US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed back to the Middle East yesterday to try to broker an end to the bloody Lebanon conflict, but Israel flatly rejected a UN appeal for a three-day truce to allow in desperately needed humanitarian aid.
Israel launched a new wave of air strikes against Lebanon, refusing to set a date for ending its 18-day-old war on Hezbollah that has left hundreds of people dead, and made hundreds of thousands homeless.
"We cannot accept a ceasefire with Hezbollah because this terrorist organization would exploit it to gather civilians to use them as a human shield in the combat zone," senior foreign ministry official Gideon Meir said.
UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland had appealed for a truce between Israel and the Shiite militant group to allow casualties to be removed and food and medicine to be sent into the war zone.
Meir said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had already agreed to set up humanitarian corridors, although aid groups have complained they have little access to south Lebanon which has borne the brunt of the Israeli onslaught.
En route to Jerusalem for the second time in a week, Rice said she was expecting a "fairly intense" round of talks with "give and take" on both sides, but that she was encouraged by progress on some fronts.
Rice hailed as a "positive step" a Lebanese Cabinet agreement on a ceasefire plan outlined by Prime Minister Fuad Siniora which calls for a prisoner exchange and for the government to assert its sovereignty over the Hezbollah-controlled south.
Israel however, continued to pound Hezbollah targets, including a missile launch pad it suspected was used to fire a new type of missile that landed in Afula, 50km south of the border, the deepest strike into Israel since the conflict began.
The army said six soldiers were wounded in the battle for the key Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold that has been the scene of the deadliest combat between Israeli troops and Shiite Muslim guerrillas.
Israel, which last week lost nine soldiers in fighting around Bint Jbeil and a neighboring village in its biggest single-day death toll of the conflict, said on Friday that it had killed 26 Hezbollah fighters.
Tanks and armored vehicles pulled back from Bint Jbeil yesterday towards Marun Al-Ras, a strategic hilltop village closer to the border that Israeli forces captured last weekend, Lebanese police said.
US President George W. Bush said that Rice would "work with Israel and Lebanon to come up with an acceptable UN Security Council resolution that we can table next week."
Bush and his staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, held talks in Washington on a plan to end the crisis, isolate Hezbollah and its backers Iran and Syria, and set the stage for a long-term solution.
Blair said world powers would meet at UN headquarters tomorrow to discuss the possible deployment of a multinational stabilization force in Lebanon, which is under the deadliest Israeli onslaught in a quarter century.
But despite pledging aid for Lebanon, they again refused to call for an immediate ceasefire to stop Israel's offensive which has left Lebanese infrastructure in tatters.
The two leaders also warned Israel's arch-foes Syria and Iran that they must become "proper and responsible members of the international community" or face "the risk of increasing confrontation."
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