MIDDLE EAST: Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday it was "too early" to discuss the idea of an international peacekeeping force in south Lebanon.
He accused Hizbullah and Iran of co-ordinating the abduction of two Israeli soldiers last week by militants belonging to the Shia organisation - the incident that sparked the current fighting - to help Tehran divert attention from its nuclear programme.
While diplomatic efforts to end the spiralling violence continued, so did the fighting: Israel again bombed targets in Lebanon, killing 31 people yesterday, including nine family members in a single strike, and bringing the overall death toll to 235.
Hizbullah continued its rocket barrage yesterday, killing one person as 80 rockets fell on towns in northern Israel in the space of an hour. The Israeli death toll since the fighting began last week rose to 25.
In a statement released by his office, Mr Olmert said that Hizbullah-Iranian collusion had worked. "Unfortunately this Iranian trick succeeded," he said. "The G8 decision focused on Lebanon and did not deal with the Iranian issue."
Referring to the idea of an international force, he said that while the "headlines sound good", Israel's experience has shown that "this is an idea without any basis . . . I want to be cautious on this issue and it seems to me that it's too early to discuss it." Earlier in the day, foreign minister Tzipi Livni had intimated Israel might accept a temporary international force in south Lebanon. "We will consider other solutions put forward," she said, after meeting with a special UN delegation.
Ms Livni, who called the current United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) in the south "ineffective and irrelevant", said that any solution would have to allow Israel to respond to future attacks. Israel's hesitancy in accepting an international force stems from a fear that such an arrangement will limit its ability to react to an attack and will also place it in a compromising position, with soldiers in an international force putting themselves in danger to protect Israeli lives.
Government officials say that Israel will not accept the situation that existed before the fighting erupted, when Hizbullah militants moved freely along the border and some 12,000 rockets were positioned in south Lebanon, aimed at Israel. A key concern, the officials say, is that Hizbullah will use a ceasefire to rearm and re-establish its threat to Israel.
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was vague yesterday about when she might travel to the region to help mediate an end to the conflict. "When it is appropriate and when it is necessary and will be helpful to the situation, I am more than pleased to go to the region," she said.
Israeli officials have been working on the assumption that the arrival of Ms Rice will signal the end of the military offensive.
In Lebanon, nine members of a single family, including children, were killed in an airstrike that hit their house in a village in south Lebanon. Israeli planes also bombed a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut yesterday, killing 11 soldiers and wounding 30.
In the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, a man was killed when he was hit by a Katyusha rocket as he headed for a nearby bomb shelter. Earlier yesterday, Hizbullah again targeted the northern port city of Haifa, with rockets hitting the railway depot in which eight people were killed in an attack on Sunday. Since the start of the fighting, Hizbullah has fired over 700 rockets at towns in northern Israel.
Israeli military officials said the air force had stepped up its bombardment of underground bunkers in a Hizbullah stronghold in south Beirut where they believe the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has taken refuge.
A senior officer also said Hizbullah was smuggling weapons from Syria into Lebanon, but added that Israel did not plan to target Damascus.