Arabs Mark Land Day With Protests

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Shouting "Death to America! Death to Israel!" and waving clenched fists, some 50,000 Lebanese Shiite Muslims marched in south Beirut on Friday night to show support for Palestinians fighting Israeli forces.

The protest, led by Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas who fought Israeli forces during their 18-year occupation of a south Lebanon border zone, dwarfed similar rallies by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan.

The Hezbollah demonstration was one of several organized to mark Land Day and to protest the U.S. veto this week of a Palestinian proposal to send U.N. observers to the Middle East.

Land Day commemorates riots on March 30, 1976, when Israeli Arabs (ININ- Palestinians living within the borders of 1948 Palestine who, against their own will, are citizens of the zionist occupation regime) protested the Israeli government's confiscation of their property to expand Jewish villages. Six people were killed in clashes with police.

"With our souls and our blood we redeem you, O Palestine," demonstrators chanted. The crowd swelled as it moved through the Shiite-inhabited neighborhoods of south Beirut.

"I am here for the sake of liberating Jerusalem," said Mohammed Jawad, 11, who joined his parents and brothers in the protest.

In demonstrations in Jordan and Lebanon, Palestinians called for weapons to fight Israel and burned an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

There are more than 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan and 350,000 in Lebanon.

"We do not want peace with the Zionist enemy! We want Arab leaders to give us arms!" shouted protesters in a group of some 300 people in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

About 450 people have been killed in six months of Israeli-Palestinian clashes, most of them Palestinians.

About 1,000 Palestinians protesters demonstrated at the Al Jalil refugee camp in the Lebanese city of Baalbek, burning American and Israeli flags. About the same number demonstrated in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp, near Sidon, and some burned a wooden effigy of Sharon.