KIRYAT SHMONA (Israel), Aug 4: As the rockets rain down on northern Israel, tens of thousands of terrified Israelis have fled to the south, leaving mainly the old, weak or those too poor to get out.

On Friday, the latest barrage of Hezbollah missiles killed three people, bringing to 30 the number of Israeli civilians to die from the strikes.

Despite the toll — which compares with the 900-odd Lebanese killed on the other side of the border by Israeli air strikes — there is no Israeli government-sponsored evacuation system in place.

Nor can local councils afford to pay to move Israelis to the south. So the less well off either have to stay put or, for the more fortunate, escape with the help of charity.

“A large percentage of those who are left are the weakest — those with no relatives, no connections or who don’t have the savvy to get out,” said Josie Arbel of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, a charity that helps find temporary lodgings for fleeing northerners.

Kiryat Shmona lies three kilometres from the Lebanese border. It has been pounded by rockets for much of the three-week-old war in Lebanon.

More than half of the town’s 25,000 residents have fled and the rest spend most of the day hiding in safe rooms and bomb shelters.

About 1,000 people made their escape from here on Wednesday after the municipality of Eilat, which lies as far south from Kiryat Shmona as one can go in Israel, made available 250 hotel rooms to people fleeing northern regions.

As hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese flee north to escape Israeli bombs, officials in northern Israel estimate that more than 300,000 of the region’s million residents have gone south since the fighting began.

Many have gone to stay with relatives or in hotels that they pay for themselves. Thousands of others have gone with the help of charities, or of southerners who have offered rooms in their homes.

About 6,000 people have moved to a tent city on a beach funded by the Russian-Israeli billionaire Arkady Gaydamak near the southern town of Nitzanim.

Choen Simcha, who works an emergency hotline in Kiryat Shmona’s specially built wartime town hall bunker, said that most of the calls she gets were from people asking to be taken out of the town.

“They get angry when I tell them we usually can’t arrange that. They’re very angry that we’re leaving them here to suffer,” she said. “I get a lot of mothers on the phone crying. They want to get out.”

In Carmiel, which lies in the heart of the Galilee region, a third of the population of 50,000 has left, said Hanna Korval, director general of the municipality.

“The old, people with young families, they can’t go. The very weak ones also can’t leave,” she said.—AFP