U.S. & World News

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CBS News) ― The United States on Tuesday stepped up evacuation plans for Americans stranded in Lebanon, preparing to move as many as 1,000 passengers onto a commercial ship that docked in Beirut.

The Orient Queen, a Lebanese cruise ship under contract with the U.S. military, pulled in Tuesday night, said Vice Adm. Patrick Walsh, the top U.S. naval officer in the Mideast. Walsh said passengers would go aboard and leave Beirut at first light on Wednesday morning.

This comes as Israel said Tuesday it was prepared to fight Hezbollah guerrillas for several more weeks and possibly send ground forces into Lebanon, raising doubts about the chances of growing international efforts to broker an immediate cease-fire.

Fighting between Israel and Lebanese guerrillas has stretched into its seventh day. The fighting has killed at least 227 people killed in Lebanon and 25 in Israel.

Speaking to Pentagon reporters from Bahrain, Walsh said there were no plans yet to put U.S. marines ashore in Beirut for security unless conditions changed.

As many as nine U.S. and coalition ships were en route to the region, including vessels from the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy. Some of the U.S. ships will take passengers to Cyprus while others will provide escorts and protection for the larger commercial vessels ferrying the Americans out of Lebanon.

"We're trying to move quickly, trying to move large numbers of people as fast as we can," said Walsh, who is commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. He said a second commercial vessel, which can hold about 1,400 passengers, also will be used.

In other developments:

•  President Bush said Tuesday he suspects Syria is trying to reassert influence in Lebanon more than a year after Damascus ended a long-term military occupation of its smaller, weaker neighbor. "It's in our interest for Syria to stay out of Lebanon and for (the Lebanese) government to survive," Mr. Bush said. In an exclusive interview with CBS News, a top Syrian official denied his country was giving weapons to Hezbollah, and offered to help resolve the crisis.

•  A new round of Hezbollah rockets pounded northern Israel Tuesday afternoon, killing one Israeli in Nahariya. An earlier rocket hit the Haifa train station, reports CBS News correspondent Robert Berger (audio) — the very same place where a rocket hit two days ago and killed eight people.

•  Israel expects to wrap up its offensive against Hezbollah "in a matter of weeks," a top general said Tuesday — but not until it has accomplished its objectives, said the prime minister.

•  Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Israel would be ready to call a cease-fire with Hezbollah if its captured soldiers are returned, the Lebanese army deploys along the countries' shared border and the future disarmament of the militia can be guaranteed.

•  Colombia and Venezuela were leading an operation to evacuate thousands of South Americans trapped in Lebanon. A caravan of buses has since Monday been ferrying Latin Americans to neighboring Syria, from where they have flown to Spain and other European countries.

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, on exercises in the Red Sea, was ordered into the waters off Lebanon to help in the evacuation. By day's end, the U.S. military will have six CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters available to move 300 passengers a day out of Lebanon. Other U.S. ships should arrive in a day or so.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the U.S. also is considering contracting with as many as four more commercial ships that could each carry between 200 and more than 1,000 passengers.

Asked about a delay getting the Orient Queen into port past an Israeli sea blockade, Whitman said the commercial ship had a number of Lebanese passengers already aboard and "we needed to do some coordination" in order to allow those people to pass through and leave the ship in Beirut. He would not elaborate on any discussions the U.S. has had with the Israelis.

The U.S. ships, not expected to arrive for a day or so, include the amphibious assault ships USS Iwo Jima, USS Nashville and USS Whidbey Island. The USS Nashville, which was already under way, could arrive as early as Wednesday, while the other two may not arrive in the area until Thursday or Friday.

The ships, part of a five-vessel Navy unit, carry a battalion of Marines with a helicopter squadron, the Navy said in a statement. The ships also have hospital facilities.

The Navy did not say exactly what role the Marines and sailors will play in the evacuation, which has been criticized as slow compared to those of other nations that have taken their citizens out of Lebanon.

"It is a chaotic situation in Lebanon," Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs said CBS News' The Early Show. "Our advice to American citizens, if they're in a dangerous area, is to stay put. Get in touch with us."

Whitman said State Department's primary concern is that the people be taken out in a safe, deliberate and organized manner. He also noted that the Beirut port is working at a higher capacity that normal, which presents a greater challenge to get the ships from various countries in and out with their passengers.

He added that it is still not clear how many Americans will ultimately be evacuated, because some may change their minds as conditions there either improve or deteriorate.

The State Department said Monday that it will ask Americans to pay for rides out of Lebanon that include chartered vessels.

"What we have to do in a situation like this is, we have to go out on an emergency basis and rent vessels," Burns said. "That's what we're trying to do ... We do that on behalf of American citizens. We're not quite sure how many of these Americans will come out."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi objected to billing evacuees.

"A nation that can provide more than $300 billion for a war in Iraq can provide the money to get its people out of Lebanon," Pelosi said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Israel said Tuesday it was prepared to fight Hezbollah guerrillas for several more weeks and possibly send ground forces into Lebanon, raising doubts about the chances of growing international efforts to broker an immediate cease-fire.

Israeli warplanes struck an army base outside Beirut and other areas in south Lebanon, killing 17 people, and Hezbollah rockets battered Israeli towns, killing one Israeli.

In an effort to evacuate, families in southern Lebanon, the site of most Israeli airstrikes, drove north on side roads, winding among the orange and banana groves and waving improvised white flags from their car windows.

Diplomatic efforts to end the fighting, continued Tuesday, as a U.N. mediation team met with Israeli leaders, a day after speaking with Lebanese officials in Beirut.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who met with the delegation, said a cease-fire would be impossible unless the soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid last week were released and Lebanese troops were deployed along the border with a guarantee that Hezbollah would be disarmed.

Livni's comments indicated that Israel would not demand that Hezbollah, a Shiite militia that controls southern Lebanon and routinely launches rockets into Israel, be disarmed before any cease-fire deal can take effect.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that any cease-fire should be based on fundamental changes that would have a lasting impact on the region.

"We all want a cessation of violence. We all want the protection of civilians. We have to make certain that anything that we do is going to be of lasting value," Rice said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement that "the start of negotiations will not stop this operation, only the return of the kidnapped soldiers will."

The week-old offensive was sparked by the soldiers' capture but has now broadened into a campaign to neutralize Hezbollah.

"I think that we should assume that it will take a few more weeks," Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, the head of the army's northern command, told Army Radio.

The army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski, said Israel has not ruled out deploying "massive ground forces into Lebanon."

Israel, which has mainly limited itself to attacks from the air and sea, had been reluctant to send in ground troops because Hezbollah is far more familiar with the terrain and because of still-fresh memories of Israel's ill-fated 18-year-occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.

But Kaplinski said Israel had no intention of getting bogged down in the region a second time.

"We certainly won't reach months, and I hope it also won't be many more weeks. But we still need time to complete the operation's very clear objectives," he told Israel Radio.

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to react to Kaplinski's comments, but said the administration was not happy with the current situation.

"A cease-fire that would leave the status quo ante intact is absolutely unacceptable. A cease-fire that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable," he said. "So what we're trying to do is work as best we can toward a cease-fire is that going to create not only the conditions, but the institutions for peace and democracy in the region."

Meanwhile, a proposal to send a new international force to bolster the current 2,000-member U.N. force in south Lebanon gained steam.

Western nations have proposed the beefed-up force as part of a possible cease-fire agreement, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday in Brussels, Belgium, that a new force must be "considerably" larger and better armed than the current force, which is viewed as weak and ineffectual. Rice also called for the introduction of a strong peacekeeping operation.

Livni said securing south Lebanon "requires activity by the Lebanese government, with the oversight (and) assistance of the international community." She said Israel's experience with the current U.N. force was "not satisfactory," and it prefers no such force in the long-term, but left open the possibility of a temporary force.

In his statement, Olmert belittled the current force in Lebanon, but said he would be cautious about discussing the new force. "It seems to be its too early to debate it," he said.

Israeli Cabinet minister Avi Dichter, meanwhile, said the country may consider a prisoner swap with Lebanon to win the soldiers' release, but only after the military operation is complete.

As the diplomatic efforts continued, the Israeli air force kept up its strikes across southern Lebanon, hitting a military base at Kfar Chima before dawn as soldiers rushed to their bomb shelters, killing at least 11 soldiers in an engineering unit were killed and wounding 35 others, the Lebanese military said. The base is in a hilly area adjacent to Hezbollah strongholds in southern Beirut that were frequently targeted by recent Israeli strikes.

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr denounced the strike as a "massacre," saying the regiment's main job was to help rebuilt damaged infrastructure. The Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, confining itself to firing anti-aircraft guns at the Israeli planes. But Israeli jets have struck Lebanese army positions.

At least five people also were killed when a bomb hit a house in the village of Aitaroun, near the border, witnesses said. Israeli warplanes also struck the Hezbollah stronghold of southern Beirut, sending plumes of black smoke rising in the air, and hit four trucks that Israeli officials said were bringing weapons into Lebanon.

"That is intolerable terrorist activity," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman. "They are using civilian infrastructure to bring in weapons, which they are using against us and killing Israelis, and we will exercise our right of self defense to stop the flow of weapons into Lebanon."

With the violence unabated, foreign citizens fled Lebanon on Tuesday.

Military helicopters ferried 120 Americans from the hilltop U.S. Embassy in Beirut, and another 200 left on a ship chartered by Sweden to rush out nearly 1,000 Europeans. Around 180 British also left on a warship.

But a plan to evacuate more of the 25,000 Americans in the country on a cruise liner, the Orient Queen, was delayed a day.

Lebanese-American Jonathan Chakhtoura said he was extremely disappointed with the Americans' response.

"Every time I call to see what's going on the lines are busy. When they answer, they say they don't know," the 19-year-old fashion design student said. "A lot of people don't know what is going on. There is so much confusion. If it's security they are worried about, then I think we will be more secure if we know what is going on."

Hezbollah guerrillas fired a new barrage of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday afternoon, killing a man as he walked down the street toward a bomb shelter in the town of Nahariya and setting fire to the top of a two-story apartment building.

At least 100 rockets fell into Israel, hitting a string of towns, including the city of Haifa.

More than 750 rockets have hit Israel since the violence began, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take cover in underground shelters.

Despite the ongoing attacks, Israelis strongly support the military operation against Hezbollah. A poll published in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot showed 86 percent believe the operation is justified, 81 percent want it to continue and 58 percent say it should last until Hezbollah is destroyed. The poll of 513 Israelis had a margin of error of 4.2 percent.

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)