horror," as Cairo's newspaper Al Akh-bar jubilantly headlined the raids, and never was a U.S. diplomat's remark more terrifyingly apt: "Every Israeli sleeps within 20 miles of an Arab knife."

On the lonely road to Beersheba, Egypt's assassins killed a truck driver, set fire to his truck and wounded his woman companion. One gang penetrated to the heart of Ashkelon, ancient marketplace of the Philistines, and threw two grenades into a house packed with Yemenites gathered to celebrate the engagement of a young couple. An old woman was killed as she cradled in her arms her year-old grandson, who was unhurt. Another group of terrorists ambushed a bus on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, wounding six. One fedayee returned to Gaza to tell Egyptian newsmen how his team was surrounded by Israelis after blowing up a power station. "We heard voices calling: 'Surrender, donkeys.' We threw our grenades. We did not surrender, but they surrendered their lives."

"Oh, How I Wish." From the first ambush, the Israeli army and police played a grisly game of hide-and-seek with the infiltrators. Clues were stiffening bodies, blown-up irrigation pipes, wrecked rail lines, burnt-out cars and trucks--a trail of death running between the fields of ripening corn, blossom-scented orange groves, drying creek beds and shifting dunes, to the shallow trench that divides Israel from the refugee-jammed Gaza strip. The Israelis killed eleven, captured four. One patrol stalked a returning assassin team for 18 hours, killed all five "self-sacrificers" as they hid in a clump of trees between Rehovoth and the border. Those captured proved no supermen. They said they had been trained in Cairo, dispatched on their murderous errands by the Egyptian army intelligence chief at Gaza. Moaned one 18-year-old: "My father owns a tobacco shop, and he begged me not to become a fedayee. Oh, how I wish I had listened to him."

At midweek Dictator Nasser's Radio Cairo broadcast that the fedayeen raids had been ordered in "revenge" for last fortnight's Israeli artillery bombardment of a village in the Gaza strip, in which 59 civilians were killed. It said that the raids were over, and Egypt's 300 fedayeen, except for ten lost in action, had all returned to base. Even the Israelis recognized that if this was the sum of Nasser's eye-for-an-eye reprisal, it was certainly not the sort of countermeasure that would lead to war. The Egyptian radio had hardly spoken before the fedayeen staged their last brutal assault at the Shafrir synagogue.

Jets in Time. In Israel such was the anger in government offices and in the streets that the next night might well have seen a full-dress Israeli attack on the Gaza strip or at least on the fedayeen training camp at Khan Yunis. But the touchiest moment in a touchy week passed. The Hammarskjold mission was applying pressure. Israel's militant Premier Ben-Gurion behaved with restraint. At precisely this moment, moreover, Israel's air force gave the Jews something to crow about. Two jet fighters caught four Egyptian planes over the Negev desert and shot down one, a British-made Vampire jet. The pilot was captured and triumphantly handed over to U.N. truce-keepers. In the streets men threw their hats in the air and cheered.

By week's end a tense stillness had settled down over the Gaza front, and Israelis, suddenly sensing that the worst was temporarily over, hung out more flags in Jerusalem on the eve of their eighth independence day. But none could be sure yet whether Israel would be celebrating its independence this week, or fighting for it.

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