October 28, 1983

''The events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart, are closely related.

With tears and expressions of relief, scores of American students evacuated from Grenada told yesterday of days and nights of terror on the strife-torn island and praised the Reagan Administration and United States invasion forces for bringing them safely away. Many of the students from St. George's University School of Medicine said they had not been directly threatened or endangered by the turmoil and fighting, and some said they believed their safety had been used as an excuse by the United States to invade Grenada. But others told of bullets crashing through their dormitory rooms, of fears of being taken hostage, of a week of campus confinement under the Government's ''shoot to kill'' curfew, of soldiers pointing guns at them and of wading through surf to board rescue helicopters amid raging gunfire and booming explosions. 24 Hours of Terror Recalled ''I don't think I can ever go back to Grenada,'' said Elizabeth Nelson of Woodmere, L.I. ''I could never concentrate on my studies. I'm sure that if I were back in class in the lecture hall, I would recall the 24 hours I spent there in terror, with the sound of gunfire and not knowing whether we would get out of there alive.''

The House, in another Administration setback, approved legislation barring new Government investment in South Africa. Page D2. WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - The Senate voted today to raise the ceiling on the national debt but by considerably less than the increase the Reagan Administration had asked Congress to enact by Nov. 1. If the Senate stands by the amendment it approved today in its final action on the debt ceiling bill, then a conference with the House would be necessary and the Treasury might have to delay the sale of $16 billion of securities scheduled for next week.

A picture caption in The Home Section yesterday misidentified an item of antique furniture purchased at auction by Harold Sack. It was an 18th- century Newport Chippendale desk, for which he paid $687,500 last January.

Mayor Koch warned yesterday that he would be forced to release prisoners from city jails ''imminently'' unless judges took action. In a letter to state judges, the Mayor said the city's jail population was near its court- ordered maximum. Prisoners would have to be freed, he said, if the judges did not speed up sentencing of inmates convicted of felonies. Most of those prisoners would be sent to state prisons, freeing up jail space in the city.