BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen broke into a mobile phone company office in Baghdad and seized two Egyptian employees, government officials said today, while the family of a British hostage shown pleading for his life on a video earlier this week awaited word on his fate.

Also today, mortars exploded near the Italian Embassy in Baghdad, slightly wounding three Iraqis, the Foreign Ministry in Rome said.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Thursday that parts of Iraq might have to be excluded from the January elections because of continuing violence.

With car bombs, shootings and kidnappings escalating and several cities effectively under insurgent control, there are concerns that Iraq will not be ready to hold a vote by the Jan. 31 deadline. But Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, are eager to hold elections since they expect to dominate whatever government emerges.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, in a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, vowed not to let violence derail the election timetable. He said 14 or 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces "are completely safe."

However, at least six provinces - Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Nineveh - have been the scene of significant attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi authorities in the past month.

Two Italian women aid workers were also seized from their office on Sept. 7. Two statements surfaced on the Internet this week claiming they had been killed, but the Italian government says the claims are unreliable.

In other violence Thursday, U.S. warplanes blasted insurgent positions in Sadr City, and American ground troops pushed into the sprawling Baghdad slum in a new operation aimed at disarming the militia of a renegade anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Iraqi doctors said one person was killed Thursday and 12 were wounded, many of them children.

Militia fighters returned fire with machine guns and an American Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and caught fire, according to a U.S. military report. It was not clear if there were casualties.