Army cuts TV link

Press, 30 December 1982, Page 6

Army cuts TV link

NZPA Tel Aviv The Israeli Army, facing rising public displeasure over "the protracted Lebanon war, has severed contact with Israeli television’s military correspondent for reporting on anti-war feeling among troops in Lebanon.

The Army move came as Israel and Lebanon opened negotiations aimed at ending the invasion.

■ A TV reporter, Dan Scemama, spent four days .with Israeli troops in Lebanon’s Chouf Mountains . last week and had aired a lengthy report.

He showed an Israeli soldier who said that he did not

understand why be was in Lebanon, and portrayed the Jewish troops as reluctant policemen in the cross-fire of sectarian The segment of the report that aroused the most controversy showed six soldiers boisterously singing a children’s song with lyrics of their own: “Come down to us aeroplane — take us to Lebanon — we will fight for Sharon — and come home in a coffin.”

The war, which the Defence Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, promised would last a few days, is nearly seven months old and has cost 450 Jewish lives — six in the past week from minings and ambushes. f. • •

An opinion poll published by the “Daily Haaretz,” a vigorous critic of the war, said that 53.5 per cent of Israelis want an immediate withdrawal from Lebanon, whereas only 23.6 per cent want the Army to stay. The Government says that it wants the talks with Lebanon to centre on normalising relations between the two countries as a condition for withdrawal. But to the average Israeli, who supported the war as long as it was getting the P.L.O. out of Lebanon, the main concern now is to get the troops home preferably before the full fury of the (northern) winter hits the Chouf Mountains in February.