Rabin Asks 3rd-Country Help on Arab Deportees : Mideast: The Israeli leader offers to let the stranded Palestinians pass through his nation’s lines and to aid their travel abroad.

JERUSALEM —  Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Wednesday called for another Arab or European country to accept hundreds of exiled Palestinians stranded in a no-man’s-land in southern Lebanon for the past two weeks.

While Israel would not take back the men, suspected of belonging to militant Islamic groups, Rabin said his nation would allow them to pass through Israeli lines and assist them in traveling to exile in a third country.

In making the proposal, Rabin implicitly acknowledged that Israel has failed to force Lebanon to take in the 415 deportees and that it is now anxious to remove an acute embarrassment for his government, both at home and abroad.

So far, there is no plan to move the deportees, Israeli officials said. But Jerusalem hopes that its new flexibility will encourage European and Arab diplomats to renew their efforts to find a country to take in the men.

“If a third country agreed to give them the possibility to stay there (during the two-year period of exile) and this government asked us to facilitate the transportation, we will do it,” Rabin told U.N. special envoy James Jonah. “I believe this is the only way to do it.”

But Dr. Abdulaziz Rantisi, a physician from the Gaza Strip and a spokesman for the group, told correspondents visiting the deportees’ tent encampment between Lebanese lines and Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon that they will leave only to return home. “We refused to enter Lebanon, although it is our second home, so how can we go to another country, European or non-European?” Rantisi said. “We will leave here only to return to our children and our families in our homeland.”

He described three of the men as being “very, very sick” and appealed for their hospitalization “anywhere.”

Another proposal for the deportees’ removal came from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He said after meeting in Geneva with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that the deportees should return home--”even if they are placed in internment camps and sentenced, if they have committed crimes under Israeli legislation.”

Arafat angrily denounced the Israeli deportations as the equivalent of “ethnic cleansing and a war crime. . . . They are not terrorists, but doctors, engineers, research workers and university professors,” Arafat told a news conference.

“If they have committed crimes, why are they not put on trial?” he said. “Let me ask, when there is a crime, should 415 people be transferred (out of the country)? For a single crime, 415 people have been deported without trial.”

Arafat said that the expulsions, Israel’s response to the killing of five soldiers and a policeman over eight days at the start of December, will make it difficult for Palestinians to return to the Arab-Israeli peace talks when they resume in Washington in February. “It is difficult for us to resume negotiations and discussions,” Arafat said, “while this population transfer is taking place, while the iron hand is applied, while this organized terrorism is still imposed upon us.”

Despite persistent questioning, however, the PLO leader never said flatly that the Palestinians would boycott the talks with the Israelis on Palestinian autonomy because of the deportations.

French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, who also met with Arafat in Geneva, said the PLO leader told him that Boutros-Ghali’s proposal of interning the Muslim fundamentalists was preferable to exile. Dumas, for his part, suggested to Boutros-Ghali that the U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon take the deportees under their protection temporarily so they could get food, water and medicine.

In Jerusalem, Rabin told Jonah, the U.N. undersecretary general for political affairs, that Israel will take back 10 men mistakenly expelled in the mass deportation two weeks ago.

Among them is Bassam Suyuri, 16, a high school student from the West Bank town of Hebron, who had been arrested for painting political slogans on a wall.

At the deportees’ camp, Suyuri said he could “hardly wait to go back home.”

“I’m happy for myself but sad for my colleagues,” he said. “I miss my mother and father.”

Israel, meanwhile, continued its negotiations with the International Committee of the Red Cross on allowing a medical team of five doctors through the Israeli “security zone” in southern Lebanon to reach the deportees, and officials said a compromise might be reached today.

Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak, the deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, asserted on Wednesday that the deportations have substantially reduced guerrilla attacks.

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Geneva contributed to this report.