By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 17, 2006; A09
The U.S. government is preparing to evacuate hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans from Lebanon in light of the escalating violence between Israel and Hezbollah, senior officials in the Defense and State departments said yesterday.
In a telephone news conference, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty urged Americans "to stay in place" at the moment and register with the State Department rather than risk traveling on roads that are "fraught with danger."
"We're trying very hard to keep the best possible records that we can so that when we have our plan in place we will be able to execute it," Harty said, adding that "we can't help people if we don't know where they are."
A Marine Corps helicopter evacuated about 20 Americans to Cyprus yesterday, according to Lt. Sharbe Clark of the U.S. Central Command. The group included U.S. Embassy officials, Americans needing medical attention and four students, Harty said.
Harty and the two other U.S. officials on the press call -- James Jeffrey, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Marine Col. Kerry Burkholder, chief of staff of special operations at the Central Command -- offered few details about any potential evacuation plan. Harty said that while they will look at commercial flights to Cyprus, they will also need charter planes and will focus on taking unaccompanied minors, people with medical problems and the elderly first.
A 20-member Pentagon team arrived in Beirut yesterday to map out contingency plans.
About 8,000 Americans have notified the State Department they are living or traveling in Lebanon, she added, but the government does not have a firm number on how many would like to leave the country. "We have fielded hundreds of calls," she said. "We may get into . . . more than that. We may get into thousands."
As administration officials began laying the groundwork for getting Americans out of Lebanon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Israel's attack on Hezbollah and said she is "willing to play whatever role I am needed to play" to defuse the crisis.
On ABC-TV's "This Week," Rice said the United States "would expect nothing less" from Israel when it came to defending itself, though she added that "we would hope that it does it in a way that preserves the possibility for a broader peace."
"We're worried about and concerned for the escalating civilian casualties on all sides," she said. "But unless we go to the fundamentals here and use the tools that we have in the international community to disable extremists, we're going to continue to have these spikes in violence in the Middle East, as we've had for the last 30-plus years."
Rice dismissed the idea that the war in Iraq has further destabilized the region, saying "the notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque." She added: "For all of those who believe that we had somehow stability in the Middle East over the last 60 years and it's now been disturbed, where do we think Hezbollah and Hamas and these other extremist forces came from? They weren't born yesterday."