Word: beirutization
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Just south of Beirut, the Israelis slowly began to tighten the noose around Palestinian defenses, establishing commanding positions above the city's airport, east of the runways. Backed by Israeli artillery barrages, Christian Phalangist forces on Wednesday captured a Palestinian stronghold on the science campus of the Lebanese University at Shuweifat. Israeli officers denied that their commandos were involved. "The Christians are doing the fighting," explained an Israeli colonel. "We are just looking...
...late in the week, the surviving core of the Palestinian guerrilla army was completely surrounded in West Beirut. Phalangist guides directed Israeli armor through the streets of East Beirut, not far from the capital's so-called Green Line dividing the Christian and Muslim sectors. Israeli gunboats patrolled the port and coastline, thwarting nearly all naval traffic. To the south, invasion troops occupied a wide arc, stretching from the Khalde road junction into Beirut's surrounding hills, merging with Phalangist forces and blocking any escape...
...West Beirut, P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat tried to galvanize his beleaguered forces for a last stand. Speaking on the Voice of Palestine radio station in an angry, desperate tone, Arafat vowed to turn Beirut into "the graveyard of the invader and the Stalingrad of the Arabs." Arafat and other top P.L.O. officials spurned calls to surrender their arms in exchange for safe escort out of Beirut. Young guerrillas bulldozed walls of red clay to serve as barricades and cut holes in street pavements to plant mines. Despite the overwhelming odds, Palestinian morale seemed high. Said a P.L.O. major: "We have...
...suburbs, the Israelis set up new headquarters in a large Catholic high school. While most soldiers relaxed by shopping, sunbathing or enjoying the beautiful if war-pocked landscape, some Israelis pondered the grim vision of more death and destruction if negotiations fail and the final battle for Beirut takes place. "We do not want to go in there," sighed an infantryman, gazing down on the capital. "We want to go home." Across the Green Line in West Beirut, a few miles away, a Palestinian guerrilla took another view. "We will fight here to the last man if we must...
Hundreds of Palestinian refugees sat disconsolately under makeshift tents in the dusty, grubby Beirut park that goes by the absurdly fancy name of Garden of the Arts. Among them was Nefalah Farour, 38, who had fled the P.L.O.-dominated port of Tyre on the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Accompanied by five of her seven children, she had walked through the mountains to the dubious safety of Beirut. Exhausted, she squatted on a flattened cardboard box and fretted over the fate of the two youngsters she had been obliged to leave behind in her flight from...