The New York Times and The Washington Post, by Thomas L. Friedman and Loren Jenkins

Israeli warplanes staged one of their most devastating and sustained aerial bombardments of West Beirut to date today, causing outraged Lebanese officials to suspend almost completed negotiations with U.S. special envoy Philip C. Habib for the peaceful withdrawal of trapped Palestinian guerrillas from the Lebanese capital.

With Habib having just returned from Jerusalem to iron out the final details of an evacuation agreement, Israeli jets struck in a 10-hour assault, hitting Palestinian positions along the capital's southern outskirts as well as striking at numerous targets in and around the more densely populated civilian areas near the city center.

Israeli radio said late this afternoon that the Israelis had declared another cease-fire. But shelling from Israeli gunboats and artillery continued until after dark and intermittent explosions could be heard well into the night.

Lebanese police said today's death toll was at least 128, with at least 400 wounded. Palestine radio said 300 persons were killed or wounded, with 400 houses destroyed. In the confusion of the day there could be no independent verification of the figures.

Palestine Liberation Organization representative Zehdi Labib Terzi told a U.N. Security Council meeting in New York that 500 persons were killed or wounded and 600 homes destroyed. He said 1,600 bombs and rockets were dropped on the city and 42,000 shells fired by land and sea-based Israeli artillery.

The air raids, which began at 6 a.m. and continued until shortly after 4 p.m., disrupted what was to have been a final negotiating session among Habib, Lebanese President Elias Sarkis and Prime Minister Shafiq Wazzan at the presidential palace in suburban Baabda. Wazzan stormed out of the meeting and announced that the delicate talks, which had seemed on the verge of producing agreement, had been suspended indefinitely.

The talks were being held to work out a formula to evacuate the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Palestinian guerrillas besieged in the city by the Israelis and to establish a temporary international peace-keeping force composed of French, U.S. and Italian units.

"I cannot continue with the negotiations in such an atmosphere," the prime minister said in a voice cracking with emotion. "Why all this destruction? Why all this killing? What more do they the Israelis want of us? They are destroying Lebanon and its beloved capital."

Wazzan also denounced the United States for not preventing the Israeli attack. He said of Habib, "I have told him I cannot carry on and hold him as well as the United States responsible for the consequences."

The prime minister decided to suspend participation in the talks after being urged to do so by former prime minister Saeb Salam, Habib's chief intermediary in discussions with the PLO.

Salam phoned Wazzan at Baabda after canvassing Lebanese Moslem leaders and Palestinian officials who streamed in and out of his home in West Beirut throughout the day. Salam also urged Sarkis to make a public declaration calling on world leaders to force Israel to halt its attacks.

But Sarkis, a Maronite Christian, refused to make the declaration and instead sent a letter to President Reagan and telephoned Saudi Arabian King Fahd to urge him to intercede directly with the U.S. president.

Salam termed the Israeli air raid a "barbarous and savage" act that he said convinced him that Israel was not interested in a peaceful solution but was stalling in the negotiations because it sought the "total destruction of Beirut and of the people in it, both Palestinian and Lebanese."

Salam said Israel had given Habib a list of four conditions, including a demand for a roster with the names of up to 13,000 PLO guerrillas and Syrian soldiers who the Israelis said would have to be evacuated. He said Israel also was insisting on written commitments from all of the Arab governments that have agreed to accept the guerrillas and is holding to its demand that most of the fighters be withdrawn before the international force is deployed.

Finally, he said, the Israelis are insisting that the day the evacuation begins be renamed "E-Day," instead of "D-Day," because of the historical meaning of the latter term, which was used to describe the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II.

The air raids were the latest phase of a steady four-day escalation of attacks that Israeli officials say were launched in retaliation for Palestinian shellings of their positions.

Israel also continued to reinforce its ground units surrounding West Beirut with new troops and equipment, Washington Post correspondent Leon Dash reported from East Beirut. According to a recent traveler to southern Lebanon, U.N. peace-keeping forces there have counted a mechanized division and two brigades coming across the border from Israel in the last four days. New gun positions have been dug in the south of Beirut, some with large field guns and Soviet Union-made Katyusha rocket launchers captured from the Palestinians.

Col. Yehiel Ben Zvi, an Israeli military spokesman in East Beirut, confirmed today that in the "past day or two we have intentionally reinforced our troops in the Beirut area and they are deployed around the city. We are preparing very seriously for a military option in the event that diplomacy fails."

Today's air raids began at dawn after a night of intense artillery bombardment of the city. Palestinian positions in the neighborhoods and refugee camps around the city's southern outskirts were hit, as well as targets in and around the heavily populated residential district in the heart of West Beirut.

With the city's estimated 400,000 remaining residents still reeling from a sleepless night spent in basements where many of them now live, Israeli planes, trailing thermal balloons to deflect heat-seeking antiaircraft rockets, began their attack.

The bombing was most intense around the refugee camps of Burj al Barajinah, Sabra and Shatila and in the Fakhani district, where many PLO offices are located and where the Israelis suspect that some of PLO leader Yasser Arafat's command bunkers lie.

The planes, using 1,000-pound bombs, rockets, and high-velocity cannon fire, also raked buildings along the Corniche Mazraa, the boulevard that runs from the sea to the National Museum crossing point to East Beirut. It is there that Israeli and Palestinian forces have fought for the past few days for control of the entry point into the western sector in a battle that has involved tanks, artillery and rocket-propelled grenades.

Israeli forces advanced about 300 yards west from their previous lines this morning, but were forced to retreat by heavy Palestinian fire in the afternoon. Israel repeatedly has tried to advance from the museum to take the boulevard. Its capture would effectively cut off the Palestinian positions in the south from the heart of West Beirut north of the boulevard.

With gunboats participating, Israeli artillery also pounded the seaside Rawshah district, once a fashionable neighborhood of middle-class apartments, French restaurants and boutiques that is now crowded with refugees. Other strikes hit near the Hotel Normandie in the guerrilla stronghold near the Israeli-held port area, and around the Manara lighthouse district of high-rise apartments four blocks west of the campus of the American University of Beirut.

Palestinian gunners fired surface-to-air missiles at the invading planes and followed their roar with less modern antiaircraft guns, but neither appeared to be an effective threat to the Israeli jets.

By midafternoon the planes no longer were being followed by the rattle of antiaircraft fire either because the Palestinian gunners had run out of ammunition or because they had given up in futility.

Along the seaside near a Lebanese Army post known as the bain militaire and in sight of an old ferris wheel, a group of Lebanese militiamen of the pro-Syrian Arab Socialist Movement saw its camp in an old soccer field attacked by a Kfir jet that dropped eight 1,000-pound bombs in a dive seen from the center of the city.

Almost as soon as the air raid stopped, the militiamen were out in the cratered streets exchanging stories and joking with each other about how the Israelis had failed either to knock out any of their antiaircraft batteries or to wound any of the men.

"We are all fine, our morale is strong," said Zaid, the group's 22-year-old commander, as others nodded in assent. "It is not a question of whether we can take this for days, we can take this for months."

Down the Corniche Mazraa, where fresh glass blown out from neighboring buildings was intermixed with dangling electrical wires along the four-lane boulevard, ambulances raced with lights flashing and sirens wailing, rushing victims dug out of buildings to the nearest hospital. After half an hour of calm, residents began to emerge from cellars to survey the damage and chat on littered sidewalks as the sun began to set.

"What is the sense of all this killing?" asked Ihsam Haj as he surveyed the damage in the neighborhood while the distant crump of artillery still landed in a refugee camp a mile or so to the south.

He added, "What do the Israelis want? Are they crazy? The Palestinians have said they are ready to go, so why don't they let them? Why do they continue to bomb us like this? There is no sense left in this world."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

No Group Claims Bombing of Office

President-elect Bashir Gemayel was killed today when a bomb blew up a local office of his Phalangist Party in East Beirut moments after he had arrived there.

No one claimed responsibility for the explosion, in which at least eight other persons died and 50 were wounded. Gemayel, 34, was elected president three weeks ago and was to take office Sept. 23.

Observers here feared his death would lead to renewed fighting in Beirut between members of Gemayel's Lebanese Forces militia and Moslem and rival Christian groups.

Late tonight, after word of his death had spread, the Lebanese Army closed the Green Line dividing the predominantly Moslem western and Christian eastern sectors of the city to all traffic.

The first official word came from Prime Minister Shafik Wazzan, who issued a statement confirming the news and calling the assassination "a link in a chain of criminal conspiracies against Lebanon at a time when it started to restore its strength."

In a statement issued nearly 12 hours after Gemayal's death, President Elias Sarkis praised the Christian leader as "a martyr to the cause of unifying Lebanon." Sarkis declared a 7-day period of national mourning and appealed to the nation for unity during the crisis, The Associated Press reported.

Before dawn Wednesday, Israeli jets roared low over East Beirut on reconnaissance missions, but otherwise the city was quiet.

Before the announcements, there had been confusion about Gemayel's fate beginning about an hour after the 4 p.m. blast, when the president-elect was reportedly seen alive.

At the time of the explosion, party sources said, more than 100 people were in the building, where Gemayel was attending a regular meeting with local party officials. Although panic spread quickly through the Christian sector of Beirut, initial reports from eyewitnesses said that Gemayel was found alive in the rubble and walked to an ambulance.

"He lives, he lives, thank God," shouted the crowd that had gathered to watch a crane pulling up concrete blocks. Tense Lebanese Forces militiamen who had cordoned off the streets began firing into the air in celebration.

After early reports that Gemayel had sustained only minor injuries, there was no official comment on his condition. Then word began to spread throughout the city of his possible death. Late tonight, it was confirmed by Phalangist Party and government sources.

Phalangist sources said that 20 people were killed, including senior party officials, and 60 injured in the explosion.

The Phalangist Party radio, "The Voice of Lebanon," began playing funeral music and telling its listeners to be calm pending an important announcement. The radio urged Phalange followers not to wear their militia uniforms nor carry their guns.

Party sources explained the initial confusion by saying that the man seen coming out of the rubble surrounded by aides and bundled into an ambulance was wearing clothes similar to Gemayel's.

But party officials who followed the ambulance to the Hotel Dieu Hospital in the Ashrafiyeh section of East Beirut discovered that the man was not Gemayel.

According to reliable Lebanese sources, Gemayel's body was discovered under the rubble at 10:30 p.m., 6 1/2 hours after the explosion. The body was taken to the hospital, where it was identified by his father, Pierre, his wife, Solange, and his elder brother, Amin. Gemayel's body then was taken to his home town of Bikfraya, 15 miles from the capital, to lie in state. Sarkis said a state funeral will be held there Wednesday.

Because Gemayel had not yet taken office, Sarkis will continue as president until parliament is convened to hold a new election. Under a 1943 agreement among this country's rival religious and ethnic groups, the presidency is held by a Maronite Christian and the prime minister's office by a Sunni Moslem. At the time of his election, Gemayel had no serious rivals and analysts here doubt a strong new candidate will emerge.

A Lebanese friend of Gemayel's, newspaper editor Rafiq Shjalaba, called his death "disastrous for Lebanon." He quoted Phalangist explosive experts as saying the blast that demolished the Ashrafiyeh headquarters came from at least 440 pounds of dynamite. This, he said, indicated it had been done by professionals with access to huge quantities of explosives, expert timing devices and access to the heavily guarded building.

"One has to ask a thousand questions about this," the night editor of the respected An Nahar newspaper said, fighting back tears. "Why? Who? For whom? Or for what purpose?"

As word spread of the death of the president-elect, a mood of deep apprehension grew in the Moslem sector of the city, which expected, instinctively, to be somehow blamed.

One worried Palestinian academic in West Beirut said, "This plunges one half of the country into sheer despair, and the other into pure terror."

In Tel Aviv, several Israeli officials expressed sorrow and condemned the assassination, United Press International reported.

The speaker of Israel's parliament, Menachem Savidor, visiting in Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Gemayel's death was a "tragic event" that could "change the whole situation."

Today's bombing was at least the third attempt on Gemayel's life in his brief political career. In 1979 a car bomb targeted for him was discovered and defused. A year later, on Feb. 23, 1980, a car bomb was detonated as his limousine passed it in the streets of Ashrafiyeh. Gemayel was not in the car that day, but his 18-month-old daughter, Maya, was killed along with three bodyguards.

At the time, those assassination attempts were blamed by Gemayel's aides on supporters of former president Suleiman Franjieh, like Gemayel a Maronite Christian. The bombs were reported to be retaliations for the killing by Gemayel's militiamen of Franjieh's son, Tony, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, along with 30 of their bodyguards, in 1978.

As the Christians' military commander since 1976, Gemayel based his power on the militia, eventually usurping the leadership of the Phalangist Party founded by his 77-year-old father. The younger Gemayel has been opposed by fellow Christians, such as Franjieh, for the way he dealt with rivals in the Christian enclaves of Lebanon. Moslems feared him for the savageness with which he directed his militias against them during the 1975-76 civil war. The Moslem leaders additionally considered Gemayel a tool of the Israelis, who have long supported and armed his militia.

Gemayel, however, outmaneuvered his opponents last month and succeeded in getting the votes he needed to be elected president by Lebanon's parliament.

Since then, he tried repeatedly to break down Moslem opposition by preaching reconciliation and stating at every chance that he wanted to be "the president of all Lebanon" not just of the Christians, as his detractors maintain.

Moslem leaders allied to Franjieh in the still Syrian-dominated north of Lebanon refused to have anything to do with Gemayel, stating that they did not recognize the legality of his election. West Beirut's more influential Moslem leaders, gathered around former prime minister Saeb Salam, had increasingly moved toward accepting Gemayel's presidency.

Moslems who considered him pro-Israel were further concerned when Gemayel received a letter of congratulations on his election from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. But Gemayel denied any collusion with Israel and insisted, "The Israelis are fighting for their own reasons, not my pretty blue eyes."

Gemayel, since his election, had said that all militias, including his own, should be disbanded once the Lebanese Army was capable of assuming security around the country. The Army so far has failed to take hold in Christian East Beirut, where the Lebanese Forces remain the principal authority.

Prime Minister Wazzan, a Moslem announced this week that the National Police, backed by the Army, would begin to deploy in East Beirut, as they have in the western part of the city, on Wednesday. Tonight, however, Wazzan said that the scheduled opening of the Fuad Chehab bridge crossing point would be postponed.

Bashir Gemayel, the youngest of six children, joined the Phalangist Party at the age of 11 during the first Christian-Moslem civil war here. Two years later he began military training in the militia, then called the Kataeb, and by the age of 22 he was in command of a unit.

He studied law and political science at a Jesuit college here and participated in student groups opposed to the leftist supporters of Palestinian nationalism.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Lebanese Claim U.S. Vow Broken

With its infantry moving cautiously from block to block behind protective columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers, Israel today occupied Moslem West Beirut.

Fighting for the first time in the heart of an Arab capital city, the Israeli units fanned through West Beirut's shuttered commercial heartland and its densely populated residential districts, fighting sporadic engagements in the streets with disorganized bands of lightly armed leftist militiamen.

The Lebanese government protested Israel's takeover of the city, which had resisted siege throughout the summer when it was defended by about 11,500 now-evacuated guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Lebanese officials claimed that the invasion violated explicit guarantees by the United States that it would not allow Israel to enter the city once the PLO had withdrawn.

The U.S. guarantees that it would block an Israeli invasion, West Beirut Moslem leaders said, were contained in unpublished appendices to the PLO withdrawal agreement negotiated by U.S. special envoy Philip C. Habib.

"I appeal to the United States and ask how far it will abide by its pledges and guarantees," Prime Minister Shafiq Wazzan said today in a radio address after he had sent urgent requests to Washington to pressure Israel to withdraw immediately. His requests were made directly to U.S. envoy Morris Draper, Habib's former deputy here, who returned to Lebanon yesterday to resume negotiations for the withdrawal of all remaining foreign forces in Lebanon. In addition to the Israelis, these include Syrian and PLO units camped in the eastern Bekaa Valley and northern Lebanon.

There were no immediate reports of the number of casualties today. Yesterday, in the first day of fighting, Israel reported two of its soldiers were killed and 42 wounded. The Nasserist Morabitoun, the dominant Moslem militia, said today that five of its men were killed and seven wounded in fighting the Israeli advance this morning.

Ambulances wailed through the mostly deserted streets during the day. The city sporadically resounded with the rattle of machine-gun fire and the loud snap of tank cannons crashing through the terrified Moslem sector of half a million people, many sent fleeing in panic from their neighborhoods.

With Israeli tanks blasting away at suspected sniper positions in office buildings within West Beirut's center along Hamra Street, with the Lebanese Central Bank afire from a random Israeli shell, and with Israeli armored forces crisscrossing the city's residential areas to engage leftist militiamen in a series of hit-and-run battles, Wazzan said that not only U.S. honor was at stake in Lebanon, but also the whole credibility of the Reagan administration in the Arab world where it has sought to curry favor through its Middle East initiative announced last week.

"I make a direct appeal to U.S. officials, to President Reagan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Habib, in particular, and ask them how they want the Arab world to look at their peace initiative and promises after this," Wazzan said. "The responsibility of the United States is great. We are waiting, the whole world is waiting, for American action."

Israel, whose June invasion of Lebanon was considered to have aided the election of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated Tuesday, had counted greatly on Gemayel's forceful presidency to control divided Lebanon.

Tonight, Gemayel's Phalange Party moved to fill the vacuum created by its leader's death, according to well-informed sources, by nominating Bashir's elder brother, Amin, 40, as its candidate for the parliamentary presidential election expected to be held before Sept. 23.

Wazzan today rejected Israel's explanation that it had moved into West Beirut to thwart any regrouping of Palestinian and leftist forces as "irrelevant" and "false," saying that his government's deployment of national policemen and Lebanese soldiers in West Beirut in the wake of the PLO withdrawal Sept. 1 had been gradually restoring order and government authority in war-battered West Beirut.

Moslem leaders point out that both before and after Gemayel was killed in a bomb explosion in an office of his Phalange Party in East Beirut, calm had been returning to West Beirut. Leftist Moslem militiamen there had been gradually turning over their militiary positions to the police and the Army under a security plan negotiated by Wazzan with the local militia leaders.

The Lebanese government also sought help in getting the Israelis to withdraw from Saudi Arabian King Fahd, whose influence with Washington is considerable, and from French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson, who met with government leaders here today after flying from France to pay condolences to Gemayel's family.

Fahd has promised Lebanese leaders that he would do his best to end the Israeli occupation of their capital, according to an official Saudi news agency dispatch reported by Reuter. The king was said to describe the occupation as inhuman and unjustified.

Wazzan is understood to have asked Cheysson to send back the Foreign Legionnaires who departed Monday night. His appeal echoed that made by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in Rome today in which he called for the return of the multinational force to Lebanon.

Lebanese Army troops that had been deployed only last week between the Israeli lines and the city's undefended southern suburbs to act, in accordance with the Habib plan, as a security cordon for the capital, simply moved aside without a word of protest or a shot fired when the Israelis began to move their tanks, armored personnel carriers and troop-carrying half-tracks into West Beirut.

Apparently having ascertained yesterday that the resistance from the city's assortment of irregular leftist militia groups was spotty at best, Israel took control of the port of Beirut and yesterday at noon landed two brigades from ships for an attack westward across the so-called Green Line of battered buildings that has divided the Lebanese capital since the 1975-76 civil war.

After a lull in the fighting last night, the Israeli Army completed its drive for control of the Moslem sector today. Armored columns moved quickly through the once-fashionable seaside hotel district, gutted during the civil war, and then split, with one force racing down the seafront esplanade on which the U.S. and British embassies sit while a second column moved up toward Hamra Street, firing cannons at every intersection either at suspected militia sniper posts or just to scatter potential opponents.

The French Embassy had two phosphorous shells land in its spacious grounds. The Central Bank was hit as were at least four cars and three office buildings along Hamra Street.

Groups of youths, in civilian clothing and armed only with Kalashnikov assault rifles and antitank, rocket-propelled grenades, tried, with little success, to stall the Israeli drive.

Even without big guns, the militiamen had a few successes. Two Israeli tanks were destroyed early this morning near the burned-out hulk of the city's former Holiday Inn. At least one other Israeli tank was destroyed near the city's southern sports complex that had served once as a PLO military academy.

Israeli tank columns along the coast joined up early this morning with other forces that had moved through the town from the south, after first surrounding the already battered Palestinian refugee camps of Burj al Barajinah, Shatila, and Sabra.

Having linked up on the coast this morning, the Israeli columns spent the rest of the day crisscrossing through the city at will, attacking suspected militia headquarters and neighborhoods where they were based, setting up roadblocks to check for identity cards, and arresting suspects.

The Israeli Army also chased the Lebanese Army from some of their recently reoccupied barracks in West Beirut; at the seaside barracks of Bains Militaire, where even under the reign of the PLO the Lebanese Army had been allowed to remain, the Israelis dug in half a dozen tanks, sent their men into the barracks and sent the Lebanese away in trucks and jeeps.

Dense clouds of smoke, black and gray, rose every now and then over the city from the refugee camps to the south, from the east-west boulevard of Corniche Mazraa where the fighting was heaviest, and from near the Green Line where the odd tank or passenger car had been set aflame. By nightfall the fighting had died out in the city center, but gunshots and occasional cannon booms could be heard from the vicinity of Gamal Abdel Nasser Mosque on the Corniche Mazraa, the headquarters of the Morabitoun.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Israeli forces, suddenly facing pockets of stiff resistance in their drive to pacify Moslem West Beirut, cordoned off that sector of the city today and began a systematic hunt for Lebanese and Palestinian sympathizers of the now-evacuated Palestine Liberation Organization.

Plainclothes security agents, carrying lists of names, led squads of soldiers through the streets in search of presumed enemies to interrogate. Scores of suspects were forced to wait for hours before being questioned, although only small numbers were seen being led away afterward.

Armed members of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian rightist militia that is informally allied with the Israelis, entered Palestinian refugee camps on the city's southern outskirts and went from house to house arresting Palestinian males. In several instances, Christian and Moslem militiamen exchanged rockets and gunfire.

Cordons of Israeli tanks surrounded the Shatila, Sabra and Burj al Barajinah camps as the Christian militiamen -- feared and hated by the Moslem population since the brutal 1975-1976 civil war -- carried out their work.

Lebanese Moslem leaders again protested that the United States had broken a pledge to block Israel from occupying West Beirut.

In Jerusalem, Israel said it was willing to open discussions with the Lebanese Army "as soon as possible" on a troop pullback from the city, Washington Post correspondent Edward Walsh reported. The statement came after U.S. special envoy Morris Draper met with top Israeli officials there.

Israeli soldiers apparently ignored diplomatic traditions in their sweep through the heart of West Beirut. Until U.S. diplomats ordered them out, they installed themselves in the half-completed building that is to be the new U.S. Embassy on Ramlet el Baidah Avenue. They also fired a shot at a Marine guarding the U.S. Embassy but missed him. An Israeli official later apologized, saying the guard had been mistaken for a leftist militiaman.

Other Israeli soldiers entered and occupied for two days parts of the Soviet Embassy compound despite the protests of its diplomats, according to Soviet officials and Israeli soldiers talking to news agency reporters. The Israelis set up command posts for their Army in the embassy of the United Arab Emirates as well as in U.N buildings occupied a week ago in the southern neighborhood of Bir Hasan.

Reuter quoted Soviet sources as saying that about 60 Israeli soldiers in two armored personnel carriers smashed through a metal gate in the side wall of the embassy compound on Wednesday night. Israeli soldiers said that they moved into the compound to command a view of the strategic Corniche Mazraa boulevard, Reuter said.

In Jerusalem, a military spokesman confirmed that Israeli soldiers had entered the Soviet compound Wednesday but denied that they had forced their way into a building, Reuter said. "There was shooting in the area, and some of our men took shelter behind a wall in the embassy compound for a limited time," the spokesman said.

ABC news reported that Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoliy Dobrynin said, "I don't have details, but it is clearly an act of aggression, which we clearly will not tolerate."

President Reagan, asked to comment on Dobrynin's statement as he left an Italian-American festival in Flemington, N.J., said, "You know those Russians; you can't believe anything they say." Deputy White House press secretary Larry Speakes said the White House still was getting "conflicting reports" about exactly what happened at the embassy.

The Israeli military command announced that one Israeli soldier had been killed and 46 wounded during the past 24 hours.

In a surprise political development, the National Liberal Party nominated its 82-year-old leader Camille Chamoun to run for president against the older brother of Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect who was assassinated Tuesday. Both Chamoun and Gemayel's brother Amin, who was nominated yesterday by the Phalangist Party, are Christian leaders.

The official Lebanese government radio reported that Raymond Edde, another Christian, has become the third candidate for the Lebanese presidency as head of the National Bloc party, Agence France-Presse reported.

Although fighting was continuing, there was little doubt that the heavily armed Israeli forces eventually would quell resistance being put up by small, disorganized bands of young Lebanese militiamen fighting with Kalashnikov assault rifles, antitank rocket-propelled grenades and a few recoilless cannons mounted on jeeps.

But it was not the futile fighting that most worried West Beirut's half million residents. It was, instead, the prospect of a sectarian crackdown on the Moslem population by Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies.

Fears were stirred particularly by the sudden deployment of the Israeli-armed Christian militiamen, known locally as the "kataeb." The militiamen -- who were led previously by Bashir Gemayel -- are remembered with bitterness for their massacre of up to 3,000 Palestinians in the now-razed Tel Zaatar refugee camp in 1976 at the height of the Lebanese civil war.

Although a tight Israeli Army security cordon tried to keep outside observers from the Palestinian refugee camps in the southern suburbs today, there were reports by civilians who managed to escape of violent reprisals by the militiamen. One Palestinian woman who fled to the house of former prime minister Saeb Salam reported in tears that her husband's throat was slit while she watched.

Salam, echoing comments by Lebanese political leaders yesterday, said that "Israel has made a laughing stock of U.S. honor and credibility" by invading West Beirut.

The Lebanese government insists that the accords negotiated by Philip C. Habib not only provided for the PLO evacuation but also for Israel's withdrawal from its positions around the city as soon as the PLO completed its withdrawal Sept. 1. Officials rejected Israel's claims that it had to enter West Beirut to maintain order following Gemayel's killing and that the PLO had broken the accords by leaving behind 2,000 guerrillas.

"We counted on American guarantees, we took it at its word and thought it had the power and the will to meet its responsibilities," said Salam, who was a key intermediary between Habib and PLO chief Yasser Arafat in the negotiations. "Instead we see it is not the United States that leads, but Israel."

In the Habib agreement, Israel accepted the number of 7,100 PLO combatants to be evacuated from West Beirut along with about 2,500 of their Syrian Army and Syrian-controlled Palestine Liberation Army allies. In the evacuation itself, about 8,300 PLO combatants left the country, according to U.S. counts, and 3,600 Syrian troops and PLA fighters also departed.

One Lebanese Cabinet minister said that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, in talking now about another 2,000 PLO guerrillas, was using a "disingenuous excuse to justify an invasion that he had already planned."

This morning in Beirut, Israeli Army jeeps mounted with loudspeakers moved down the city's commercial artery, Hamra Street, ordering merchants to shut down their shops and everyone to go to their homes.

Civilian security agents, heading squads of soldiers, went from neighborhood to neighborhood in the city ordering all men to come into the streets for interrogation and, eventually, to turn over any weapons they might have in their houses.

A group of about 175 was thus herded on the seafront corniche near the U.S. Embassy. The civilian in charge interrogated the group about names he had on lists of men suspected by the Israelis. Only two men, a Palestinian and a Lebanese belonging to a local militia group, actually were seen being hustled away in an Israeli Army truck.

One Western diplomat witnessed a similar scene in the middle-class apartment house district of Raouche. There, about 130 men were forced to sit on a sidewalk for several hours while being interrogated. In the end, six or seven men were detained and taken off to an unknown destination.

Yousef Nazal, the millionaire proprietor of the Hotel Commodore, where most of the Western press corps stays, was taken at gunpoint from his hotel lobby for brief questioning by Israeli officials who asked him why the PLO had held press conferences in his hotel. He told them that the press conferences were held there because the press lived there.

A 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew was clamped on the city.

In the camps to the south, a foreign television camera crew that managed to get to Sabra camp's Gaza hospital filmed children and old men and women who had been wounded badly by shrapnel. The crew interviewed a doctor who said that more than 1,000 people had been killed and wounded in the camps during the past two days. There was no way to confirm the report.

Spokesmen for the Lebanese Forces militia in East Beirut denied any knowledge that its men had invaded the camps that had once been bastions of the PLO. But this correspondent, after evading Israeli Army roadblocks and making two separate visits to Shatila during the day, saw the militiamen operating openly there.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Lebanese gunmen belonging to right-wing Christian militia units killed hundreds of men, women and children in two undefended Palestinian refugee camps overnight, according to accounts by survivors given to correspondents who counted scores of corpses lying in the streets of the camps today.

The rampage of killing, which extended to babies still in diapers and teen-age girls, started in the war-battered camps of Shatila and Sabra on Friday and continued into the early hours of Saturday, after the militiamen had moved in through an access route from the south that had been controlled by Israeli troops until Thursday night.

Confusion surrounded the precise identity of the killers, who appeared to have systematically machine-gunned everyone within range when they burst into Shatila, on the southern outskirts of Beirut. But a number of survivors identified them as belonging to the units under the control of Saad Haddad, a cashiered Lebanese Army major whose men have been funded and trained by Israel. In a telephone call to the Reuters news agency bureau in Jerusalem, Haddad denied any involvement and condemned "this savage action."

Israeli soldiers stationed around the camp and other survivors said the killers also included members of the Phalangist militia, whose leader, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was killed in a still unexplained blast in Beirut on Tuesday. This correspondent saw men wearing the uniforms of both Gemayel's and Haddad's units in Shatila on Friday. The Phalangists, in a radio broadcast, also denied involvement in the killings.

It was impossible to establish a precise death toll immediately. This correspondent counted 46 bodies lying in the open in Shatila before being overcome by nausea. Reporters for United Press International counted more than 100 bodies in a 20-minute walk in the camps, while Associated Press photographers counted about 60.

But bodies were strewn across acres of wreckage in the camps, which had housed more than 10,000 persons before Israel launched its June 6 invasion of Lebanon. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, often with their inhabitants still inside. Hundreds and perhaps thousands more were reported as missing or having been seen being taken away from the camps by the militiamen.

The PLO's representative at the United Nations, Zehdi Terzi, charged that "1,500 helpless civilians . . .were butchered in cold blood" at Shatila.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement issued at its headquarters in Geneva Saturday that its delegates saw hundreds of bodies lying in the streets, Reuter reported.

"Injured people were killed in their hospital beds, others were kidnaped, as well as doctors," the statement added.

Survivors said the gunmen had moved through the camp beginning after sunset Friday breaking into houses and spraying them with machine-gun fire, as bulldozers rolled behind them, evidently trying to bury many of the corpses under mounds of rubble as quickly as possible. A large pit was excavated near the southern entrance of the camp, and bears the markings of a mass grave.

The killing countinued throughout the night, with the militiamen withdrawing around 8 a.m, witnesses said. When reporters, diplomats and frightened camp residents arrived in midmorning to view the remains of the slaughter, there were no signs of the gunmen or of any Israeli military presence.

Israeli Army units backed by tanks surround the area on three sides, and were in apparent hearing distance of the events in the camp. The Israelis sealed off access to Shatila late in the day, after press accounts of the massacre began to be transmitted. Israeli Army officers with the units around the camps Saturday disclaimed any knowledge of the killings.

Reports of the massacre swept through Beirut and touched off a new wave of terror and recriminations. Former prime minister Saeb Salam, who had negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization and U.S. envoy Philip C. Habib this summer to get a PLO evacuation from Beirut, said: "This is what we always feared, and this is what the United States told us would not be allowed to happen. It has, and now the United States, Israel and the Christians must bear responsibility for it."

The negotiations on the PLO withdrawal nearly broke down several times because of Palestinian and Moslem fears that the refugees left behind in the camps would be defenseless against Christian attacks unless a multinational force moved in as the guerrillas were withdrawing and remained to protect the civilians. The Israelis permitted a force of U.S. Marines, Italian and French troops to act as a buffer during the evacuation, but this force left after three weeks of duty.

On Thursday in Rome, PLO leader Yasser Arafat called for a return of the multinational force to Beirut.

Following the evacuation of the Palestinian guerrilla forces, the Israelis moved their troops into the approach area of Shatila and Sabra, around the Bir Hasan area, on Sept. 3. When Gemayel was killed, the Israelis moved their forces completely into West Beirut, asserting that they were doing so to avoid bloodshed. As they moved northward, they shelled and lobbed mortars into the camps, but did not occupy them.

Residents of Shatila and Sabra said they were terrified by the sudden appearance Friday morning of Christian militiamen at the southern gates of Shatila. According to residents just outside the camp area, the militiamen arrived overnight Thursday in trucks, passing through the Israeli Army lines around the camp.

Friday morning, when this correspondent tried to visit the Shatila camp, the Christian militiamen, some wearing uniforms of Gemayel's "Lebanese Forces" militia and others in uniforms of the Gemayel rivals from Haddad's Israeli-backed southern militia, were controlling the southern road into the camp, at a roadblock by the Kuwaiti Embassy just to the southwest of the camp.

On a later visit Friday, at about 6 p.m., the Christian militia roadblocks were not in evidence, although the Israelis were still in their positions on three flanks of the camp. The southern flank, a road that leads from the sea to the Beirut Airport road, was, however, in the hands of the Christians. Turning into the camp off this highway, this correspondent was stopped about 100 yards inside by a group of militiamen, again in the uniforms of both Christian militia groups, and told to skip visiting the camp because things were under control.

But fires already were burning in the camp, and the men talked about meeting resistance as they tried to take control of Shatila. There had been some shooting by terrified Palestinian youths earlier in the day, but they quickly fled as the militiamen advanced into the camp.

A Norwegian diplomat, Gunnar Flaksad, tried to drive to the camp Friday afternoon, and was also turned away, after seeing a front-loading bulldozer leave the camp with what he estimated were at least 20 bodies in the front shovel.

At Gaza Hospital Saturday, 11-year-old Milad Farouk told of the militiamen kicking down the door of his family's modest home and spraying the place with machine-gun fire, killing his father, mother, and younger brother. Milad was wounded by bullets in the arm, leg and hand.

People from the northern part of Shatila and in Sabra heard the screams and shouts in the night, and many of them fled northward, into West Beirut's Hamra commercial district, passing through the Israeli lines of tanks and personnel carriers.

A group of 20 American and European doctors and nurses was arrested by the gunmen at the Gaza Hospital in Sabra camp and marched at gunpoint through the body-littered streets. A Washington woman, Ellen Siegel, a registered nurse associated with the Washington Hospital Center, said the physicians were forced to abandon patients, who had been coming into the hospital since Wednesday as a result of Israeli shelling.

The group was freed when an Israeli colonel walked up to the gunmen "and saw what was happening and told us not to worry," David Gray, one of the physicians, said. Israeli troops then escorted the group to safety in West Beirut.

During their trip through the camp, the medical group saw up to 400 Palestinian civilians being held by the Lebanese gunmen, Siegel said.

Refugee camp survivors Saturday spoke of the killers coming from Haddad's forces, a group created by Israel after their first invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978 to guard a Christian sector of Lebanon just north of their borders. Haddad's forces often have used the uniforms of the Lebanese Forces from East Beirut in an attempt to link them to his own actions.

Israeli Col. Nastali Bahiri, the officer in charge of a group of at least 1,000 Palestinians turned over to the Israeli troops at a nearby sports stadium, said he did not know what had happened in the camp several hundred yards from his position.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Witnesses Describe Militiamen Passing Through Israeli Lines

Troops from the Christian militia units that have been accused of murdering hundreds of men, women and children in Palestinian refugee camps here moved into Israeli-controlled security areas and fraternized with Israeli troops shortly before, and during, the rampage of killing, reliable witnesses said today.

The witnesses, who include diplomats, Lebanese residents of the neighborhoods around the camps, survivors of the attacks and foreign medical workers, acknowledged that it was impossible to identify the particular militiamen they saw as the killers who moved into the Shatila and Sabra camps shortly afterward to begin the massacre of unarmed civilians.

But their accounts, and the discovery of a clearly marked path established for militia convoys through an isolated Israeli-held staging point and then into the area of Shatila, heightened suspicions here of Israeli complicity in the movement of the militia into the camps.

None of the witnesses, nor any other evidence gathered in an effort to reconstruct the events of the past four days, suggest that Israeli troops participated in the slaughter. Israeli officials vehemently deny that their troops even knew it was going on.

But officials in Jerusalem have begun to explain to journalists that their troops did let the right-wing militiamen pass through their lines on the way into the camps as part of an effort to track down any Palestinian guerrillas who had stayed behind in Beirut after the guerrilla evacuation last month. They went on to say that the militiamen went amok, and that Israeli troops intervened as soon as they became aware of the atrocities.

"Nobody dreamed this would happen," United Press International quoted an Israeli official as saying.

But as Red Cross workers and Lebanese Boy Scouts began today to pick up the savaged corpses of the Palestinians caught in the rampage in Shatila and Sabra, new accounts emerged to challenge some of the basic premises of the Israeli professions of initial ignorance and quick response. The witnesses' assertions included the following:

* The massacre was conducted by two separate, Israeli-supported Christian militias -- that of cashiered Lebanese Army Maj. Saad Haddad, Israel's surrogate in southern Lebanon, and members of the late president-elect Bashir Gemayel's Phalangist Lebanese Forces, the dominant militia of Christian East Beirut. A Gemayel family member reportedly acknowledged to a U.S. diplomat that Phalangist militiamen were in the camps during the massacres.

* Israeli Army troops let members of the two militia groups pass through their lines and allowed them to assemble at a part of Beirut's international airport that is under their direct control shortly before the attacks began. The militia convoys then appeared to establish a command post about 300 yards from the entrance to Shatila and immediately across the street from a fully manned Israeli observation post that looked directly down into the camp.

* Journalists, diplomats and Western medical workers saw Israeli troops in the immediate vicinity of the camps at the time the massacres began Friday afternoon, throughout the night and early yesterday morning at the time the killers appeared to have finished their work. Unarmed Palestinian prisoners and in one case a group of European and American medical workers were marched past Israeli troops.

The sighting of Israeli troops casually talking to the militiamen at the entrance to the camp at 7 a.m. yesterday, after most of the killing had stopped, and later of the militiamen withdrawing from the area through Israeli lines with truckloads of Palestinian prisoners, raised questions about Israeli claims to have halted the slayings several hours after they had begun.

Lebanese politicians continued today to make explicit the point that a White House statement strongly suggested yesterday: that a tragic chain of events that led inevitably to the massacre -- as these politicians and others had predicted would happen if the camps were left unprotected -- was begun with Israel's invasion of Moslem West Beirut Wednesday within hours of the assassination of Gemayel, 34, leader of the Christian Maronite Phalangist movement, which Israel had hoped to turn into an open ally in running Lebanon following Israel's June 6 invasion.

Israel said it moved into West Beirut, despite what the Reagan administration said was a clear and binding pledge to special envoy Philip C. Habib not to go into the Moslem-dominated section of the capital, to impose order and avoid any outbreaks of violence. But today, pressed by journalists on why Israel had been unable to prevent the massacre, Israeli Army Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Rafael Eitan, said during a press conference at a makeshift command post less than a quarter of a mile from Shatila camp:

"We don't give the Phalangists orders and we are not responsible for them. The Phalangists are Lebanese and Lebanon is theirs and they act as they see fit."

At about 2 a.m. Wednesday, according to Lebanese Army officials, and only several hours after the Lebanese government had officially confirmed Gemayel's death, Israeli Army units began to move north into West Beirut from previously secured and prepared positions in the southern suburb of Bir Hasan, just southwest of the Shatila refugee camp. By noon, Israeli Army units supported by tanks and armored personnel carriers had totally surrounded the camp and the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Sabra.

According to foreign doctors at Sabra's Gaza Hospital, just north of Shatila, the camp was shelled by Israeli cannons and by mortars that afternoon. By nightfall, the hospital had received 25 wounded and their first reports of deaths in the camp where once up to 10,000 people had lived.

Villagers who live in Shuwayfat, southeast of West Beirut, and along a road from Christian East Beirut -- where the Phalangists are the dominant force -- to the coastal road that leads to southern Lebanon -- where Haddad's troops have been built up by Israeli funding and training -- reported today that at about 3 p.m. Thursday trucks and jeeps marked with Haddad's militia's insignias began pouring into Shuwayfat, to drive along an Israeli Army-controlled road that leads to Israeli military positions around the southern end of the Beirut airport's western runway paralleling the coastline.

Israeli troops seized the airport early in the invasion, and now appear to have moved out of the main terminal area while maintaining control of the coastal runway where small planes land and where Haddad troops were filmed by Israeli cameramen recently.

At the same time Thursday other military transports were coming down from East Beirut and turning into the same airport road, which was marked distinctly by a new sign post that bore the Phalangist Lebanese Forces' insignia, a triangle inside a circle, along with the letters "MP" and an arrow pointing down the road, the residents said.

I located the turn-off sign today. Immediately beside it in the airport perimeter was a sign in Hebrew lettering with an arrow pointing in the same direction, into the Israeli staging area. An Israeli Army jeep emerged from that area as I watched.

Similar signs, which could be used to direct troop movements and convoys, were spaced every 50 yards, sometimes spray painted on a wall or on signposts standing by the road.

Two hours after the convoys were seen going into the southern end of the airport Thursday, an estimated two battalions, or about 1,600 men wearing Christian militia uniforms, were seen moving from the direction of the airport into Bir Hasan, next to the Kuwaiti Embassy crossroads. This brought them immediately adjacent to the Israeli Army operational headquarters in the area, located around three bombed-out, seven-story apartment buildings that had once served as officers' housing for the Lebanese Army.

The Christian militias drove to Bir Hasan along the airport road, turned left to drive toward the sea from the village of Ouzai, then north into Bir Hasan where they set up their own command post in the business administration building of the Lebanese University, directly across from an Israeli command post. To get there, the militias followed the arrows of the road markers of the Lebanese Forces that were spray-painted all the way to Bir Hasan, along the route retraced today by this correspondent.

Several hours after that--while Israeli tanks continued to occupy positions with their cannons pointing into the camp they had shelled previously -- the militiamen entered Shatila camp through its southern gate about 300 yards east of the Israeli and Christian command headquarters at Bir Hasan.

At about 7 p.m., European doctors working at Gaza Hospital, started hearing the rattle of small- arms fire, the explosion of grenades and mortars, and the first wave of casualties and terrified refugee families started flowing in. The sky over Shatila was lit through most of the night by flares fired repeatedly into the sky, either by the Israelis or the Christian militia.

With the ghostly light of those flares streaming in the hospital windows, the hospital's medical team, which included 20 foreign doctors and nurses, worked through the night. By dawn, the hospital had admitted 82 people wounded by rifles or shrapnel, and the hospital was jammed with 2,000 refugees from Shatila.

Sometime Friday morning, local residents around the Shatila camp, saw the Christian militiamen march out a group of about 100 men from the camp onto the four-lane road that forms its southern border. Lebanese were herded to one side and forced to sit down, while Palestinians were grouped on another side.

A 15-year-old Palestinian, whose story was corroborated by half a dozen other people in the neighborhood, said he saw at least half the Palestinians were bleeding from their faces.

"They were standing over them with knives and asking them questions," said the boy, whose name cannot be given, as other people from the area nodded in assent. "Those that did not answer them were cut in the face."

The Palestinians were later led off toward Bir Hasan while the Lebanese men were released.

Later that same morning, according to European medical personnel who later helped evacuate Akka Hospital, just outside the southern entry of the Shatila camp, the Christian militiamen went around the street blowing up buildings on Shatila's southern edge, including a mosque whose conical green dome settled on top of a mound of concrete rubble to look like a scoop of pistachio ice cream.

At one point, the militiamen entered the hospital, shot two Palestinian doctors and a civilian, and took the three wounded men away. Later they returned, and on the hospital premises, repeatedly raped a young Palestinian nurse named Intisar Ismail then shot her dead, witnesses said.

When a team of four Palestinian doctors and nurses walked out of the hospital under a white flag to try to tell the militiamen not to shoot at the hospital, a militiaman threw a hand grenade that killed three of them, and wounded the fourth. The hospital staff, and five wounded patients, were evacuated by the international Red Cross thereafter.

At 11 a.m. Friday I managed to find a route through a ring of Israeli Army roadblocks that cut off most of West Beirut from the camp area. The area was strangely silent, but Christian militiamen were manning a roadblock in front of the Kuwaiti Embassy, at the southwestern limits of the camp, and Israeli soldiers were everywhere, lounging around armored personnel carriers and tanks whose cannons still pointed into the camp.

A group of 12 young Palestinians were seen being led down the Camille Chamoun Boulevard that marks the camp's far western edge, led by a Lebanese Forces soldier. They marched past the Israelis and were taken to the militia command post, at the business school of Lebanese University.

Two hours later, militiamen wearing arm patches of the Lebanese Forces, turned me away from the camp gate.

At 4 p.m. a reporter for an American newsmagazine reached the Kuwaiti Embassy crossroads. There he talked with a Christian militia officer, who said he had just brought his men out of the camp for a "bit of rest" before going back in. Israeli soldiers were lounging all about them, some reading calmly despite the rattle of gunfire in the camp. The gunfire was in short bursts, in roughly one place, and did not indicate that there was any return fire. The Christian militiamen were being fed and given water by the Israeli Army.

U.S. diplomats spoke to Amin Gemayel, the brother of the slain president-elect, by telephone at about 4 p.m. and asked if any Phalangist units were in Shatila. Amin Gemayel, who is now the Phalangist candidate for the presidency, acknowledged that his militiamen were present, but he said they would be leaving within an hour, diplomatic sources reported.

At about 6 p.m., this correspondent once more reached the edge of the camp, in the company of a Western diplomat. Men wearing Phalangist Lebanese Forces uniforms were still in the area. At the militiamen's headquarters in the business school, Israeli officers as well as Lebanese Forces officers were seen together, standing and talking before a group of jeeps, all with the markings of the Lebanese Forces.

There was no roadblock at the Kuwaiti Embassy this time and no guards at the camp entrance. But after we had driven about 150 yards into the camp, a group of militiamen, some with patches of Saad Haddad's southern militia, others with those of the Lebanese Forces halted the car and ordered it to leave. Several fires were burning in the camp, but, at that time, there was a great stillness.

At 6 a.m. yesterday Christian militiamen arrived at Gaza hospital and ordered everyone into the street on the threat of storming the facility.

The Palestinians and Lebanese were led off first, then the foreign staff of 20 doctors and nurses, two of them from the United States -- Ellen Siegel, of the Washington Hospital Center, and Dr. Michael Knipmeyer. They were all herded southward down the main street of Shatila.

At the camp entrance, which the group reached at about 7 a.m., a group of 100 militiamen were entering with their rifles at the ready. The foreign medical group was marched up to the business school in clear sight of the Israeli Army units still in positions all around them then taken around to the back of a building for interrogation.

The medical team was later turned over to the Israeli Army officers across the street.

By 9 a.m. yesterday, when the first foreign correspondent entered the refugee camp, he was greeted with stillness and death.

A Western diplomat ordered by his embassy to try to make a count of the dead today said he counted 106 bodies in the camp although many were still hidden in concrete buildings that had been demolished by dynamite sometime early yesterday morning. Parts of bodies were protruding from piles of rubble pushed up by bulldozers. It was not known how many people might be in a mass grave under Israeli Army observation, where the bodies of two men were found partially buried on the edge of a pit which showed signs of having been freshly covered with red earth.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Lebanese Christian militiamen moved into Palestinian refugee camps two weeks ago in accordance with an operational plan designed and approved by the highest military echelons of Bashir Gemayel's Lebanese Forces militia, including Gemayel himself before his assassination on Sept. 14.

Nothing in the plan called for the wanton slaughter that occurred in the Shatila and Sabra camps once the militiamen had moved in. But, a variety of well-informed sources now say, that plan did call for arrests, interrogations and physical destruction of housing as part of a broader effort to spread terror among Lebanon's estimated 500,000 Palestinian refugees to encourage them to flee the country.

These sources have established that the operation in the camp was carried out by about 500 elite troops of the Lebanese Forces, including members of the militia's special commando unit, its military police and the intelligence security units. Sources in the Lebanese Christian community said that the operation had been under the command of 28-year-old Elie Hobeika, one of the closest associates of Gemayel, who was leader of the Lebanese Forces and president-elect of Lebanon at the time of his death.

Hobeika, the chief of intelligence for the militia, was also the Lebanese Forces' chief contact with Mossad, the Israeli secret service, as well as with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Lebanese sources said.

What happened to turn the Gemayel plan from a sweep through the camps in search of armed Palestinians and men of military age into a murderous rampage that left at least 597 unarmed civilians dead still is not clear. Grief over his assassination may have been an emotional factor. But it is also true that massacres have been committed against civilians on both sides during the seven years of warfare in Lebanon, with Palestinians most frequently having been the victims.

There is also no direct evidence that the newly installed president, Amin Gemayal, 40, Bashir's elder brother, knew of the plan beforehand, or was aware that the Lebanese Forces' General Staff had been involved in executing it. But there is growing concern within the Christian community that he may be tainted by a Phalangist effort to shut off questioning about the massacres and to cover up the responsibility of the commanders of the units that have now been identified as having taken part in the slaughter.

These conclusions emerge from a week-long inquiry that included extensive interviews with Lebanese politicians, officials of Bashir Gemayel's Phalange Party, staff officers in his militia command, Lebanese government officials, members of the Lebanese Army and police, and Western diplomats who have been following events in Lebanon with growing concern.

The difficulties involved in such an inquiry were underscored by repeated warnings delivered to this correspondent and to Colin Campbell of The New York Times, who was pursuing a parallel investigation. Both of us left Lebanon today after word was passed to us through diplomatic channels that our lives might be in danger because of our line of questioning. Sources interviewed for this story, citing the same risks to them, all requested anonymity.

Phalange officials, when asked for a formal comment on the accusations being made against the senior commanders of the militia, declined, saying that an inquiry was being conducted. The officer in charge of the investigation into the massacres is Elie Hobeika, these officials said.

There has been nothing here that compares with the public uproar in Israel demanding an official full-scale inquiry into Israel's role in letting the militia units into the camp, nor anything like the public discussion by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon of the background leading up to the tragedy that occurred Sept. 16-18.

"No one wants the real story to come out because it could be dynamite for this poor country," said a senior Western diplomat. "The president Amin Gemayel knows where any such inquiry leads. It would be both dangerous physically to him and politically explosive."

"The president does not command here," said a Christian lawyer. "It is the Lebanese Forces who command now, and they have every intention of continuing to do so."

The most powerful figure in the Lebanese Forces now appears not to be the commander in chief, Fuad Ephraim, who was given the job earlier this month by his mentor, Bashir, but Hobeika, a man described by one senior Western diplomat as "very tough, absolutely ruthless, a man who has been a fighter since he was 14."

The other most important figures in the Lebanese Forces command are the heads of units that witnesses say were identified as being in or around Shatila and Sabra at the time of the massacres. They include Dib Anastas, the head of the military police, and Joseph Edde, the commander of the militia's special black-bereted commandos and of all Lebanese Forces' units south of Beirut.

There was also at least one contingent of militiamen from the town of Damour, south of Beirut, whose men had sworn vengeance against all Palestinians because of the sacking of Damour during the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war.

Anastas played a prominent role during the civil war siege by the Lebanese Forces of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal Zataar, where several thousand civilians died in 1976.

Lebanese sources who knew of the original plan to send the militia into the camps say the idea was discussed and approved sometime between Bashir Gemayel's election to the presidency Aug. 23 and his death in a bomb explosion at a local headquarters of his Phalange party in East Beirut Sept. 14.

Gemayel's plan, according to these authoritative sources, envisoned the disarming of any armed Palestinians left in the camps after last month's U.S.-negotiated evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, widespread arrests and interrogations of refugees and the destruction of some "squatter" housing. The purpose, in part, these sources said, was to make it clear to the Palestinians that they should all leave Lebanon.

"It was not a question of killing women and children and old men as happened at Shatila," a highly placed Lebanese source insisted, "but to go into the camps to eliminate all the remaining PLO terrorists that Bashir, and Israel, believed had stayed behind after last month's evacuation."

Expelling the Palestinians from Lebanon has long been an item of priority in the platform of the ultrarightist Phalange Party founded by 77-year-old Pierre Gemayel, the patriarch of one of Lebanon's dominant Christian Maronite political clans.

Whether the Israeli government was aware of this plan either as it was being worked up or in the wake of the assassination of Bashir Gemayel is not clear. What has been established is that at 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 15, Israeli chief of staff Rafael Eitan and Gen. Amir Drori, the commander of Israel's occupying army in Lebanon, went to the Lebanese Forces' whitewashed headquarters building near the port of Beirut and met with the militia's general staff, which is chaired normally by the militia's commander in chief, Fuad Ephraim.

According to Sharon's statement on the events leading up to the operation in the camps, the issue of the militia's entry into the camps was mentioned "in principle" at that meeting, which also apparently included the commanders of the units that would later take part in the operation.

At a subsequent meeting with Ephraim and Col. Michel Oun, the pro-Phalange Lebanese Army commander in West Beirut, Drori urged that the religiously divided and weak Lebanese Army be ordered into the camps to collect all weapons held by Palestinians. That request was turned down by Prime Minister Shafiq Wazzan, who apparently was not prepared to take the responsibility for leaving the camps unprotected.

Sometime that night the Lebanese Forces' general staff, acting in the absence of its 13-man political "war council," met again and decided to order some 1,500 of their special troops to assemble during the course of the following day at Beirut International Airport south of the capital, in an area tightly controlled by the Israeli Army -- which until today used the airport runways as its own military air field.

As can best be pieced together from reports of the various uniforms seen inside the Shatila camp by massacre survivors, unit identifications spotted by eyewitnesses along the militia route to the airport, as well as authoritative leaks emanating from Israel, these units consisted of: Anastas' military police, Edde's black beret commandos, Hobeika's own special security units, and the Damour unit.

There were also a handful of men spotted who appeared to belong to the militia of renegade Lebanese Army major Saad Haddad, Israel's surrogate in a buffer zone north of its borders in south Lebanon.

Though the official Phalangist denials maintain that no "regular" Lebanese Forces units were sent to Shatila Thursday, Sept. 16, a senior man on the general staff has privately confirmed that from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. that day 1,500 men from his militia did in fact assemble at the airport.

This admission corroborates eyewitness accounts of troop movements Thursday, including that of 11 antiquated Sherman tanks, toward the airport. The troop movements were both from East Beirut north of the airport and from the south along the coastal highway that leads to the capital from Damour and the big Lebanese Forces encampment above the campus of the International College at Mishraf.

Not all units assembled at the airport that Thursday went into the camp. Which ones did is still not totally clear, though helmets with the military police's distinctive red bands were spotted by survivors and foreign hospital workers as were black berets usually worn by the elite commandos.

Road signs guiding the militiamen from the airport to the outskirts of the camp also tend to confirm the military police's presence since the signs, painted on walls and buildings along the route, bore the Lebanese Forces emblem of a triangle within a circle, the letters "MP" and arrows pointing out the route to the camp.

From all reports it seems probable that the militia force in the camp was no bigger than 500 men, maybe even much less. The rest apparently stayed at the airport under Israeli protection as a reserve force in case they were needed.

The slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children began that Thursday night, continued through Friday, and did not end until early Saturday morning, Sept. 18, when the militiamen withdrew. They left behind them mass graves, bodies littering homes and alleyways, and a major scandal that has rocked the Israeli government and cast a shadow over the future of President Amin Gemayel, who was elected by Parliament and inaugurated in a span of two days last week.

The new president has made numerous visits to the Lebanese Forces headquarters to closet himself with its Command Council and General Staff since his election last week. These meetings have been held despite the fact the new president publicly exonerated the militia and the Phalange Party of having any knowledge of the Shatila massacres, a statement that has reinforced the general suspicion that despite the formation of an investigation commission under an Army prosecutor-general that stonewalling is going on.

As the emerging major figure in the Lebanese Forces, Hobeika owes his position to the president's late brother. Hobeika was deeply devoted to Bashir Gemayel since they were a part of a young group of Christian militants who were known before the civil war of 1975-76 as the saqr, or rock, group. When, during the civil war, Bashir Gemayel arranged for Israel to give his embattled Christians military aid, it was Hobeika who was one of the first of a group of young fighters loyal to the commander who was sent to Israel for training under Mossad and the Israeli Army.

Diplomatic sources said that many of the key operational contacts were conducted by Hobeika in the name of Gemayel.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

More than three months after the massacre that shocked the world, the men who planned and led the slaughter of still untotaled hundreds of men, women and children at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps here are going about their business, as powerful as ever.

The government of President Amin Gemayel appears to be doing little to track down and punish them. Western diplomats report signs that Gemayel has made a tacit pact with these same men that allows them to continue above the law in pursuit of their vision of how to make Lebanon safe for the religion they profess.

Phalangist commanders identified by a variety of diplomatic, intelligence and Christian sources as being responsible for the massacre that took place between the evening of Sept. 16 and the morning of Sept. 18 are reported today at their posts in the Lebanese Forces militia created and commanded by Gemayel's assassinated brother Bashir.

It was Bashir Gemayel's death in a bomb explosion in his party headquarters Sept. 14, nine days before he was to assume the presidency now held by his brother, that set off the chain of events that led to the Israeli military occupation of Moslem West Beirut and the subsequent entry of their Lebanese Forces allies into Shatila and Sabra.

In Israel, the fact that its government approved the Christian militia's entry into the camps and that its military then provided logistical support for their operations was enough to shake the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and force an independent state inquiry into possible government derelictions of duty.

In Lebanon, the official reaction was to deny that the Christian militia was actually involved and to appoint the powerless Lebanese Army's Christian prosecutor general to conduct what even government supporters admit was a perfunctory, empty investigation.

While the Israeli investigating commission has gone as far as calling Begin, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and senior military and intelligence officials to testify about the exact knowledge they had at the time the massacre was going on, the Lebanese investigator has not even gone to the Lebanese Forces' East Beirut headquarters to ask their commanders where they were at the time of the crime.

There are signs, according to one distressed western diplomat closely following the post-Shatila events, that even this pretense of an investigation is about to be closed. "We have reports the so-called investigation is going to be allowed to expire on the grounds that since the Lebanese government had no authority over the camps at the time, it has no official competence to probe the affair," the diplomat said. The premise, he indicated, appeared to be that since there were no trustworthy Lebanese officials on the ground to provide the sort of official testimony the government requires, there was no point in continuing the investigation.

It is a measure of the impotence, indifference or policy of the Lebanese government that to this day no systematic effort has even been made to determine the exact extent of the carnage

Statistics being hard to come by in the Third World, there are varying numbers given for the Shatila dead, depending on the source consulted. But no one in the government has even bothered to probe into what are believed to be mass graves dug by the two bulldozers that were provided to the militia by the Israeli Army. Women in the camp have told numerous witnesses of seeing bodies dumped into bulldozed holes by the scoopful. Nor have officials made any effort to establish what happened to hundreds of people whom the camp residents still list as missing.

Sharon last week came up with a figure of 479 dead, which probably is as accurate a count as exists of the bodies found above ground, in homes where doors had been kicked down, in patios where victims had been surprised, or in the streets and alleys where many appeared to have been gunned down trying to flee. At one session of the Israeli investigating commission Sharon cited a figure as high as 700 to 800, but in Lebanon no one has done enough investigating to confirm or deny such numbers.

In East Beirut, one Christian militia unit commander who boasted to an old friend that he had been in the camp for the massacre was asked whether he knew how many were actually killed. "Nobody is ever going to know that unless one day Beirut decides to build itself a subway system," was the chilling reply.

Among the Christians of East Beirut and the Moslems of the western sector, the official denials of the Christian militia's involvement by President Gemayel, by his father's Phalange Party, by the spokesmen of the Lebanese Forces are still cited when the question is brought up. But there is an undercurrent of tension that suggests that it is dangerous to discuss the question. Moslem politicians, at heart seething about the dreadful deed, maintain their silence in public, privately attributing this to the higher priority of preserving the mythical national unity between Lebanon's Christians and Moslems.

The Lebanese Forces remains an independent entity answerable only to its own leaders. Since the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and the subsequent evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization fighters who once ruled there, the Lebanese Forces have become even more powerful.

Exactly what President Gemayel's relationship is with the powerful private militia that followed his dead brother is not totally clear. What is known is that the president has not tried to disarm the militia that rivals the national army he is seeking to build, and of late there is talk of an understanding between Gemayel and Fadi Frem, the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Forces hand-picked by Bashir Gemayel two days before his death.

"It is not clear who has coopted who," said one western diplomat here, "but from what is being said and what is being done it is evident that Amin [Gemayel] and Fadi [Frem] are seeing eye to eye on most things these days."

Frem and the other key members of his command whom both western diplomatic and Christian political sources have pinpointed as the men of Shatila are very much still in business, operating as if nothing had happened.

Frem, who presided over the war council that sent his forces into the camps, today sits in the office of his martyred mentor in the militia headquarters near the port in East Beirut, directing his men's new campaign against the Druze in the Chouf Mountains outside Beirut. That campaign, like the militia's opening of offices in Moslem West Beirut, has alarmed those who wanted to believe that once the PLO left harmony and peace would reign.

Frem's security chief, 28-year-old Elie Hobeika, a man who learned his craft at the Christian siege of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel Zataar during the 1975-76 civil war, where the final slaughter of civilians was to dwarf what happened in Shatila, is also back at his headquarters office, according to western diplomats, after a brief diplomatic holiday in Europe following the massacre. Hobeika, who many believe is the power behind Frem's throne, has been pinpointed by a variety of reliable sources as the overall commander of the Shatila operation.

Dib Anastas, who led his elite military police units, with their distinctive red striped helmets, in the camp, is still in charge of the force, despite the spreading of rumors in Beirut that he had been somehow implicated in Bashir Gemayel's death.

Joseph Edde, the head of the militia's so-called Occupied Territories Office that oversees the troops in southern Lebanon and a leader of the black-bereted commando units in the camp, was last seen as part of a Lebanese Forces delegation negotiating a cease-fire with the Druze in the Chouf.

Marun Mishalani, another alleged participant in the Shatila rampage, has also been reported fighting around the Chouf town of Alayh, scene of countless firefights, murders and kidnapings in recent weeks.

Walking once more through the desolation of Shatila in a fading winter's light, the only fleeting consolation for unarmed Palestinian civilians is the sudden sight of a red, white and green Italian flag flying above a sandbagged gun position. Six smiling Italian soldiers look down over the camp, shouting "Ciao!" to passersby, especially if they are young women.

Members of the 4,300-man multinational force that includes French paratroopers and U.S. Marines sent to Beirut in the wake of the massacre, the Italians also patrol the meandering alleyways of the camp at night.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)