Aid workers lament no safe access to south Lebanon

BEIRUT, July 29 (Reuters) Aid workers are finding it impossible to get medical supplies and food safely to isolated villages in southern Lebanon due to the Israeli bombardment, aid agencies said.

A humanitarian corridor has allowed the United Nations to truck food and basic medical supplies to the southern port of Tyre, but getting safe passage beyond that is another matter.

''For us the major issue is clearly the impossible access in the south. This talk of a humanitarian corridor should not mask the real situation,'' said Christopher Stokes yesterday, director of operations for Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) Belgium.

''It's a kind of humanitarian alibi because in effect there is no real humanitarian access in the south. And we are deluding ourselves, the international community is deluding itself, if it believes there is,'' he said in his Beirut office.

The Lebanese authorities say up to 600 civilians have been killed in a 17-day Israeli onslaught, which began after Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas killed eight Israeli soldiers and seized two in a cross-border raid on July 12.

Dozens of air raids struck villages in the hills behind Tyre yesterday and hundreds of artillery rounds crashed across the border from Israel, witnesses said, killing at least eight.

World Food Programme spokesman in Beirut, Robin Lodge, said the UN food aid organisation had been unable to move supplies trucked to Tyre beyond to villages in the south.

He said the best they could do at the moment was inform the warring parties of where and when they wanted to deliver aid.

''But for security reasons we are not able to get the areas south of Tyre,'' he said. ''We are keenly aware of the needs.'' NO SAFE PASSAGE The UN estimates there are up to 800,000 people in Lebanon displaced by the fighting and bombing. It said there are nearly 600 schools being used as shelters, with between 100 and 1,200 people in each school.

''There are a lot of people who live in confined areas. That can lead to diseases including diarrhoea,'' said World Health Organisation spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said in Geneva.

A soldier in the UN force in south Lebanon (UNIFIL), which has been shuttling to border villages in white UN armoured personnel carriers this week, said getting people out was risky.

Speaking under condition of anonymity in Tyre after rescuing people from the border town of Rmeish, he said Israeli strikes often landed very close to the UN vehicles.

He said missions were precarious because Hizbollah fighters profited from the arrival of UN convoys as cover, to bring out launchers and fire rockets at Israel from near the vehicles.

Stokes said contacts with Israel to try and secure safe passage had not been encouraging, meaning access was almost worse than in other war zones, such as Chechnya.

''It wasn't completely reliable there ... but you had something to work with. But here, it seems you are taking your chances,'' he said, adding that Lebanese aid workers were the backbone of the emergency aid effort.

''I've rarely seen people so committed, who are staying in those areas under really impossible conditions. They have no protection whatsoever,'' he said.

''And they are the ones doing most of the work. It's not the international aid community, that's quite clear.'' REUTERS SRS BST0510