HotmailU.S. citizens remain in dark about evacuation
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 | Mideast crisis July 14 - July 18 The Israeli army steps up offensive on Lebanon as Hezbollah hits targets inside Israel. |
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IN DEPTH: MIDEAST IN CRISIS |
Cyprus awaits flood of people
The government of the nearby Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus prepared to help with the evacuation of the thousands expected to be brought out of Lebanon by the United States and European countries.
“At this stage we don’t have an exact number of people. ... We’ll surely have four or five ships this week alone,” said Foreign Ministry official Omiros Mavromatis.
Since the kidnapping on Wednesday of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas, which Israel says sparked the ongoing offensive, Israel has blocked ports, closed the main international airport by destroying its runways and struck strategic points around Lebanon.
The embassy itself is not being evacuated, Harty said in an ABC News interview. But dependents of U.S. personnel who have chosen to leave will be able to depart, she said.
Two Arab-American organizations criticized the slow start and that the United States was not promoting a cease-fire.
“The absence of American leadership to secure a cease-fire and protect its own citizens is appalling,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said “the highest duty of any president is to protect the lives of Americans.”
Many of the U.S. citizens in Lebanon are Arab-Americans making regular summer pilgrimages to visit family members.
Cyprus awaits flood
An Italian ship left Beirut with some 350 Italians who were expected in the Cyprus port of Larnaca by Monday evening.
Hundreds of French citizens and other Europeans were evacuating on a commercial ship sent by France, which has more than 20,000 citizens in Lebanon. The evacuees began moving in buses from a Beirut school used as a gathering point to Beirut’s port, where they were to board boats taking them to the ship anchored offshore.
“Who knows when this will end,” said Habib al-Saad, who was sending his three sons. “If any of our Arab leaders had a brain this would have been resolved a long time ago. But they don’t,” al-Saad said as his sons — Marwan, 20, Thomas, 17, and Pierre, 10 — looking bewildered and anxious — listened to their father in silence.
“I am not worried about them,” al-Saad said. “They will look after themselves.”
Greece was sending a navy frigate to a Lebanese port to pick up 100 people and has three additional warships on standby.
Hundreds of thousands were on the move in Lebanon, leaving areas considered dangerous for the relative safety of the hills east of Beirut, the eastern Bekaa valley and northern Lebanon.
Wisam Musalam, a statistics student in Lyons, France, was standing in line outside the French Culture Center, waiting to register his name for evacuation. He is not a French national, but has a residence permit in France.
“Slowly, slowly we will become like the Palestinians,” he said. “A nation of refugees.”
Foreign evacuations continue
Meanwhile, about 850 of about 5,000 Swedes in Lebanon have been evacuated, largely to the city of Aleppo in northern Syria. Sweden chartered three ships to bring Swedes from Beirut to Cyprus, but was awaiting security guarantees from the warring parties.
A British aircraft carrier and another warship — both already in the Mediterranean — set off Sunday on a three-day trip to the Middle East in preparation for the possible evacuation of Britons. A British Foreign Office spokesman said the first wave of Britons — children, elderly and ill people — left Sunday aboard a helicopter that also transported European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Denmark began evacuating some 2,300 people by bus to Damascus, Syria. So far, some 700 have returned home, the Danish government said.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said there were more than 1,400 Russian citizens in Lebanon and more than 1,000 were ready to leave.
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