Tue Aug 8, 2006 02:04 PM ET
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BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli air raids and ground battles with Hizbollah guerrillas convulsed south Lebanon on Tuesday amid diplomatic wrangling over how to end a four-week-old war that has killed more than 1,000 people.
Three Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, bringing Israel's military and civilian death toll to 100 in the conflict touched off by Hizbollah's capture of two soldiers on July 12. At least 965 people have been killed in Lebanon.
Despite global alarm at the rising casualties, days of intensive efforts at the U.N. Security Council to bring about a ceasefire and lasting peace have proved difficult.
Israel has vowed to expand its military offensive if no diplomatic solution emerges soon.
Roads in south Lebanon were virtually empty after the Israeli army warned that those who travel risked being bombed.
"We are scared to move around," taxi driver Mahmoud Faqih told Reuters in the southern port city of Tyre.
The Israeli army had told residents south of the Litani river, which is about 20 km from the border, not to drive after 10 p.m. (8 p.m. British time) on Monday. The open-ended ban exempts only aid convoys agreed in advance with Israel, the army said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said a U.N. resolution could be clinched on Wednesday, but that it would not include a demand for an immediate Israeli pullout as Lebanon wants.
U.S. President George W. Bush has said such a withdrawal could enable Hizbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, to rearm.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Lebanon's plan to send 15,000 troops to the south when Israeli troops withdraw was an "interesting step".
But he added that his security cabinet would discuss on Wednesday a possible expansion of military operations in Lebanon, where 10,000 Israeli troops are already on the ground.
STRONG FORCE
Israel wants a strong international force to join the Lebanese troops before it would agree to withdraw, a senior Israeli official said.
France also welcomed Lebanon's proposed troop deployment.
"It demonstrates the desire of all the parties in Lebanon to enable the Lebanese government to exercise its sovereignty over all its territory," Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said the priority was to "have a quick ceasefire or at the very minimum an end to acts of aggression" to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced people to return home.
Israel's efforts to push Hizbollah back from the border and stop rocket fire into Israel have met stiff resistance.
Dozens more Hizbollah rockets landed in northern Israel on Tuesday, but there were no reports of casualties.
A Reuters journalist saw at least 10 Israeli air strikes and hundreds of artillery shells hit the southern Lebanese town of Khiam. Other border areas came under fire from air and land.
One air strike destroyed a three-storey school building in the village of Maaroub, 15 km (9 miles) east of the southern city of Tyre. Khalil Moussa, the school's janitor, told Reuters his wife, three children and a teacher were under the rubble.
"I couldn't do anything to help them," he wept. "They might be still alive. We have to remove the rubble quickly."
Fallen masonry was still hampering a search for bodies or survivors in a Beirut suburb struck by an air raid on Monday.
Brigadier-General Darwish Hobeika, head of Lebanon's civil defence, told Reuters 17 bodies had been recovered and a score of people were still missing in rubble in the Shiyah district.
France and the United States have drafted a U.N. resolution to end the fighting but are considering changes to overcome Arab criticism that it favours Israel. Arab foreign ministers are to pitch Lebanon's case at the United Nations later in the day.
Israeli bombing has hampered international efforts to assist civilians displaced or trapped by the fighting in Lebanon.
Robin Lodge, spokesman for the United Nations' World Food Programme, said U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon were seeking Israeli assurances that it would be safe to start repairing a bridge on the coast road to Tyre that was bombed on Monday.
"So far such assurances are not forthcoming," he said. "Tyre is currently cut off."
(Additional reporting by Jerusalem, Paris and United Nations bureaux)
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