Deaths rise as Israel, Hezbollah trade attacks

updated 12:57 a.m. ET July 17, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah and Israel traded fierce barrages for a sixth day Monday, as the latest eruption of warfare in the Middle East showed no sign of easing. Rockets struck deep inside Israel, killing eight people in Haifa, and Israeli planes bombed Lebanon from north to south.

The toll on both sides rose to more than 200. In addition to the Israeli victims at a rail repair facility in the Haifa attack on Sunday, an Israeli rocket blew up a Lebanese army position, killing eight soldiers, and a sea-launched missile killed at least nine people in the southern Lebanese port of Tyre.

Israel warned of massive retaliation after the Haifa attack, and accused Iran and Syria of providing the weaponry used in it. Israeli military officials said four of the missiles were the Iranian-made Fajr-3, with a 22-mile range and 200-pound payload, and far more advanced than the Katyusha rockets the guerrillas rained on northern Israel in previous attacks.

Foreigners began to flee by the hundreds and several nations drew up plans to get their citizens out. U.S. planners arrived to organize evacuation for any of the 25,000 Americans seeking to leave. Two Marine Corps helicopters evacuated 21 Americans to Cyprus on Sunday.

Italian military flights rushed out some 350 people, mostly Europeans. France, which has more than 20,000 citizens in Lebanon, chartered a Greek ferry expected to pick up some 1,200 people on Monday.

Early Monday, witnesses reported that waves of Israeli airstrikes hit the Lebanese city of Tripoli and Hezbollah strongholds in eastern town of Baalbek. Missiles apparently aiming at a relay station for Hezbollah’s al-Manar television missed their target and hit a house south of Beirut. Police said four villagers were killed and 10 wounded. Lebanese police said the village had been hit by missiles fired from Israeli warships, but the Israeli military denied gunboats had participated in the bombings.

Israeli missiles hit the Lebanese capital shortly after sunrise Monday, as three loud explosions rocked the southern suburbs while another strike sparked a large fire in Beirut’s port, witnesses said.

Eight Lebanese army soldiers were killed Sunday and 12 wounded in an Israeli airstrike in the fishing village of Abdeh in northern Lebanon.

Israel, technically at war with Lebanon since 1948, said it had targeted radar stations in the north because Hezbollah had used them to hit an Israeli ship on Friday. It all but accused the Lebanese military of lending its support to Hezbollah.

“The attacks ... are against radar stations used, among other things, in the attack on the Israeli missile boat, by Hezbollah in cooperation with the Lebanese military,” an Israeli army spokesman told The Associated Press.

‘Extremist elements’
World leaders meeting in St. Petersburg produced a draft framework to end the crisis and a U.N. envoy landed in Beirut. The Group of Eight most industrialized nations expressed concern over “rising civilian casualties on all sides” and urged both sides to stop their attacks.

“These extremist elements and those that support them cannot be allowed to plunge the Middle East into chaos and provoke a wider conflict,” the G-8 leaders said in a statement. “The extremists must immediately halt their attacks.”

The United Nations, the European Union and Italy also pushed ahead with separate efforts Sunday to try to end the fighting. But both Israel and Hezbollah signaled that their attacks would only intensify.

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