The 15-member UN Security Council was to hold an emergency meeting on the conflict later Sunday, with France circulating a draft resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Israel expressed "regret" over the civilian deaths and ordered an inquiry but said it had warned residents to leave and pinned the blame on Hezbollah for launching rockets from the village.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he was in "no rush" for a truce and told Rice that Israel needed 10 to 14 days more to continue its offensive against the Hezbollah, an Israeli government official said.

In Beirut, a mob of angry demonstrators smashed into the UN building as thousands took to the streets in protest while Hezbollah and the ruling Palestinian Islamist militant movement Hamas both vowed revenge.

"This horrible massacre, like the others, will not remain unpunished," said Hezbollah, which has fired off waves of rockets against northern Israel since the onslaught began.

In Qana -- scene of another deadly bombardment 10 years ago -- rescue workers with only their bare hands clawed through rubble of flattened homes and an underground shelter to find survivors while mothers hugged their dead children in a final hopeless embrace.

Police put the death toll at at least 52 including 30 children.

"The bombing was so intense that no-one could move," said a distraught Ibrahim Shalhoub, 26. "I succeeded in getting out and everything collapsed. I have several members of the family inside and I do not think that there will be any other survivors." Israel, which has received staunch US backing since the conflict began on July 12, unleashed its firepower on Qana after flatly rejecting a UN call for a 72-hour truce to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Lebanon.

Siniora ruled out any talks on putting an end to the conflict until there was an immediate halt to Israel's offensive, signalling the likely failure of Rice's efforts to win support on both sides for the deployment of an international force in Lebanon.

"There is no place on this sad morning for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now," he told reporters.

Rice, on her second trip to the region in less than a week, refrained again from calling for an immediate truce after talks in Israel and a trip to Lebanon was cancelled.
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"I think what it is time to do is get to a ceasefire, we actually have to put one in place," she said. "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible, I would have wanted a ceasefire yesterday if possible, but the parties have to agree to a ceasefire and there have to be certain conditions in place." A US official said she would return home to Washington on Monday to start intensive diplomacy aimed at reaching a UN resolution on the conflict. Reaction to the Qana carnage was fierce across the Arab world, and even Britain, Washington's closest ally, branded the Qana attack as "quite appalling." The United Nations condemned the strike, while European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said "nothing can justify" the deadly bombardment and Syria, Lebanon's former powerbroker, described it as "state terrorism." The village, said by some to be where Jesus turned water into wine, was the site of an Israeli bombing of a UN base in April 1996 that killed 105 people during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" offensive -- also aimed at wiping out Hezbollah.

Dozens of other villages around the southern port city of Tyre were also bombarded with fire from the Israeli navy, air force and artillery. Israeli planes also tore up the Masnaa border crossing into Syria, leading to the closure of the main Damascus-Beirut route.

Israeli ground troops also launched a new cross-border incursion and were engaged in fierce battles with Hezbollah guerrillas on the outskirts of the southeastern village of Taibe.

About 30 rockets fired from south Lebanon landed across towns in northern Israel, without causing any injuries, police said.

The attacks came after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed to strike cities in the centre of Israel if the Jewish state continued to attack civilians in Lebanon.

Israel's war on the Shiite Muslim Party of God has triggered the deadliest cross-border fighting in a quarter century, made hundreds of thousands homeless and laid waste to much of Lebanon's infrastructure.

The Jewish state has lost a total of 51 people since it launched the offensive following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah on July 12, many of them soldiers killed in combat.

Israel has mobilised thousands of army reservists and says it plans to create a narrow buffer zone in Lebanon until the mooted international force is deployed -- but has ruled out another occupation of its northern neighbour.

Last week nine soldiers died in fighting around the key border town of Bint Jbeil in its biggest single-day death toll of the conflict, facing tougher-than-expected resistance despite its military superiority.

On Friday the Israeli military claimed to have hit a launch pad it suspected was used to fire a new type of missile that hit Afula, 50 kilometres (35 miles) south of the border, the deepest strike into Israel since the warring began.

US President George W. Bush had called Saturday for militias in Lebanon to be disarmed and for Lebanese security services to be deployed across the country, including the Hezbollah-controlled south.

Two Indian UN peacekeepers were wounded on Saturday in an Israeli air raid on their post in south Lebanon. Four UN military observers were killed last week in an Israeli strike on their observation post.

With 800,000 Lebanese displaced by the fighting, the International Committee of the Red Cross has criticised the "unacceptable" humanitarian situation and said Israel had to do much more to spare civilians.-AFP

Petersen was not at the U.N. offices in Beirut when they were attacked.

U.N. spokesman Khaled Mansour said the building had been stoned and furniture smashed but no U.N. staff were hurt as they had taken refuge in the basement. He said a small fire was started on the second floor but it had been contained.

Demonstrators held aloft the flags of Lebanon, Hizbollah and the Amal party, whose leader, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, appealed for a halt to the attack.

"Give the world a chance to stand by us," he said on local television.

CALLS TO ATTACK TEL AVIV

Demonstrators tore down a United Nations flag outside the building and ripped it to shreds and called on Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to launch rocket attacks on Tel Aviv.

"Oh Nasrallah, oh our cherished one, destroy, destroy Tel Aviv," they chanted.

Members of Hizbollah, the Shi'ite group that sparked the war 19 days ago when it seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid, tried to restrain the crowd.

The protesters gathered after an Israeli attack early on Sunday killed at least 40 people, including 23 children, in the southern Lebanese village of Qana.

Following the attack, Lebanon canceled a planned visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday, saying she was unwelcome until a ceasefire was declared.

At least 523 Lebanese, mostly civilians, have been killed since the conflict started and there is growing anger in Lebanon that the international community has not done enough to stop it.

"It's tense, we understand the anger and the rage of the people outside because of the Israeli shelling, but we don't understand why the U.N. building and its staff, many of them Lebanese, are to blame," said Mansour, speaking from the basement of the UN building.

"There is no place on this sad morning for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now," Siniora told a news conference in Beirut.

Siniora called for unity "in the face of the Israeli war criminals."

"The persistence of Israel in its heinous crimes against our civilians will not break the will of the Lebanese people," he said.

The stunning bloodshed in Lebanon earlier on Sunday prompted Rice to cut short her Mideast mission and intensified world demands on Washington to back an immediate end to the fighting.

The attack in the village of Qana brought Lebanon's death toll to more than 510 and pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury at the United States flared in Lebanon. The Beirut government said it would no longer negotiate over a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire. U.N. chief Kofi Annan sharply criticized world leaders - implicitly Washington - for ignoring his previous calls for a stop.

In Qana, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls - dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in - out of the mangled wreckage of the three-story building. Bodies were carried in blankets.

Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered in the house for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the 1 a.m. strike brought the building down.

"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said 13-year-old Noor Hashem, who survived, although her five siblings did not. She was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.

Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building. Before Ereli's announcement, Olmert said the campaign to crush Hezbollah would continue, telling Rice it could last up to two weeks more.

"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," he told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "If necessary, it will be broadened without hesitation."

The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting to debate a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire - a step Washington has stood nearly alone at the council in refusing until the disarmament of Hezbollah is assured.

In a jab at the United States, Annan told the council in unusually frank terms that he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were ignored. "Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.

After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora said he told her not to come.

Rice decided to cut her Mideast trip short and return to Washington on Monday morning.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who only days earlier gave his support to the U.S. stance, struck a more urgent note Sunday, saying Washington must work faster to put together the broader deal it seeks.

"We have to get this now. We have to speed this whole process up," Blair said. "This has got to stop and stop on both sides."

But Saniora said talk of a larger peace package must wait until the firing stops.

"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people," he told a gathering of foreign diplomats. But he underlined that Lebanon stands by ideas for disarming Hezbollah that it put forward earlier this week and that Rice praised.

He took a tough line and hinted that any Hezbollah response to the airstrike at the village of Qana was justified.

"As long as the aggression continues there is response to be exercised," he said, praising Hezbollah's leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah said on its Al-Manar television that it will retaliate.

"The massacre at Qana will not go unanswered," the group said.

The largest toll from a single Israeli strike in past weeks was around a dozen - and Sunday's dramatic deaths stunned Lebanese. Heightening the anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a halt to an Israeli offensive.

In Beirut, some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, at one point attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting, "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv" and chanting for Hezbollah's ally Syria to hit Israel. Another protest by about 50 people on a road leading to the U.S. Embassy forced security forces to close the road there.

Images of children's bodies tangled in the building's ruins, being carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on Arab news networks. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 women, Lebanese security officials said.

In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother's body taken out on a stretcher. "Why are they killing us? What have we done?" he screamed.

Israel said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed. Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields."

It said residents of the village had been warned to leave, but Shalhoub and others in Qana said residents were too terrified to take the road out of the village. The road to the nearest main city, Tyre, is lined with charred wreckage and smashed buildings from repeated Israeli bombings.

More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the fighting - many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli strikes.

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah was firing missiles from Qana.

"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV station.

On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into southern Lebanon warned residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. Leaflets with similar messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.

Israel on Sunday also launched its second significant ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Before dawn, Israeli forces backed by heavy artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas in the Taibeh Project area, about two miles inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed and claimed eight Israeli soldiers also died. The Israeli military said only that four soldiers were wounded when guerrillas hit a tank with a missile.

Some 460 Lebanese, mostly civilians, had been killed in the campaign through Saturday, according to the Health Ministry - before the attacks on Qana. Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities said.

The U.N. World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the embattled south after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group said in a statement. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring relief supplies to Marjayoun.

Many in the Arab world and Europe see the United States as holding the key to the conflict, believing that Israel would have to stop its offensive - sparked by Hezbollah's July 12 abduction of two Israeli soldiers - if its top ally Washington insisted it had to.

The United States has balked at doing so, saying any cease-fire must ensure real and lasting peace.

Rice had come to the Mideast with a peace package that would call for the disarming of Hezbollah, release of Israel's soldiers, deployment of a U.N.-mandated force in south Lebanon and the establishment of a buffer zone along the border.

Hopes had been raised earlier in the week when Hezbollah signed onto a Lebanese government peace plan that contained some similar items - though it left disarmament and deployment of the international force for later and dependent on conditions. Chief among those conditions was that Israel release Lebanese in its jails and agree to resolve a dispute over a piece of land it holds claimed by Lebanon.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud lashed out at the United States, saying that if it was "serious, it can make Israel cease firing ... They (Americans) are still giving the green light to Israel to continue its aggression against Lebanon."

Bush himself did not mention the Qana strike by name but said the latest losses of civilian life demanded that world powers focused their efforts on agreeing a unified response to the 19-day crisis.

"The United States is resolved to work with members of the United Nations Security Council to develop a resolution that will enable the region to have a sustainable peace, a peace that lasts, a peace that will enable mothers and fathers to raise their children in a hopeful world," Bush told reporters.

"The current situation in the Middle East is a reminder that all of us must work together to achieve a sustainable peace," he said before leaving the White House for a planned official trip to Florida.

Bush has so far resisted backing a UN resolution proposed by France demanding "an immediate cessation of hostilities." The chief White House spokesman told reporters that Washington was working with other nations on a different version of the draft.

"It's safe to say that we're working on something that we think is consistent with the goals and the language the president has used from the beginning," Tony Snow told reporters on board Air Force One on the way to Florida.

"And we're working with numerous parties," Snow said.

But Washington's closest allies used language Sunday that strongly hinted they were not willing to give the Israeli offensive much more time.

The Qana strike prompted British Prime Minister
Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to underline in a joint statement "the urgency of the need for a ceasefire as soon as possible."

However Snow refuted a reporter's suggestion that Blair was pressing Bush to support a ceasefire more quickly.

"That was not part of the conversation," said Snow. He latter added: "We're not dragging our feet."

Washington celebrated one diplomatic coup Sunday when a spokesman for US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said after talks with top Israeli officials in Jerusalem that the Jewish state had agreed to halt strikes for 48 hours to investigate the Qana attack.

"Israel has agreed to a 48-hour suspension of aerial activity in south Lebanon," Adam Ereli told reporters.

He said Israel would also coordinate with the United Nations on a 24-hour period of "safe passage" for civilians that wish to leave the area. US officials said Israel still reserved the right to target missiles pointing directly at its territory.

The Israeli promise marked a coup for Rice after she was forced to scrap a planned trip to Beirut amid her Middle East peace mission because Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora refused to meet US officials after the Qana attack.

Siniora again demanded an immediate ceasefire that Rice was unable to back.

Hezbollah rockets hit Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, but no casualties were reported, Israeli Radio said.

Earlier, Israel had said it would suspend its air strikes on Lebanese targets for 48 hours, beginning at 2 a.m. Monday.

The suspension was intended to allow for an investigation into an air attack Sunday by Israeli forces that killed 56 people, many of them women and children, in the Lebanese village of Qana.

Israel had also said it would suspend all offensive action for 24 hours to allow humanitarian aid to get into the region by land, sea and air, and to allow civilians to leave south Lebanon for the north.

However, in offering the two-day moratorium on air strikes, Israel had also warned that it would still respond to any attacks launched by Hezbollah militants.

Lebanese officials said the civilians killed in Qana had taken refuge in the basement of the building when bombs fell before dawn.

Israeli officials said the neighbourhood was targeted based on intelligence that Hezbollah fighters had used it to launch rockets at northern Israel, including 40 earlier on Sunday.

They also said civilians had been warned several days ago to leave.

Rice returns to Washington

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left the region for Washington after a trip in which she sought support for an all-out ceasefire.

As she left Jerusalem, Rice told reporters she was working toward a ceasefire that would be supported by a lasting settlement.

"I am convinced we can achieve both this week," Rice said.

She added that her third key goal is the creation of an international force to support the Lebanese army in keeping the peace.

Rice had planned to visit Beirut during the tour, but left the region without visiting the Lebanese capital after Sunday's deadly air strike.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council met Sunday and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made an urgent appeal for peace.

"Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," Annan said.

Anti-Israel opinion hit a new peak Sunday after Israeli missiles hit a building crowded with civilians in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing at least 56, half of them children.

Overall, Lebanon's 1.2-million-strong Shiite community has been hardest hit in Israel's assault. More than 500 people have been killed and 750,000 forced from their homes - the vast majority Shiites.

Secularized middle class Shiites and others who have previously shown apathy toward the group are now strongly defending its actions.

Farroukh, who has begun volunteering to help refugees who have swamped Beirut since the fighting started, recalled his reaction to Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah's July 14 announcement that his fighters had struck an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast.

"I felt such pride, I got tears in my eyes,'' he said. "I stepped out and everyone was celebrating with fireworks. ... That might make us terrorists according to the American dictionary, but we're not. We're people with dignity.''

A poll carried out by the Beirut Center for Research and Information this week showed a high level of support for Hezbollah's capture of the two soldiers, based on a belief that Israel and the U.S. intended to crush and disarm Hezbollah at some point, regardless of what Hezbollah did.

In Beirut, Hamzi Eneissi said his morale has not been affected by the mounting Lebanese civilian casualties.

"God is with the Muslim people, and God will make us triumph,'' said the 18-year-old, who is from a bombed-out neighborhood south of Beirut and has been living for more than two weeks at a derelict school with no water or electricity.

"All this misery is for a good cause,'' he said, sitting next to a heap of garbage in the school's playground.

"Israel is the Satan,'' chimed in his friend, Ayad Khalife, 21, whose home in Beirut's southern suburbs has been reduced to rubble. "Everyone who can should fight Israel and America.''

Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations at Boston University, wrote in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper this week that Shiites will likely emerge from the war more "politicized, not to mention angry and militant.''

"This war is consolidating sectarian loyalties, reinforcing the role of religious institutions and only heightening distrust of the U.S. and major Arab states - most prominently Egypt and Saudi Arabia,'' he wrote.

For Farroukh, the draw into the Hezbollah fold was nothing conscious.

"It's like you had a rope around your hand that you were not aware of, but when someone tries to yank it away from you, you hang on to it with all your strength,'' he said.

Yacoub al-Sarraf, the Lebanese environment minister, said: "We have never seen a spill like this in the history of Lebanon. It is a major catastrophe.

"The equipment we have is for minor spills. We use it once in a blue moon to clean a small spill of 50 tonnes or so. To clean this whole thing up we would need an armada."

The EU commission said the Lebanese authorities had asked for "urgent" assistance to clean up the oil.

Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner, said: "Wars do cause enormous human suffering as we are witnessing now in Lebanon. But another aspect is also the significant environmental destruction caused by it.

"[The spill] could affect the livelihood and health of the Lebanese and people in neighbouring countries as well as the status of the marine environment in the region."

The government has also asked the UN environmental protection agency to assist in the clean-up operation.

Al-Sarraf said the cost of removing the oil could reach $40-50million.

Equipment

An Israeli warship damaged by a Hezbollah missile on July 15 may also have spilled oil into the sea, according to the environment ministry.

One of the main problems is that an Israeli air and sea blockade of Lebanon, in place since the war began on July 12, is hampering both the clean-up and the delivery of equipment.

Sarraf said: "To really clean it up we need access to the sea, which we don't have.

"We need more equipment and mobilisation but for that we need the hostilities to end."

Local environmentalists say the marine ecosystem could take years to recover.