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BEIRUT/Manila. — A severe storm, carrying heavy rain and strong winds toppled an old wall and several graves at a Jewish cemetery in the Lebanese capital yesterday.

The cemetery in Beirut’s Sodeco District, which dates back to the early 1820s, is Lebanon’s only Jewish cemetery and has been closed to the public for many years.

Heavy rain and winds toppled the cemetery’s stone wall, tumbling onto several graves and tombstones that came crashing down. The fallen tombstones with Hebrew writing on them could be seen from the main street where the wall had collapsed.

Lebanon once had a thriving Jewish community. As many as 15 000 to 22 000 Jews lived in Lebanon in the mid-1960s, but the various Arab-Israeli wars and Lebanon’s own 1975-90 conflict caused waves of emigration and today, almost none are left in the country.

The storm, which has been dubbed “Loulou,” has lashed Lebanon and also caused flooding and landslides in parts of the country while the first heavy snow fell on the mountains, forcing some road closures

Meanwhile, a strong typhoon that barrelled through the central Philippines left at least 20 people dead and forced thousands to flee their homes, devastating Christmas celebrations in the predominantly Catholic country.

Typhoon Phanfone stranded many people in sea and airports at the peak of holiday travel, set off landslides, flooded low-lying villages, destroyed houses, downed trees and electrical poles and knocked out power in entire provinces. One disaster response officer described the battered coastal town of Batad in Iloilo Province as a “ghost town” on Christmas Day.

“You can’t see anybody because there was a total blackout, you can’t hear anything.

“The town looked like a ghost town,” Cindy Ferrer of the regional Office of the Civil Defence said by phone.

The storm weakened slightly yesterday as it blew into the South China Sea with sustained winds of 120 kilometres per hour and gusts of 150 kph after lashing island after island with fierce winds and pounding rain on Christmas Day, the weather agency said.

Most of the 20 deaths reported by national police and local officials were due to drowning, falling trees and accidental electrocution.

A father, his three children and another relative were among those missing in hard-hit Iloilo Province after a swollen river inundated their shanty, officials said.

The typhoon slammed into Eastern Samar Province on Christmas Eve and then plowed across the archipelago’s central region on Christmas, slamming into seven coastal towns and island provinces without losing power, government forecasters said.

Provincial officials, army troops, police and volunteers spent Christmas away from home to attend to thousands of displaced residents in town gymnasiums and schools turned into emergency shelters. Many more people spent Christmas Eve, traditionally a time for family reunions, in bus terminals.

More than 25 000 people were stranded in sea ports across the central region and outlying provinces after the coast guard prohibited ferries and cargo ships from venturing into dangerously choppy waters.

Dozens of international and domestic flights to and from the region were cancelled, including to popular beach and surfing resorts.

About 20 typhoons and storms batter the Philippines each year. The Southeast Asian nation is also located in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions often occur, making the country of more than 100 million people one of the world’s most disaster-prone. — AP.