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Israel fights Hizbollah, extends hand to Arafat

JERUSALEM: Israel plunged into a second week of war against Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon on Thursday while renewing Middle East peace moves at a planned summit with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Katyusha rockets from Lebanon pounded northern Israel again early on Thursday. No one was hurt. Israel hit back hours later, its fighter planes and artillery gunners pounding villages near the Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, witnesses said. At least one person was killed.

At Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Arafat planned to meet for the first time since a spate of Palestinian Moslem suicide bombings beginning on February 25 killed 59 people in Israel.

Israeli Tourism Minister Uzi Baram, a key player in Peres's Labour party, said: "Arafat is after all the only element in the Palestinian world...with whom we have begun talking and with whom we are going to continue.

"After all, everything that is happening around us doesn't stop our main aspiration to reach a situation in which we are able to go on with the peace accord," Baram told Israel Radio.

Israeli officials said Peres agreed to the meeting only after being satisfied Arafat had taken firm steps against Hamas, the Islamic movement that carried out the suicide bombings.

PLO officials said the two men would discuss Israel's closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, imposed after the first suicide bombing seven weeks ago, and Israel's troop withdrawal from Hebron postponed last month.

Peres has reassured the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that talks on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip will begin on schedule next month.

Hizbollah rejected a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire and Lebanon made clear it thought the proposal favoured Israel.

Israel has been cold to French diplomatic efforts, preferred by Beirut. French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette, proposing that Washington and Paris guarantee a ceasefire in southern Lebanon, was due back in Israel on Thursday.

The Israeli offensive has killed at least 35 people and wounded 156. About 50 Israelis have been hurt by Katyushas.

At the United Nations on Wednesday, Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin said his country did not have a timetable for its operation. He said it would stop when Hizbollah stopped firing into northern Israel.

Beilin, a dovish minister in Peres's office, said that after a recent night during which no rockets were fired into northern Israel "we decided perhaps we will not continue the process, as long as there are no Katyushas...Some hours later, they again shot Katyushas against Kiryat Shmona and the other cities in Galilee and we continued the operation."-Reuter