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Bush sends Rice back to Middle East for new talks

Posted on: Friday, 28 July 2006, 15:30 CDT

By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will return to the Middle East on Saturday to discuss a United Nations resolution to end the 17-day-old war between Israel and Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas.

President George W. Bush told a Washington news conference on Friday, after talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that an international force should be sent quickly to southern Lebanon to secure shipments of humanitarian aid.

Blair said a U.N. resolution was needed as soon as possible to end hostilities.

The two leaders met in Washington after a day that saw Israeli forces kill at least 17 people in Lebanon and Hizbollah launch new, longer-range missiles at Israel.

Rice had said she would return to the Middle East only when the time was right for a lasting solution to end the crisis.

The war, which has caused at least 462 mostly civilian deaths in Lebanon, and 51 in Israel, erupted after Hizbollah seized two Israeli soldiers in a border raid on July 12.

Israel, with support from Washington, wants the Shi'ite group to be driven from the border and disarmed.

Rice was in Kuala Lumpur after visiting Lebanon and Israel earlier in the week and attending a conference in Rome that stopped short of calling for the violence to end immediately. Bush said she would return to the Middle East on Saturday.

"Her instructions are to work with Israel and Lebanon to come up with an acceptable U.N. Security Council resolution that we can table next week," he said.

A LOT OF WORK

U.S. officials said there was still a lot of work to do to get the two sides to sign on to conditions for a ceasefire.

Issues on the table include the release of the two captured Israeli soldiers as part of a prisoner exchange, the creation of an international force on the border between southern Lebanon and Israel, and the disarming of Hizbollah.

On Friday, aircraft repeatedly bombed villages near Lebanon's southern port of Tyre and Israeli artillery fired hundreds of rounds across the border, killing at least 13 people including a Jordanian.

Four people were killed in about 70 air strikes in the eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanese security sources said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said at least 15 Hizbollah guerrillas were killed in fighting in the town of Bint Jbeil, bringing the total number of Hizbollah guerrillas killed to more than 200. There was no confirmation from Hizbollah which gives the total number of its fighters killed as 31.

Hizbollah fired scores of rockets into Israel, including at least one that the guerrilla group said was a new, longer-range missile, in a barrage that wounded 13 people, police said.

The longer-range rockets landed in open ground near the town of Afula, about 50 km (30 miles) from the Lebanese border. It matched the furthest that Hizbollah rockets had landed inside Israel since the conflict began.

Hizbollah said it had fired new "Khaibar 1" missiles at Afula, fulfilling a pledge by its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to extend its bombardment of Israel beyond the port of Haifa.

STRANDED CIVILIANS

Israeli media reported that a Hizbollah rocket hit a clinic in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya but caused no injuries.

An Israeli shell exploded near an aid convoy in south Lebanon, wounding at least three people, witnesses said.

The convoy, organized by Lebanese civil defense workers, was evacuating stranded civilians from Rmeish village to Tyre. Hundreds of Shi'ites had taken refuge in the Christian village, where some were reduced to drinking irrigation water.

"We are with the resistance," Fatmeh Srour told Reuters. "But we need supplies to remain steadfast. My three-month-old baby hasn't eaten for two days because there's no baby milk."

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland asked for a 72-hour pause in the fighting to enable relief workers to evacuate the elderly, the young and the wounded from southern Lebanon and to send in emergency aid supplies.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men," he said.

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, the existing U.N. peacekeeping force in the south, said it had withdrawn eight unarmed military observers from two posts on the border.

One of its observer posts was destroyed on Tuesday in an Israeli air strike that killed its four occupants. A second post was vacated earlier after an observer was wounded by Hizbollah gunfire in the border village of Maroun al-Ras.

Source: REUTERS

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