Following a four-hour meeting late Monday, the cabinet authorized military operations "with a view of controlling the area until the Litani River after having cleaned it of Hezbollah presence but without a permanent occupation," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Israel's border with Lebanon runs eastwards from the Mediterranean coast about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the Litani, but moves much closer to the river as it turns north about 30 kilometres inland.

Lebanese television showed pictures of soldiers and tanks massed at the border, where Israeli bulldozers have started flattening Hezbollah positions to create a buffer zone.

Fierce fighting was also raging between Hezbollah guerrillas and advancing Israeli forces in an eastern border area of south Lebanon for the third straight day, Lebanese police said.

The Israeli troops made a small advance of about one kilometer (mile) on the ground, they said.

Despite a promised 48-hour halt in air raids which allowed thousands of southern Lebanese to flee the war zone, Israeli warplanes also struck roads leading to Syria in the early hours of Tuesday, police said.

Syria, which along with Iran, backs Hezbollah, ordered its armed forces to raise their level of alert, official media reported.

Olmert warned that Israel's war on Hezbollah, unleashed on July 12 after Shiite Muslim fighters seized two soldiers in a deadly border raid, would end only when the group ceased to be a threat.

"We will end it when the threat over our heads is removed, when our kidnapped soldiers return to their homes and when we can live in security," Olmert said.

As the fighting looked set to intensify, diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire gathered pace after an Israeli attack on the Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday killed 52 people, mainly women and children, and triggered international outrage.

The five permanent UN Security Council members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- held their first official consultations to prepare a resolution on the war, although there has still been no formal call for a ceasefire.

Ambassadors from the five major countries were also due to meet with UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan Tuesday.

US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice flew back to Washington on Monday after a weekend visit to Israel overshadowed by the carnage in Qana, saying she was convinced that "an urgent ceasefire and a lasting settlement" could be achieved this week.

The plans centre on the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon but Israel has warned that any halt to its offensive into southern Lebanon would allow Hezbollah guerrillas to regroup and rearm.

Olmert had however told her that his army would need another 10 days to 12 weeks to cripple Hezbollah, which has been a thorn in Israel's side for years.

"If there is an immediate ceasefire, the extremists will immediately rear their heads," Defence Minister Amir Peretz told a stormy parliament session.

Encouraged by the temporary halt in air bombardments, however brief, tens of thousands of villagers fled southern Lebanon, the Hezbollah heartland which has borne the brunt of the onslaught.

Carrying piles of luggage, mattresses and blankets on car roofs or pickup trucks, people streamed from mountain villages toward the coastal highway leading north to Beirut.

Lebanon was in mourning after what many in the Arab world were calling the Qana "massacre", the biggest single loss of life since Israel unleashed its firepower on its northern neighbour.

Qana, where Jesus is said to have turned water into wine, achieved martyr status after an Israeli attack on a UN base there in 1996 killed 105 people, and the new raid prompted an outpouring of anger around the world.

Rescue teams were searching for bodies still under the ruins of a shelter levelled by Israel forces as personal possessions, bags, and clothes of the dead, were piled up outside.

Flags flew at half-mast throughout Lebanon and banks and public institutions were closed in memory of the victims of what one Beirut newspaper charged was "butchery."

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora denounced the Qana carnage as a "war crime" and Hezbollah vowed that "this horrible massacre... will not remain unpunished."

But the Shiite militant group reined in its rocket attacks during Monday's Israeli lull. Israeli officials said that compared with 156 rockets on Sunday -- a record number for a single day -- just two shells hit the Jewish state on Monday.

Angry demonstrators took to the streets in several Arab capitals, some burning Israeli flags and denouncing the US administration for its staunch backing of Israel.

Lebanon says 750 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Israeli offensive, which has also displaced hundreds of thousands and laid waste to much of the country's infrastructure.

An AFP count has put the death toll at 530, while the
United Nations has said around one-third of the casualties were children. A total of 51 Israelis have been killed, most of them soldiers.

The UN Security Council met immediately after the attack on Qana to adopt a resolution which, in unusually emotional language, expressed its "extreme shock and distress" at the casualties.

But it stopped short both of condemning Israel and of calling for a ceasefire after the United States rejected a draft describing the attack on Qana as "deliberate".

Annan had appealed to the council to call for an immediate ceasefire, and warned Israel and Hezbollah they were both likely guilty of "grave breaches of international humanitarian law".

President George W. Bush said the United States was working "urgently" to end the conflict, but again resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire and avoided criticism of Israel.

Bush also set out what he called "clear objectives" for a lasting peace, including the deployment of a multinational force to bolster humanitarian efforts and to help the Lebanese government take control of the conflict zone.

France has already distributed a draft UN resolution which calls for a ceasefire and political settlement but the United States is working on its own proposal.

But efforts to put together an international force suffered a setback when the United Nations postponed a Monday meeting of potential troop contributors while details of a peace plan were hammered out by the major powers.

Israel pointed the finger at archfoe Iran, saying it pulled the strings of the Shiite militia.

"We are battling Hezbollah, which is nothing but the vanguard of the extremist regime in Tehran that finances and encourages its murderous activities," Peretz said.

But French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, who has insisted Iran must be a part of the solution, held talks with his counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki in Beirut Monday and talked up Iran's "stabilising role" in the region.

At the United Nations, Israeli and Lebanese delegates sparred at a special Security Council debate on the conflict.

"We owe our people an honorable way out of this war," said Lebanon's acting foreign minister Tarek Mitri.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, retorted that Israel "has been repeatedly forced to act, not against Lebanon, but against the forces and the monstrosity which Lebanon has allowed itself to be taken hostage by."

Lebanese security sources said Israeli aircraft hit Bayyada and Mansoureh.

Israeli jets also struck eastern Lebanon and roads leading to Syria.

Hezbollah fighters said in a statement that they had beaten back some of the advances in southern Lebanon.

Resistance

"The Israeli forces started from Monday night until the early hours of Tuesday morning to try to take control of the triangle of Aita al-Chaab/al-Qaozah/Ramie villages but Hezbollah fighters confronted them ... forcing them to retreat," the statement said.

Aita al-Chaab is near the Lebanese border from where Hezbollah fighters entered Israel on July 12 and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others.

The movement said Israeli troops were trying to take control of a hill overlooking all three villages.

Hezbollah has also said it has destroyed an Israeli warship off the coast of Tyre. Israel has denied the claim.

The Israeli army said it had killed 20 Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon over the past 48 hours.

An army spokeswoman said: "We have killed 20 Hezbollah terrorists during the past two days in the sectors of Taibe and Al-Adeissa."

Hezbollah said it had lost three men during the fighting.

Arab TV channel Al-Arabiya reported that three Israeli soldiers had been killed in the area.

Further advance

A senior Israeli official has said the Israeli army will move deeper into southern Lebanon and hold on to that territory for several weeks, until a multinational force can deploy there.

Israel Radio, Israel Army Radio and a Israeli goverment official said ground forces would reach the Litani River, about 30km north of the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Ephraim Sneh, a senior Labour Party politician, indirectly confirmed the planned push to Litani in an interview.

Asked by Israel Radio how long troops would hold on to territory up to the Litani, Sneh said: "We are not talking about days we are talking about longer, but not about months."

Sneh, a former deputy defence minister, spoke hours after Israel's security cabinet approved a broader ground offensive into southern Lebanon.

However, two other government officials said the cabinet approved taking only a smaller area of land, a strip about seven kilometres from the border.

She argued that world powers could use a resolution to move on from the arguments about the timing of a ceasefire.

"It's time, everybody has said urgent, some people have said immediate, I would hope we are now going to do the work to put in place the conditions for a ceasefire ... My hope is we will have it during this week."

Despite failing to stop the fighting, Rice earlier said in Jeruslam that she believed she had managed to underpin a future lasting peace.

"As I head back to Washington, I take with me an emerging consensus on what is necessary for both an urgent ceasefire and a lasting settlement," Rice said.

"I am convinced we can achieve both this week," said Rice, who laid out broad principles of a proposed deal, but did not discuss the exact measures that would be adopted to put it in place.

She also did not address the issue of the return of Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah guerrillas on July 12 sparked Israel's offensive, or of those prisoners the militia wants released from Israeli jails.

Rice welcomed Israel's adoption of a 48-hour suspension of air strikes in southern Lebanon after the raid on the village of Qana that killed 52 people, more than half of them children.



And she said she hoped a parallel 24-hour period allowing people to leave the area could be extended.

The three-part plan would include a ceasefire, the political principles that provide for a long-term settlement and the authorization of an international force to help the Lebanese army keep the peace.

Rice was expected to travel to New York later in the week to push her peace plan at the United Nations -- but faced the prospect of a new debate with France, which has its own draft resolution.

The French draft "calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities" -- a key difference with the Washington plan, which forsees elements of a permanent peace fusing together to create conditions for an ultimate ceasefire.

Rice said that in talks with Israeli and Lebanese officials in her double-pronged peace mission over the past eight days, she had found consensus on key issues.

Among them was the need for Lebanon to be able to expand its authority over the whole of the country -- a goal that would require the deployment of the international force, she said.

Rice also said she found broad agreement that there should be an arms embargo enforced against weapons delivery to anyone other than the Lebanese forces or the international force.

"No foreign forces will be allowed unless specifically authorized by the government of Lebanon and Lebanon should, assisted as appropriate by the international community, disarm armed groups," she said in Jerusalem.

Under the proposed agreement Lebanon would agree to respect the UN-demarcated Blue Line between Lebanon and Israel, and the Lebanese armed forces should deploy to the border.

"These are important, yet temporary measures. An urgent and more permanent end to this violence is something that we all want, and that we must work together to achieve," Rice said.

"To make a cease fire more than words alone, the international community must be prepared to support and sustain it."

US critics in that world community argue however that there will be no peace without bargaining with Hezbollah and sponsors Syria and Iran, a step Rice refused to take.

They also doubt whether the Lebanese government can force Hezbollah to disarm and assail Washington for its staunch support for Israel which they accuse of a "disproportionate" response to agression from Hezbollah.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"

Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country begun on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as "an ugly crime".

Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.

No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire - a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.

Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun - close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil - and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorised - and terror is the word they used - by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.

Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and - when they do - they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses - just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?

Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

The conflict was triggered by a Hizbullah operation in which two Israeli soldiers were captured and three killed. Let's be frank, this wasn't exactly the Tet offensive. It certainly didn't justify Israel's ferocious onslaught against the very fabric of Lebanese society. Yes, the rocket attacks on Haifa are an appalling crime, but they followed rather than preceded Israel's decision to escalate the fighting. They cannot provide retrospective justification for Israeli strategy.

The crisis has also been accompanied by the selective and often inappropriate use of the term "terrorism". Following the Israeli government, George Bush and Tony Blair were at it again on Friday, blaming "terrorists" for sparking the conflict. The purpose behind this is obvious enough. In the context of America's war on terror, anyone claiming to be engaged in the fight against this most contested of notions gets carte blanche to do as they please. But the result has been to politicise the term in ways that render it effectively useless as a category of moral judgment or policy analysis.

It is certainly true that Hizbullah has been linked to a string of classic terrorist attacks going back more than 20 years, including suicide bombings against civilian targets, hostage-taking and the hijacking of a TWA flight. A particularly vile example was the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were murdered. Hizbullah strongly denies involvement, but the truth is probably murkier than either side pretends. Responsibility for these attacks has often been attributed to Hizbullah's External Security Organisation (ESO), a unit believed to be under the operational control of Iranian intelligence rather than the Hizbullah's Lebanese leadership. Britain is one country that draws this distinction, proscribing ESO, but not Hizbullah itself, under the Terrorism Act.



Interestingly, some of the earliest suicide bombings commonly attributed to Hizbullah, such as the 1983 attacks on the US embassy and marine barracks in Beirut, were believed by American intelligence sources at the time to have been orchestrated by the Iraqi Dawa party.



Hizbullah barely existed in 1983 and Dawa cadres are said to have been instrumental in setting it up at Tehran's behest. Dawa's current leadership includes none other than the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, feted last week in London and Washington as the great hope for the future of the Middle East. As the old saying goes, today's terrorist is tomorrow's statesman - at least when it suits us.

None of this should be read as exonerating Hizbullah of the charge that it uses terrorist tactics. Irrespective of anything else, the use of Katyusha rockets against Israeli population centres is clearly intended to inflict terror and suffering on civilians. It deserves a response. But the allegations of terrorism levelled at Hizbullah (as well as Hamas and other groups) by America and Israel go well beyond the targeting of non-combatants. The US state department's annual reports on terrorism also list operations carried out against the Israeli Defence Force as examples of terrorism. The US government justifies this conclusion by way of a logical contortion that defines Israeli troops as "non-combatants", despite the fact that Israel continues to occupy territory in Lebanon and Palestine with military force. The intention is not just to stamp out terrorism as commonly understood, but also to stigmatise perfectly legitimate acts of resistance.

Terrorism has always been extraordinarily difficult to define, but the American approach lacks any pretence at objectivity, thus making the term utterly meaningless. Used in this way, terrorism becomes simply "political violence of which we disapprove". The answer, of course, must not be to abandon any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong in the use of force. There need to be standards if we are to prevent the free-for-all of violence without limit. But these standards must be disinterested, legitimate and robust. As it happens, most of what we need is adequately provided for in international humanitarian law. Numerous treaties and judgments from the Geneva conventions onwards set out quite detailed rules governing the use of force, including the principles of proportionality and civilian immunity.

Under international law, there can be no doubt that many of the actions carried out by Hizbullah and Hamas constitute war crimes that must be punished. The reason it has been disregarded for the purposes of fighting terrorism is that, rather inconveniently for the governments concerned, it applies to states as well as non-state groups. Accepting it would leave them open to unwanted scrutiny and possibly even prosecution for war crimes of their own. In the case of the Israeli government, it isn't hard to see why. Israeli doctrine eschews the principle of proportionality in favour of massive retaliation, as has been amply demonstrated in Lebanon and Gaza.

Despite Israel's protestations that it is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties, it is clear that its military strategy is aimed at maximising the suffering of the Lebanese people as a whole. This was declared quite openly on day one of the campaign, when Israel's chief of staff, General Dan Halutz, promised to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years", and confirmed again yesterday with the horrific slaughter at Qana. The approach is identical to the one taken in similar operations in 1996 and 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin admitted: "The goal of the operation is to get the southern Lebanese population to move northward, hoping that this will tell the Lebanese government something about the refugees, who may get as far north as Beirut." Populations will move like this only if they are in fear of their lives.

The same applies to Gaza, where the pretence at discrimination is even thinner and Palestinian civilians are being subjected to a brutal siege and acts of violence that have no military justification. As in Lebanon, the intention is to force civilians to turn on the militias by inflicting as much pain and suffering as the Israeli government thinks it can get away with. What is this if it is not terrorism? It is certainly a war crime. So let's hear no more hypocritical utterances about the evils of terrorism from Bush and Blair. Not until they are able to speak with genuine moral authority by condemning all forms of illegal violence, irrespective of who commits them.

Three of my colleagues went to Tyre today.

I will spare you the details of what they saw and wrote. There's only one thing that I need to share with you. Saada went to Jabal Amel hospital where she found a four year old boy, Hassan Chalhoub, who had spent the previous night in the morgue between the dead. He had been sleeping next to his sister, six-year-old Zeinab, in the shelter in Qana. There with him were his mom and his dad, who's confined to a wheelchair. Many of the people of Qana are survivors of the 1996 massacre, when 110 people were killed and more than 100 were injured when by Israeli raids on civilians who had sought shelter in a nearby UN base. Thus, many of the people of Qana have special needs.

Hassan was sleeping when it all happened Saturday night. His mom was injured, but she managed to find her way under the rubble and was looking for her kids. She called him, and he answered her. She asked him if he was injured and he said no. So, she went to look for her daughter and husband. She found her daughter's hand. She tried to take her out, to pull her up. She couldn't. Then she saw her husband, so she crawled to him. But before that, she caressed her daughter's hand and whispered to her, "forgive me my angel because I can't help you out of here."

She saved her husband, thinking that someone had already taken care of little Hassan.

She and her husband spent the rest of the night in the closest house, where the civil defense workers had taken them. The next morning, they took them to the hospital.

Hassan was thought dead. They put him where they put the other kids. He woke up in the morning and opened his eyes to see a two-year-old girl lying next to him. He thought she sleeping. He looked around, and luckily found a man. "Ammo, what am I doing here?" he asked. The man couldn't believe his eyes.

He took Hassan to his parents. When Hassan saw his mom, he started yelling at her, "Why did you leave me there alone, sleeping with our neighbor's kids? How could you? You know, if I weren't scared I would have followed you home. But it was dark and they were shelling, so I slept again. Where is Zeinab?"

His mother, Rabab, told him the following: "She's having fun in heaven. There are no Israelis there. She's happy there."

Just as the assault ordered by Peres in 1996 turned out to be a strategic defeat for Israel, so too does Israel's present action in Lebanon appear to be turning out the same way.

In Haaretz today, veteran israeli strategic analyst Zeev Schiff writes (and sorry, no link) that Condi Rice,

needs military cards, and unfortunately Israel has not succeeded to date in providing her with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah and Lebanon under fire, all of Israel's military cards at this stage are in the form of two Lebanese villages near the border that have been captured by the IDF.
If the military cards Israel is holding do not improve with the continuation of the fighting, it will result in a diplomatic solution that will leave the Hezbollah rocket arsenal in southern Lebanon in its place. The diplomatic solution will necessarily be a reflection of the military realities on the ground.

I find these words interesting from a number of perspectives. First, Schiff is admitting that-- for all the destruction Israel has rained on the Lebanese citizenry over the past 17 days-- still, they have been able to take and hold only two Lebanese villages. (I note that he seems to measure "military cards" almost wholly in terms of facts established on the ground, an analytical judgment that I agree with.)

Second, he seems clearly to be urging the Israeli military command to establish more "facts on the ground" than they already have.

Third, he is writing from the clear premise that there is close coordination between the Bush administration's diplomacy and Israel's military actions. In one sense, we all know this to be true at this point. The Bushites have clearly been holding up the attempts to get a ceasefire as a way of giving the Israeli assault more time to continue. But Schiff is saying something a little different from this. He is saying not so much that American diplomacy has been buttressing Israel's military interests as that Israel's assault has been serving the Bushites' broader diplomatic interests (even if, from his perspective, they have not yet done so enough.)

Schiff is a very smart and well-informed person, but on occasion he acts a bit as a mouthpiece for the Israeli military's propaganda. Is the Israeli military now trying to tell the world that they have been doing everything they've been doing over the past 17 days as a "service" to the Bush administration?

Anyway, as I've written before, for every day this fighting continues, the death and suffering will continue. In Qana, elsewhere in Lebanon and Palestine, and in Israel (though on a far smaller scale). The idea that all this suffering does anything to "serve" the interests of the US citizenry is outrageous.

(I'm enroute back to the US, currently overnighting in London. This slaughter in Qana, once again, is deeply disturbing. I'm still trying to get my head around it. I do know that Shimon Peres and his commanders were never ever held accountable for the Qana slaughter of 1996. I interviewed him in 1998 and asked him about it. He tried to blow off all responsibility for it, saying something to the effect that "We told the Lebanese to leave south Lebanon on that occasion so everything we did after that was quite legal and okay." They've used this "warning people to leave their homes" PR maneuver again this time. It does not exculpate the Israeli commanders and leaders one iota and certainly provides no excuse under international law for their actions. It's an outrage: people-- including vulnerable young families, elders, and the sick, should be ordered away from their homes on the whim of a foreign military? And then, how on earth are they supposed to leave in safety if no safe access is afforded them? The whole argument is deeply manipulative and dishonest.)

Promising during a special session of the Knesset that Israeli forces would "expand and deepen [their] operations against Hezbollah", the Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, intimated there would be no let-up by Israel until a multinational force was mandated to use its weapons against Hezbollah if the group broke the terms of any ceasefire agreement.

But amid rising uncertainty about the direction of the war - one leading Israeli commentator yesterday described Mr Peretz as "stupid" - Israel saw time on its side because efforts to formulate a peace plan at the United Nations are stalling.

The Hezbollah militia, whose kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers sparked the war, also dug in, warning it would not accept the presence of an international security force on Lebanese territory.

As the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, left Jerusalem on Monday, she was upbeat about the prospect of putting a peace plan in place this week. But in-flight to Washington, that confidence seemed to ebb as she told reporters: "I can't tell you when to pack just yet ... We're working very hard to make it this week."

There are two stumbling blocks at the UN - the timing of a ceasefire within a greater peace plan and the perception that the US is dragging its heals to allow Israel more time as it tries to diminish Hezbollah as a fighting force.

But in judging the progress of the war, Michael Oren, of Israel's Shalem think tank, said: "Israel started this crisis with the most favourable diplomatic position it has ever had in its history, and over the course of three weeks the Olmert Government has managed to squander that advantage".

Israel, with strong US backing, is demanding any international force must take up its positions on the border before it will stop fighting. Other countries, led by France, are insisting that there has to be a halt to the war before any big-picture plan can the finalised.

The diplomatic logjam forced the cancellation of a UN-convened meeting of countries likely to make up the force - France, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Norway, Indonesia, Turkey and Egypt. The most fraught issue on their proposed agenda was the rules of engagement, particularly the extent to which they would have to fight Hezbollah.

Central to the UN debate is a requirement that Lebanon's security forces must be backed in extending Beirut's authority to the south of the country - a near-autonomous Hezbollah enclave - but weakness and sectarian splits in the Lebanese Army virtually guarantee it will be the foreign forces that engage Hezbollah.

Like Hezbollah, the Lebanese forces are mainly Shiite and in the past have crumbled in the face of Hezbollah aggression and manipulation of their sectarian loyalty.

Combined with political inertia in Beirut, this Lebanese reality cuts the ground from under claims like that made by President George Bush on Monday: "Lebanon's democratic government must be empowered to exercise sole authority over its territory."

Calling for "a long-lasting peace, one that is sustainable" over what Washington sees as a short-term ceasefire, Mr Bush again shaped the conflict as part of a global battle between good and evil: "The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East."

But as he directed his verbal fire at Syria and Iran, Hezbollah's chief sponsors, the French Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, was dining with his Iranian counterpart in Beirut and praising Iran as "a great country, a great people, and a great civilisation which is respected and which plays a stabilising role in the region".

A 48-hour halt to Israeli air strikes, which ends at 2am local time today, was partially observed by Israel and Hezbollah. In a remarkably cynical explanation of the Israeli response to the slaughter in Qana, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official said Israel had to offer the suspension to "take the steam" out of the reaction to the mass civilian killings at Qana.

As the confirmed death toll there reached 49, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, admitted the sloppiness of the Israeli targeting at Qana. He said the rocket launcher they were targeting was a full 300 metres from the apartments that were demolished - a distance commanders believed avoided the risk of hitting the building in which up to 60 are thought to have died.

Writing in Yediot Aharonot on Monday, the columnist Nahum Barnea challenged the carte-blanche bombing of civilian homes that were believed to be stores for Hezbollah weapons.

He defended Israel's right to strike at Hezbollah and acknowledged the inevitability of civilian casualties in war, but wrote: "The question is how and at what cost? ... A blanket directive [by Mr Peretz] regarding the entire civilian population of southern Lebanon and the Shiite neighbourhoods of Beirut is a hasty and light-headed act, which courts disaster. We saw the outcome of this yesterday, in the bodies of the women and children that were taken out of the bombed house in Qana."