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Lebanon fighting claims UN lives

Hezbollah militants were yesterday engaged in bloody clashes with Israeli forces battling to move deeper inside the Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil, after four UN peacekeepers were killed in an Israeli strike on south Lebanon.

During the night, three of the corpses of four UN observers killed in an Israeli air strike on their post in south Lebanon were recovered and intense efforts were underway to recover the final body from beneath the rubble, a security source said.

Fifty of the victims' former comrades from the Indian contingent of UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were desperately working to extract the remaining corpse with their hands or using improvised shovels, the source said.

The raid has provoked widespread international condemnation, with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saying he was "shocked" at Israel's "apparently deliberate targeting" of the UN post.

Israel expressed deep regret over the incident but its ambassador to the UN said he was distressed by Annan's "hasty" statement and surprised by the "premature and erroneous assertions."

Israeli military sources said nine Israeli soldiers were "hit" in heavy fighting in Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah military stronghold in the border area which Israeli forces first penetrated on Tuesday.

The sources did not say whether the casualties were killed or wounded but the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera said 13 Israeli soldiers were killed and 12 wounded in fighting with Hezbollah.

"There are still exchanges of fire in Bint Jbeil ... They're putting up resistance and the fighting is continuing," an Israeli military spokesman told reporters.

A Hezbollah statement said "heavy exchanges are ongoing between the heroic mujahedeen [fighters] of the Islamic Resistance and the Israeli enemy forces which are trying to advance from Tallet Masoud" on the southwestern outskirts of Bint Jbeil.

"There are also heavy exchanges around Aitarun, Marun al-Ras and Bint Jbeil," to the southeast of the town, it said.

Meanwhile, an Israeli air strike destroyed a three-story house in the border village of Yarun, close to Bint Jbeil, burying 10 civilians -- including children -- under the rubble, police said. It was not immediately known if all the civilians had been killed.

The fighting came as Israel pressed its border incursion into southern Lebanon, which has already seen it take control of Marun al-Ras. The Jewish state has said it could establish a security zone in southern Lebanon if multinational troops are not deployed.

In an overnight televised speech, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah insisted that Bint Jbeil was not in Israeli hands.

Crisis talks

Meanwhile, diplomats held crisis talks on Lebanon yesterday under growing pressure for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, but the talks collapsed.

The Lebanese government and foreign policy chiefs from the US, Middle East and Europe met in Rome to discuss ways to end the conflict.

But it failed to agree on a framework for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, while saying that "some progress had been made," was blunt about the meeting's failure.

"The more we delay the ceasefire, the more we are going to have civilians being killed," said Saniora, who blamed Israel for the impasse.

Calling for "historic deeds" to bring peace, Saniora said it was time for Israel to take the initiative because the Arabs were "committed to peace."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who co-hosted the meeting with Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, tried to put a positive spin on the talks: "We are all committed to dedicated and urgent action to bring about an end to this violence."

Israel was not invited to the conference, nor was Hezbollah or its allies Syria and Iran.
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