Hizbullah forces are battling up to 6,000 Israeli troops on five fronts in south Lebanon, escalating a conflict which Israel's prime minister vowed to pursue until a strong international force arrived.
Israeli commandos snatched suspected Hizbullah members from Lebanon's ancient city of Baalbek in a helicopter-borne night raid backed by air strikes that killed 19 people, including four children.
A rocket fired by Hizbullah guerrillas killed one person in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya. It was the first fatality from a Hizbullah rocket strike in more than a week.
One round even struck the occupied West Bank, marking the furthest distance Hizbullah rockets have ever reached south of the Lebanese border. In all, police said 155 rockets had been fired from Lebanon towards Israel, making it one of the busiest days of rocket fire so far in the three-week-old conflict.
Hizbollah has fired about 1,700 rockets from Lebanon into Israel in the past three weeks, killing 19 civilians and wounding hundreds.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) would keep fighting Hizbullah in south Lebanon until peacekeepers arrived.
Elderly Lebanese are evacuated to safety in a Red Cross ambulance, from the southern village of Srifa
Mr Olmert said he wanted the international force to be mandated to enforce a UN resolution calling for Hizbollah to be disarmed, adding that Israel had already destroyed much of the Shia group's military capacity.
"If indeed, as we hope, the international force will be an effective force made of combat units, then we will be able to stop fire when the international force will be on the ground in the south part of Lebanon," Mr Olmert said. Asked if that meant Israel would carry on fighting until then, he said: "Yes."
Israel is seeking to damage Hizbullah as much as it can before diplomacy ends the war. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a ceasefire could be reached within days.
But the UN Security Council has yet to agree on a mandate for any international force and a French diplomatic source said France would not attend a meeting of potential troop contributors at the United Nations in New York tomorrow.
France has been touted to lead the force, but it wants a truce and an agreement on a framework for a permanent ceasefire before any troops deploy. That is at odds with the US-Israeli view that the ceasefire can wait until the force moves in.
Israel has sent mixed signals on the duration and scale of its offensive in Lebanon, but it already has sent thousands of troops across the border to tackle Hizbullah.
Lebanese security sources reported fierce battles on five fronts in the south. Israeli artillery fire pounded frontier villages as tank-led forces pushed in. Guerrillas were firing back mortars, anti-tank rockets and machineguns.
Hizbullah said it had destroyed four tanks and a military bulldozer. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.
Three Lebanese army soldiers were also killed in a separate Israeli air strike in south Lebanon, security sources said.
Fighting raged for four hours around Baalbek in eastern Lebanon after the Israelis landed near a previously evacuated Hizbollah-run hospital, supported by helicopters firing missiles and heavy machineguns.
The Israeli army said commandos seized five suspected Hizbullah militants before returning safely to base. Hizbullah denied any of its militants were taken, while Lebanon said the men captured were civilians.
It was the first helicopter-borne assault deep inside Lebanon in the conflict that flared after Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12th.
At least 13 civilians were killed when Israeli warplanes hit Jammaliyeh, a village near Baalbek, where five family members were found in the rubble of their house, security sources said. Another family of five died in a strike on the village of Saath. One motorist was killed by a strike in Hermel to the north.
After the Israeli commandos left, air strikes destroyed the three-storey al-Hikmah hospital.
The raid on Baalbek, 100 kilometres inside Lebanon, followed the expiry of a 48-hour bombing pause agreed by Israel under US pressure after an air strike killed 54 civilians, including 37 children, in the southern village of Qana.
The latest violence shattered a partial lull in Israeli bombing and erupted despite international diplomacy aimed at halting the three-week-old war in which at least 646 people in Lebanon and 54 Israelis have been killed.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a ceasefire could be reached within days. "This week is entirely possible. Certainly we are talking about days not weeks," she said in Washington last night after meeting with Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Mr Peres said the Israeli military campaign would take "a matter of weeks, not months."