No letup in Lebanon

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hezbollah and Israel traded rocket and missile barrages for a sixth day today, as warfare that has erupted in the Middle East showed no sign of easing. Hezbollah rockets struck deep inside Israel, killing eight people in the northern city of Haifa, and Israel retaliated with waves of missiles from Lebanon's north to south and into the Bekaa Valley near Syria.

The toll on both sides rose to above 200, most of them civilians, as strikes continued into today. In addition to the Israeli victims at a rail repair facility in Haifa, an Israeli rocket blew up a Lebanese army position, killing eight soldiers, and a sea-launched missile killed at least nine people in the southern Lebanese port of Tyre.

Israel had warned of massive retaliation after the Haifa attack and accused Iran and Syria of providing the weaponry used in it. Israeli military officials said four of the missiles were the Iranian-made Fajr-3, with a 22-mile range and 200-pound payload, and far more advanced than the Katyusha rockets the guerrillas had rained on northern Israel earlier.

With the violence rising, foreigners began to flee by the hundreds, and several nations drew up plans to get their citizens out. U.S. planners arrived to organize evacuation for any of the 25,000 Americans seeking to leave. Italian military flights rushed out some 350 people, mostly Europeans. France, which has more than 20,000 citizens in Lebanon, chartered a Greek ferry expected to pick up some 1,200 people today.

In the early hours today, witnesses reported that waves of Israeli airstrikes hit the Lebanese city of Tripoli and Hezbollah strongholds in eastern town of Baalbek. Barrages from gunboats killed four in a village south of Beirut.

Eight Lebanese army soldiers were killed and 12 wounded in an Israeli airstrike in the fishing village of Abdeh in northernmost Lebanon.

Israel, technically at war with Lebanon since 1948, said it had targeted radar stations in the north because Hezbollah had used them to hit an Israeli ship on Friday. It all but accused the Lebanese military of lending its support to Hezbollah.

"The attacks . . . are against radar stations used, among other things, in the attack on the Israeli missile boat, by Hezbollah in cooperation with the Lebanese military," an Israeli army spokesman told The Associated Press.

World leaders meeting in St. Petersburg produced a draft framework to end the crisis and a U.N. envoy landed in Beirut. The Group of Eight most industrialized nations expressed concern over "rising civilian casualties on all sides" and urged both sides to stop their attacks.