Attackers again threw gasoline bombs at police guarding a French synagogue, part of a wave of anti-Semitic violence in France since fighting worsened in the Middle East.

Three assailants hurled Molotov cocktails at three officers guarding the Merlan Synagogue in the southern port city of Marseille late Saturday, police said yesterday. No one was injured and no property was damaged. The assailants got away.

Two attackers had hurled gasoline bombs at the same synagogue Tuesday.

Such attacks have increased across France as fighting has intensified between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.

On Friday, prosecutors said three young men of Moroccan origin confessed to throwing Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in the southern city of Montpellier on Thursday.

"These three men were coming out of a party and had been drinking quite a lot when they decided to carry out this attack against the synagogue," Montpellier prosecutor Leonard-Bernard de la Gatinais said on Friday.

"They were acting based upon what they had seen in the news," he said, and called the suspects "unemployed, confused people."

The government stepped up police patrols of Jewish religious sites after another synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground by arsonists on Wednesday.

A woman who used fertility drugs gave birth to sextuplets Saturday and doctors say the three boys and three girls appear healthy.

Only 96 sets of sextuplets have been born worldwide since recording began in the early 1900s, said doctors at Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Joseph, where a 24-member medical team delivered the babies by Caesarean section Saturday afternoon.

Mother Sondra Headrick, 33, and her husband Eldon, 32, live in Rago, about 40 miles southwest of Wichita, which until Saturday had a population of 12.

Headrick has been in the hospital for the past 93 days. Doctors said they delivered the babies Saturday because they feared for the health of one of the children.

Four were on a respirator Saturday night and the other two children were on oxygen, but doctors say they were all doing well.

Each baby weighed between 2 pounds 10 ounces and 3 pounds 11 ounces and they all squealed when they were born, Dr. Katherine Schooley said.

Headrick carried the children for 31 weeks. A full pregnancy is 40 weeks, but in Headrick's case doctors had hoped she would carry them for at least 26 or 27 weeks.

"It is a miracle the mother was able to hold onto the babies as long as she did," Schooley said. "I anticipate all the babies are going to do very beautifully."

The Headricks did not appear at a hospital news conference Saturday night and could not be reached for comment.

A 150-acre wildfire was burning yesterday at the Coronado National Forest's Reiley Peak, about 20 miles northwest of Willcox.

The fire was burning in grass, oak brush and mesquite in steep, inaccessible terrain, forest officials said. No structures were immediately threatened.

Strong winds on Saturday caused the fire to spread quickly. Yesterday, firefighters scouted the fire and were trying to flank it from the ridgetops.