Word: commandos
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...Palestine and a passionate hatred of Israel. Today the camps house 540,000, including 350,000 new refugees who fled the occupied territories after the June War. The camps seethe with frustration and anger, and provide a rich source of recruits for fedayeen. Says the mother of one dead commando: "I am proud that he did not die in this camp. The foreign press comes here and takes our pictures standing in food queues, and they publish them and say 'Look at this nation of beggars.' This is no life. I am proud to send my second...
Outside Amman, children, aged eight to twelve, from the Baq'aa refugee camp, are trained in commando techniques. They are given rigorous calisthenics and obstacle-course training, taught to handle rifles and machine guns, and instructed where the larynx, heart, liver and intestines are located, the better to thrust a dagger in the right place. Daughters of dead fedayeen are sent to schools run by the "Martyr Family Welfare Service," where they are taught to chant: "I have broken mv chains. I am the daughter of Fatah! We are all commandos." Refugee women are trained in first...
...rocky West Bank, where they target most of their operations, does not provide good cover, and the Israelis are a formidably efficient enemy. They claim to have killed or captured 2,650 fedayeen and tend to dismiss them as amateurs. "We cannot dignify them with the name guerrilla or commando," says an Israeli officer. "The Arabs who cross over show no daring. In that respect, they are nowhere near Viet Cong standards." The Israelis do respect Arafat, however. Their intelligence network has twice reported him on Israeli soil, and twice he escaped a dragnet. "Anyone who can do that...
There are signs that Israel's traditional response to commando activity, a retaliation raid in massive force, only serves to steel the will of the fedayeen and win them new allies among the Jordanian people. Last March, an armored column of more than 1,000 Israeli men punched across the Jordan River to destroy a guerrilla base at Karamah. They succeeded, but Karamah became the fedayeen Alamo. In the furious battle, as El Fatah recounts it, one youth strapped a bundle of TNT around his waist and jumped on an Israeli tank, blowing himself up with it. From...
...March, 28 children were wounded and two adults killed. In August, the guerrillas managed to terrorize the population of Jerusalem and in the bargain set off an anti-Arab riot by a series of grenade attacks. In September, they struck for the first time at Tel Aviv, where a commando bomb in a wastebasket outside the bus station killed one Israeli and wounded another...