Toll Climbs In Mideast As Fighting Rages On

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Foreigners Flee
As the bombings in Israel, Lebanon and Gaza escalate, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the European Union raise the prospect of sending an international security force to southern Lebanon and foreigners escape the country.

In one of the worst losses of civilian life in Lebanon, an Israeli attack targeted two cars crossing a bridge in Rmeileh, north of the southern port city of Sidon. Government officials said 10 civilians were killed, including two children.

Nine Lebanese soldiers were killed Monday in an attack on the fishing port of Abdeh in northern Lebanon, the Health Ministry said. Israeli military officials said the only army installation targeted Monday was a radar post used by Hezbollah to attack an Israeli ship last week.

[Early Tuesday, attacks by Israeli warplanes killed at least 11 people, including seven civilians from one family in a southern Lebanese border village called Aitaroun, the Reuters news agency reported. Four others died in strikes elsewhere in the south.]

The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch called on the Israeli military to provide details about a bombing Saturday that killed 16 people in a convoy of civilians fleeing a Lebanese village near Israel's border.

Meanwhile, in a sign of a potentially prolonged conflict, the United States said it was sending a cruise ship to begin evacuating Tuesday some of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon. The Pentagon said the Orient Queen, which can carry 750 people, will take the evacuees to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The U.S. Navy will provide an escort through waters blockaded by Israeli warships.

The French Embassy began evacuating its citizens, along with other Europeans, on Monday. About 1,200 people gathered at a French school in eastern Beirut to board buses that carried them to the Beirut port, where they were to depart for Cyprus and then catch flights home. At the school, people waited hours on a humid, overcast day, their suitcases and strollers piled along the school's courtyard.

"This isn't going to end," said Prince Michilidis, a Lebanese Greek who was returning to Greece with his three sisters. "It's a shame. Just that."

He pointed beyond the school's walls, where bomb blasts occasionally echoed. "I'm lucky to leave, but there are thousands who are not as lucky, and they don't have food, they don't have water and they don't have money," he said. "It's chaos."

Many people shared the gloom as they waited. Hagop Manuokian wrapped a pink towel around his neck to wipe his brow. He and his three children had come for a summer vacation in Lebanon, but now were returning home to the Netherlands.

"At least three days from now, I'm going to be sleeping like a lamb on my pillow, but everyone else here is going to live with it," he said. "Injuries don't heal quickly. It takes time, and they leave scars."

The fighting has displaced more than 60,000 people, the government said, a figure thought to be a conservative estimate. At Mohammed Shamil School in Beirut, some of those displaced threw mats, blankets and foam mattresses on classroom floors.

Food was short; a few boxes of cheese, beans and tuna were stacked outside, hardly enough to feed the 300 people who had arrived since Wednesday.

In the northern Israeli city of Haifa, where eight civilians were killed in rocket attacks a day earlier, three more rockets struck late Monday afternoon, one smashing the facade of a three-story apartment building and wounding at least six people. The attack prompted Israel to shut the city's port, the country's largest.

Another barrage struck the town of Atlit, 35 miles south of the border with Lebanon, in the longest-range strike to date. No one was hurt.

Israel's defense forces said that an airstrike in Lebanon destroyed a truck carrying Iranian-made missiles, one of which has a range of nearly 100 miles, military sources said. Hezbollah has previously said its munitions could reach Tel Aviv, 75 miles south of the Lebanese border.

Earlier Monday morning, small teams of Israeli ground soldiers briefly crossed into Lebanon to attack Hezbollah targets, a military spokesman said, calling it "a very pinpointed operation, not an incursion."

Also Monday, in the West Bank town of Nablus, Palestinian gunmen threw an explosive at Israeli soldiers conducting a raid on what military sources described as a militant stronghold, killing one soldier. Six soldiers were wounded in the skirmish, one seriously, the military said.

Correspondents John Ward Anderson in Gaza City and Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.