Middle East situation/Lebanon/Palestine Research Center – Letter from PLO – Letter from Oman

Letter dated 16 July 1982 from the Permanent Representative of Jordan

to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General

I have the honour to enclose herewith the text of a communication from the Permanent Observer of the Palestine Liberation Organization concerning the abominable act perpetrated by Israeli agents against the Palestine Research Center in one of the residential sections of Beirut.

I request Your Excellency kindly to circulate this memorandum as an official document of the General Assembly , under item 31 of the preliminary list, and of the Security Council.

(Signed) Hazem NUSEIBEH

Ambassador

Permanent Representative

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* A/37/50/Rev.l.

ANNEX

Letter dated 14 July 1982 from the Permanent Observer of the

Palestine Liberation Organization to the United Nations

addressed to the President of the Security Council

I am instructed by Chairman Arafat to inform you that at 6:30 p.m. Beirut time 13 July 1982, explosives were planted outside the Palestine Research Center in an exclusively residential section of Beirut. As a result, a number of civilians suffered injuries and great damage was inflicted on the Palestine Research Center.

This outrageous and criminal attack was launched after a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities had been declared, effective 11 July 1982.

The Research Center is located close to a building housing refugees from the Dbaye refugee camp. The Dbaye refugees are Christian Palestinians who were drfven from their homes when their can,p was destroyed by the Phalangists in January 1976. These refugees, whose only crime was to be Palestinian, have been made homeless twice already.

The Palestine Research Center was exactly that: housing a library, an archive, and publishing books on the Palestine Question, it was one of the research and publishing centers which make Bei rut a beacon of free thought and expression in the Arab World.

By placing a bomb which killed and wounded innocent people, and which severely damaged an institution whose objectives are intellectual and cultural, the Israelis and the Phalangists have once again had recourse to their principal weapon: blind terror.

It will be recalled that on 7 July 1982 a press conference held by the West Beirut Higher Security Committee exposed the involvement of the Israelis in the planting of explosives in West Beirut. Four men related their complicity in these crimes. Three of them were responsible for the car bomb attacks including the huge explosions in the Ain Al Mreisse hotel district three weeks earlier. The starting point for these operations was the "good fence" on the Lebanese-Israeli border near Adaisseh.

Hussein Jaber, a Haddad militia man, was recruited through inducement of huge quantities of drugs, some of which he consumed before the operation with an official in Junieh. The services of Yahya Samaha, a Lebanese Army deserter, were secured through Israeli pressure on his family. Similar tactics were used to recruit Hussein Al-Sayyad, a truck-driver living on the border strip.

According to the four men, the coordinators of the entire operation were an Israeli intelligence officer calling himself "Abu Jabal" and a Phalangis official named Elie Qordahi.

Please accept, Excellency, assurances of my highest consideration.

Zehdi Labib Terzi

Permanent Observer

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