A Fraternal Bombing

Their sworn enemy is Israel, but Palestinian liberation groups have been so busy fighting each other that lately the Jewish state has gone virtually unscathed. Since July, factional bloodletting has left 60 dead and more than 100 wounded, including the victims of a savage Mafia-style war raging between Yasser Arafat's Al-Fatah and Iraqi-backed Palestinian agents in capitals across Europe and Asia. Early last week, a powerful explosion ripped through an eight-story apartment and office building in Beirut, killing more than 175 Palestinians and wounding 80 others. Among the dead: 37 members of the pro-Iraqi Palestine Liberation Front (P.L.F.) and ten members of Fatah.

The explosion--so forceful that inhabitants of the Lebanese capital mistook it for an earthquake--erupted shortly after midnight in an ammunition dump in the building's basement. Both the P.L.F. and Fatah kept offices in the building, but innocent people were sleeping in apartments upstairs. Rescue crews found the remains of two Lebanese families and of two young girls who had come to spend the fasting month of Ramadan with their grandmother.

Arafat and other Palestinian leaders blamed Zionist and CIA agents. But Ahmed Jebreel, head of the pro-Syrian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was the logical suspect. Six weeks earlier, two of his commandos were killed by men thought to be members of the P.L.F. It appeared that Jebreel, in seeking to even the score, made a tragic miscalculation. Only an hour before the explosion, the 28-member central committee of the P.L.F. had unexpectedly adjourned a meeting. Thus the intended victims of the blast walked away unharmed.

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