Lebanon Shelling Swells Exodus

Fear-stricken residents driven by the threat of Israeli bombings fled this city by the tens of thousands Sunday, swelling Lebanon’s refugee population to more than 400,000 in the latest stage of an escalating Israeli campaign to force the Lebanese government to rein in Hezbollah guerrillas.

This normally bustling southern port city was turned into a desolate zone of abandoned buildings, closed shops and vacant streets after Israel issued an extraordinary overnight warning that the city of 250,000 had been added to the target list for attack jets and helicopters seen flying overhead.

The exodus came as an array of artillery, planes and helicopter gunships kept up Israel’s pressure on Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas--who have been rocketing northern Israel--and the rest of Lebanon for a fourth day. The conflict expanded with the first attack on a government power plant that was seen as symbolizing Lebanon’s nascent efforts to rebuild after its long and devastating civil war.

The strike was “just a hint of what we can do,” Israeli air force chief Herzl Bodinger said.

All told, three civilians died and seven were wounded in Israeli raids and shelling Sunday in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon, security sources said. Since Thursday, at least 27 people have been killed and about 80 injured by Israeli forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel in the past week have killed one person and injured more than 40.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, pledged that his movement will respond to the campaign by turning Israel into a “fiery hell.” He said 300 suicide bombers are on their way to southern Lebanon and that they will strike Israel abroad as well. Israeli military intelligence chief Moshe Yaalon confirmed that Israel is bracing for possible Hezbollah suicide bombs, car bombs or even explosives sent into Israel by hang gliders. Jewish or Israeli targets abroad might also be hit with the aid of Iran, he warned.

In Tyre, most of the residents raced to abandon the city in cars, trucks, buses, ambulances, tractors, livestock wagons or anything else that moved immediately after hearing a midnight warning broadcast by Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army.

Israel had told residents of about 90 surrounding towns and villages that they risked shells and bombings if they remained. The area, including Tyre itself, is home to 500,000 people, and officials estimate that up to 400,000 people, about one-tenth of Lebanon’s population, have fled the area. In their panicky northward trek that began well before dawn, vehicles jostled and honked in heavy traffic on Lebanon’s coastal highway to get north quickly.

“Our house has been demolished. We were already hiding on the road last night when it happened,” said Manifi Ataway, a 65-year-old refugee from the village of Sawaneh, clutching her 2-year-old granddaughter tightly. Her extended family was piled into a battered, open-backed truck--five people in the front seat and about 15 standing in the back--caught in a traffic jam north of Sidon.

“Frustration, pain and torture,” she said bitterly at the thought of leaving behind her farm for the second time; the family also fled an Israeli invasion in 1982. “We are being tortured.”

“We are not happy to see people abandoning the villages, but we had no choice,” said Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, briefing reporters on the day’s operations. “The Lebanese regime will have to decide who is in control, whether Hezbollah is in control. The Lebanese in general will have to decide how they want to live.”

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The mass exodus is reminiscent of the last major Israeli strike against Hezbollah, a weeklong offensive in July 1993 that killed 130 Lebanese, wounded about 500 and uprooted half a million people.

Tyre, founded nearly 5,000 years ago and the center of the ancient Phoenician empire, has many important archeological sites and has been declared a world heritage city by the United Nations. At the U.N. compound in the city, about 500 people who were left behind because they had no transport huddled desolately on foam mattresses or the concrete floor, dully chewing pieces of dried bread provided by U.N. personnel.

Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, speaking on television Sunday, said the military campaign is justified by Hezbollah’s recurring attacks on Israel with crudely inaccurate but highly mobile Katyusha missiles. The Lebanese government does not take part in the attacks but considers itself too weak to disarm the guerrillas, whose struggle to dislodge Israel from a self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon has broad popular support.

The massive depopulating of southern Lebanon, a naval blockade that began Saturday and the assault on the electric station Sunday suggest that Israel is increasing the economic pressure on Lebanon itself.

“Of course I am unhappy. This is my country,” said one employee of the power station, which is east of Beirut, the capital.

Electricity was cut off to several areas of the city, and overall power supplies to the capital’s 1.2 million people that were recently restored to operate almost 24 hours a day were expected to drop dramatically. Repairing the war-battered electric grid had been one of the government’s proudest accomplishments.

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In other attacks, Israeli jets and helicopter gunships hit the eastern Bekaa Valley, attacking a Hezbollah radio transmitter, and returned for the third time in four days to strike in a neighborhood of southern Beirut considered the nerve center of Hezbollah.

At least four rockets crashed into the densely populated area, wounding six civilians. Shops were burning near the building housing the Shura, a Hezbollah advisory council. Lebanese and Syrian antiaircraft batteries stationed in hills opened fire in response, but without consequence. The Israeli army said the targets were buildings used by Hezbollah intelligence and security branches.

Israeli aircraft also struck near Tyre, hitting a civil defense ambulance and injuring four paramedics in Israel’s second helicopter raid on an ambulance in as many days.

Hezbollah stepped up its shelling of northern Israel, shooting 47 missiles into the country Sunday and causing two injuries. In the afternoon, the guerrillas were launching three rockets every hour.

Hezbollah said it shot rockets into Safad--deeper into Israel than it had managed to strike before.

In Israel, the military campaign, code-named “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” is being regarded as a technical and political success for the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

“Nobody in Israel harbors illusions that the operations will bring about the liquidation of Hezbollah as a military organization,” the Haaretz newspaper said. Rather, officials think that by slowly putting an intolerable squeeze on Lebanon, they will force the government and its Syrian sponsors to seek negotiations. In those talks, Israel will demand “an absolute end” to the firing of Katyushas by Hezbollah.

The Israeli newspaper Davar Rishon said Israel is planning “escalation in stages” intended to cause mounting frustration. For this reason, the government is trying to minimize civilian casualties in order not to create international pressure to call off the operation, it said.

The U.N. Security Council will convene today to discuss Lebanon’s protests against Israeli attacks.

Daniszewski reported from Tyre and Miller from Jerusalem.