Middle East: Attacks continue as Westerners take flight

Israel struck a Lebanese army base outside Beirut and flattened a house near the border, killing at least 10 people in a new wave of bombings.

Hezbollah continued to fire rockets at northern Israel.

The international community stepped up diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, which has sent foreigners fleeing by land, sea and air.

UN negotiator and former Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen today said that diplomatic initiatives between Israel and Hezbollah had the potential to result in a ceasefire.

Speaking in Jerusalem, Roed-Larsen said the UN delegation had presented clear ideas to end the current crisis and to reach an end of the hostilities.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called for the disarmament of Hezbollah and the stationing of Lebanese troops along the countries’ shared border.

A commercial ship, the Orient Queen, escorted by a US destroyer, was due to begin evacuating some of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon today, joining US military helicopters that have already ferried about 20 US citizens to a British base on the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

More helicopter transfers were planned, a US official said.

The base in the southern area of Kfar Chima took a direct hit as the soldiers were rushing to their bomb shelters, leaving at least five soldiers dead and 41 wounded, security officials said.

The Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, but its positions have been repeatedly attacked by Israeli warplanes, casting a shadow on Israel’s call for it to help push Hezbollah back from the border.

At least five people also were killed when a bomb hit a house in the village of Aitaroun, near the border with Israel, witnesses said.

Israeli warplanes also fired four missiles on the eastern city of Baalbek, wounding four people, and southern Beirut, both Hezbollah strongholds, according to witnesses and news reports. Another attack targeted the southern town of Qana, Lebanese TV reported.

The Islamic militant group fired rockets that knocked down a three-storey house in northern Israel, but no casualties were immediately reported.

Today’s deaths raised the toll from seven days of fighting to at least 220 people killed in Lebanon and 24 in Israel.

Israel was allowing evacuation ships through its blockade of the country. France and Italy moved hundreds of nationals and other Europeans out yesterday on a Greek cruise liner. An Italian ship left earlier with 350 people and other governments were organising pullouts by land to Syria.

India has evacuated 49 of its citizens from embattled Beirut and stationed four naval vessels off the Lebanese coast to assist in future evacuations, officials said today.

Diplomatic efforts gained traction with Israel signalling it might scale back its demands. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah had to be released and Hezbollah must pull back from the border for fighting to halt.

An aide to Olmert indicated, however, that the prime minister was ready to compromise on the question of dismantling the Islamic militant group. The aide said he might oppose a UN and British idea of deploying international forces to Lebanon.

The current UN force in southern Lebanon had proven impotent and a larger, stronger force could hamper any future Israeli attacks, should any deal fall apart.

An Israeli cabinet minister, Avi Dichter, meanwhile, said that Israel may consider a prisoner swap with Lebanon to win the release of two soldiers captured by Hezbollah, but only after its military operation is complete.

“If one of the ways to bring home the soldiers will be negotiations on the possibility of releasing Lebanese prisoners, I think the day will come when we will also have to consider this,” the public security minister told Israel’s Army Radio.

The crisis began on June 25 when Hamas-linked militants in the Gaza Strip carried out a cross-border attack on a military outpost in Israel, killing two soldiers and capturing one.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas joined the fray in July, attacking a military patrol on the border in northern Israel, killing three soldiers and capturing two. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have said the two attacks were not related.

Dichter also said efforts to gain the release of the soldier being held by Hamas-linked militants in Gaza and the two being held by Hezbollah were not connected to one another.

Delivering an impassioned speech to Israel’s parliament, Olmert said the country would have no mercy on Lebanese militants who attacked its cities with rockets.

“We shall seek out every installation, hit every terrorist helping to attack Israeli citizens, destroy all the terrorist infrastructure, in every place. We shall continue this until Hezbollah does the basic and fair things required of it by every civilised person,” he said.

Hezbollah’s patron Iran, meanwhile, said a ceasefire and prisoner exchange would be acceptable and fair.

In continued rhetoric, Iranian parliamentary speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel warned that no part of Israel is safe from Hezbollah rockets, but he is not among the most influential power-brokers in the regime.

“The towns you have built in northern Palestine are within the range of the brave Lebanese children.

"No part of Israel will be safe,” he told thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators in Tehran.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special political adviser emerged from talks with Lebanon’s prime minister to say he would present Israel “concrete ideas” to end the fighting.

“We have made some promising first efforts on the way forward,” the adviser, Vijay Nambiar, told reporters.

One UN official said Nambiar’s mission had “very useful discussions” with Lebanon’s prime minister and the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, a close ally of Hezbollah’s leader.

“They have agreed on some specifics, and this is going to be carried to Israel, and they will probably go back to Lebanon if they are a promising signal,” said the official, UN Undersecretary General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari.

Late yesterday, Hezbollah dismissed international ceasefire proposals as “Israeli conditions”, accusing foreign envoys of allowing Israel time to continue its military offensive to force Lebanon into submission.

“The international envoys have conveyed Israeli conditions. These conditions are rejected,” said Hezbollah legislator Hussein Haj Hassan.

“We accept what secures our country’s interest and pride and dignity and not to submit to Israeli conditions,” he said on al-Jazeera television late yesterday.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Annan called for the sending of international forces to southern Lebanon, and the United States said it did not oppose the idea.

But US President George Bush also suggested, in a moment of unscripted frank discussion caught on tape, that Annan simply call the president of Syria, another Hezbollah backer, to “make something happen”.

Speaking with Blair privately before the G8 leaders began their final lunch in St Petersburg, Russia, in an exchange caught on tape, Bush swore over Hezbollah’s border raids and rockets.

“See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s*** and it’s over,” Bush said.