20 Killed by Artillery Battle in Beirut

Shells blasted street markets and a hospital today, killing at least 20 people in another of the fierce Christian-Muslim artillery duels that have kept residents huddled in bomb shelters for a month. Police gave the death toll and said 68 people were wounded on the fifth day the divided city’s Muslim and Christian residential areas have been bombarded without letup.

At least 175 people have been reported killed and 574 wounded, nearly all of them civilians, since the confrontation began March 8 between Gen. Michel Aoun’s Christian army units and an alliance of Druze militiamen and Syrian troops.

It is the worst round of fighting since 1985 in Lebanon’s 14-year-old civil war.

A police spokesman said most of the casualties today were in Muslim West Beirut, where shells fired by Aoun’s gunners hit three vegetable markets and the Barbir hospital, one of the sector’s four major medical centers.

He said the Murr tower, an unfinished 40-story skyscraper Syrian troops use as a base for snipers and artillery spotters, took several direct hits from 155-millimeter howitzers.