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BEIRUT, Lebanon, Monday, July 17 — Israeli jets hit a Lebanese port today and killed 17 people in strikes at targets linked to Hezbollah in the city’s suburbs, while the militant group continued the rocket barrage on Israel that killed 8 people in the port city of Haifa on Sunday.
Meanwhile, as the G-8 summit ended in St. Petersburg, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called for an international peacekeeping force to be deployed in southern Lebanon to stop Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
President Bush, in remarks he apparently believed could not be overheard, used an expletive to tell Mr. Blair at a lunch concluding the summit meeting that the United Nations should “get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop’’ its rocket attacks.
Once that happens, “it’s over,’’ Mr. Bush said, news services reported.
The attack by Hezbollah on Haifa on Sunday prompted Israeli leaders to step up their military campaign to drive the group from southern Lebanon.
Within an hour, Israeli warplanes engaged in a fierce bombardment of targets in southern Beirut and southern Lebanon, killing 45 people and wounding more than 100, according to local reports. Among the dead were eight Canadians, with another six critically injured, largely from an air attack on the border town of Aitaroun, where they were vacationing, the Canadian government reported.
Early Monday, an Israeli rocket blew up a Lebanese army position near Tripoli in northern Lebanon, killing eight soldiers, and a sea-launched missile killed at least nine people in the southern Lebanese port of Tyre, The Associated Press reported.
The rocket attacks on Haifa and elsewhere in northern Israel on Sunday prompted the police to order residents into shelters. The biggest rocket, which Israel said was Syrian-made, hit a busy railway maintenance building, destroying the roof, killing 8, wounding more than 20 and leaving congealing pools of blood on the platform.
The missile, which Israel said was a Syrian-produced model of a Iranian Fajr-3, has a range of about 30 miles and carries a warhead with some 100 pounds of high explosive and shrapnel, a significant change from the smaller Katyushas that Hezbollah has mostly been using. Haifa is Israel’s third most important city after Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is a bustling port of several hundred thousand with terraced hills, a large Israeli Arab population and two major research universities.
The impact of the deaths and the use of the new missile were a qualitative and psychological escalation of the conflict, in its fifth day on Sunday, with the Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, saying, “For those who live in the Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut and feel protected — the situation has changed.”
On Monday, rockets again hit Haifa, but no new casualties were reported. Another Hezbollah rocket flew over Haifa to land in the town of Atlit, 35 miles from the border, the deepest point within Israel that Hezbollah has reached, according to news service reports.
Mr. Blair and Mr. Annan made their announcement after meeting in St. Petersburg during the final day of the G-8 summit. Mr. Blair said that the fighting would not stop until Israel was convinced that Hezbollah’s rocket attacks could be prevented.
“The only way is if we have a deployment of international forces that can stop bombardment coming into Israel,’’ Mr. Blair said, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Annan appealed to Israel to spare civilian lives and infrastructure. The European Union also said that it was considering sending a peacekeeping force to the scene, the A.P. reported.
The Israeli air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has its headquarters, continued throughout the night and into the morning, according to news service reports, after heavy raids on Saturday against Hezbollah offices and apartment houses and, the Israelis said, bunkers underneath them where Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, has spent much of his time.
Streets were deserted, littered by debris, broken glass and parts of shattered buildings. Heavy plumes of black smoke rose over the city in the late afternoon as Israeli jets circled over the shut Beirut airport, hitting fuel storage tanks and an oil refinery.
“We are facing a real annihilation carried out by Israel,” Lebanon’s information minister, Ghazi Aridi, said after an emergency cabinet meeting. Beirut had an eerie, empty feel, with many residents having fled to the surrounding mountains.
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