West African mediators hope to persuade Liberian President Charles Taylor to agree to a ceasefire in a final attempt to prevent a battle for the capital Monrovia.
The coastal city has come under fierce attack by the main rebel faction LURD for four days running, raising fears of a repeat of the tribal fighting that left Monrovia's streets littered with bodies in the 1990s.
Throughout the day, French special forces airlifted more than 500 foreign nationals, including US and European citizens, to safety.
With peace talks in Ghana adjourned until tomorrow, regional mediators set off for a diplomatic shuttle to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to muster support for a ceasefire between the rebels and Mr Taylor's forces.
Officials at the regional West African bloc ECOWAS, which is brokering the peace negotiations, said the mediators hope to meet Mr Taylor in Monrovia on Tuesday if it was safe enough for them to fly there.
The United Nations Security Council called on the warring sides "to immediately cease all hostilities and to give the current peace process a chance to succeed".
LURD says it has ordered its fighters - who are now some three miles from the centre of Monrovia - to stop their advance on the capital. It says the fighting of the past few days was provoked by loyalists trying to regain lost ground.
LURD and another rebel group, known as Model, control two-thirds of the country of three million. The rebels on Sunday gave President Taylor 72 hours to step down.
Pressure on the Liberian leader, a former warlord elected president in 1997 after a seven-year civil war, rose further last week as he was indicted for war crimes in nearby Sierra Leone by a UN-backed court.