The United Nations will try to deploy more peacekeepers in Lebanon as quickly as possible, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Israeli television tonight.
Mr Annan told Israel's Channel 2 he thought the process of meeting the terms of a Security Council resolution for a ceasefire, passed on Friday, could take weeks or months.
"We are trying to move them as quickly as possible...it may probably take weeks or months, but we are trying to move them as quickly as we can," Mr Annan said.
The interview was broadcast as Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was to fly to New York for talks with Annan on Wednesday to press Israel's demands to disarm Hizbullah guerrillas in Lebanon and free two soldiers they captured in a cross-border raid into Israel last month.
In line with the resolution that ended a month of fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hizbullah, the Lebanese army will begin moving 15,000 troops to south Lebanon on Thursday, a senior political source in Lebanon said today.
Israel's army chief, General Dan Halutz, said Israeli forces could complete their withdrawal in seven to 10 days.
The ceasefire resolution calls for the expansion of a UN peacekeeping force that has been in Lebanon since 1978, although plans for the larger force are still at an early stage.
Mr Annan's assessment seemed more optimistic than that of the commander of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, Major-General Alain Pellegrini, who told France's Le Monde newspaper it would take a year for an expanded force to reach full strength.
Asked by the Israeli reporter about disarming Hizbullah, Mr Annan said that this "is not directly part" of the force's job. However, he said the UN force "will help the government of Lebanon do the job".
Mr Annan urged all sides in the latest conflict to "be focused today on how we achieve a permanent peace and make sure that we don't have this sort of explosion either next year, six years from now, and deal with it once and for all".
He said Hizbullah guerrillas "should not have crossed the border to pick up the two Israeli soldiers" in a raid on July 12th that sparked the fighting. "This should not have happened."
Annan criticised Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israeli civilians during the was as a violation of international humanitarian law, but reiterated he had also accused Israel of "excessive use of force" in Lebanon.
He said the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hizbullah and another by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip in June must be released and they should be visited by the International Red Cross "to assure their families as to their condition and how they are doing".