By Land and Sea, Europeans Flee Lebanon for Their Lives

Governments around the world were mobilizing Monday as thousands of terrified foreign residents and visitors scrambled alongside Lebanese to find a way to leave a country under an air and sea blockade.

With Beirut's airport in ruins, many foreigners were taking the land route to Syria to escape Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery fire, while others waited to be brought out by ship or helicopter to Cyprus.

With a mass exodus to safety in the making, Israel indicated it might provide "windows of opportunity" to give foreign civilians safe passage through the violence.

Any air or sea operation to bring out civilians would need close coordination with the Israeli armed forces, which have been staging daily raids over Beirut and other cities. A spokesman in Jerusalem said liaison was under way with both the European Union and the United States.

"We are coordinating with the Europeans and Americans how to get foreign civilians out of Lebanon," he said. "We are trying to organize the evacuation."

But Denmark said it had received reports from its citizens of attacks by Israeli forces on people traveling from southern Lebanon to Beirut to escape the worst of the bombing.

Avoiding the air blockade, an Airbus carrying 320 Germans who fled the Israeli offensive landed in Düsseldorf on Tuesday after flying out of Syria.

The flight was chartered by the German foreign ministry, which is planning to organize several more in the coming days to repatriate German nationals who want to leave Lebanon.

A spokesman for the ministry said there were 10 children on Tuesday's flight. The group traveled from Beirut to Damascus in buses and were made to wait eight hours at the Syrian-Lebanese border, he said.

There were about 2,000 Germans in Lebanon when Israel began bombarding the country last week, of whom 1,100 live there. About 200 had left by Sunday.

Biggest evacuation since World War II

British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells told the British parliament that the Royal Navy could be faced with "the biggest evacuation since Dunkerque," when some 330,000 soldiers were evacuated by sea from France in 1940. British warships were preparing for the possible evacuation of up to 12,000 British nationals and 10,000 dual nationals, plus other Commonwealth citizens.

Some 40 British nationals fled Beirut by helicopter Monday morning, taking advantage of the visit of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, British ambassador James Watt told the BBC.

France was also sending a naval vessel to help move out several thousands of its own nationals. And a ferry chartered by the French government left Beirut for Cyprus late Monday with some 1,250 evacuees: 800 French nationals, including 300 children, 400 from other European Union member states, and 50 Americans.

Canadian officials in Ottawa said that three chartered ships were already on their way from Cyprus to Lebanon to help evacuate some of the nearly 50,000 Canadian citizens trapped amid the heavy fighting.

Cyprus bracing for tens of thousands of evacuees

Cypriot authorities estimated the various operations could bring about 6,000 evacuees to the island this week.

The first evacuees to arrive in Cyprus recounted harrowing tales of the fighting as their Italian vessel docked in the Cypriot port of Larnaca Monday evening. The ship held over 300 people, including 186 Italians, 58 Lebanese and 49 Swedes, and one infant only a few days old, said an Italian embassy official.

The Swedish ambassador to Cyprus, Ingemar Lindhal, said Stockholm was also chartering a 1,600-passenger Greek vessel to ferry out evacuees to Larnaca Wednesday.

He said priority would be given to the 5,000 Swedish nationals registered with the embassy in Beirut, some 750 of whom are believed already to have escaped overland through Syria, and to other EU nationals.

US begins evacuating nationals

The United States, which has an estimated 25,000 passport holders in Lebanon, flew 43 people out of Lebanon Monday on military helicopters, most of them children, elderly and sick people. Washington has chartered a vessel capable of carrying 750 passengers to begin ferrying US nationals from various locations in Lebanon to Cyprus.

Syria, which has been criticized strongly by Washington for supporting the Hezbollah militia's attacks on Israel, said it was offering "safe haven" to Americans and "citizens of other nationalities" wishing to flee Lebanon.

In New York, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced that the United Nations was also considering bringing staff and dependents out of Lebanon.

Hezbollah retaliates

The evacuation emergency gathered pace Tuesday as Israeli jets pounded Lebanon with a blistering sequence of deadly overnight raids which extended the offensive to six days.

Air strikes on the southern coastal city of Tyre and the border village of Aitaroun in the early hours claimed a number of civilian lives. Twelve people were reported killed when a missile hit a minibus south of Beirut. Barracks of the Lebanese army in the hills overlooking Beirut were also bombed four times overnight by Israeli jets.

Amid the tit-for-tat cycle of violence, six people were injured when a Hezbollah rocket plowed into a four-story apartment building in the Israeli city of Haifa and a barrage of rockets rained down on northern Israel late Monday evening.