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Isra el carried out air and artillery strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon as it ruled out staging a land offensive in the region.

Targets included missile launchers and apartment blocks and bridges that the military said are being used by terrorists. An air strike yesterday in the southern city of Tyre hit Hezbollah's missile command center that directed rocket attacks on Haifa, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported, without saying where it obtained the information.

Israel is pursuing a “policy of containment”, Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Israel will continue “intensive combat” to strike at Hezbollah's commander centers and infrastructure, the Security Cabinet said in a statement.

The Israeli government yesterday called up reserve forces as the military fights Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip, in operations that began after the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers. A total of 405 Lebanese and 51 Israelis have been killed since fighting in Lebanon began July 12.

Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have been killed.

“The military action has not come to an end and will continue a long as it's needed,” Israel's military Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said. “This battle may take time, and this is why we are not showing all of our cards immediately.''

As many as three divisions of reserves are being put on stand by, Halutz said. Any decision to activate the reserve forces will be taken by the full Cabinet, ministers decided yesterday. There are about 5 000 soldiers in each reserve division, Haaretz reported.

Israel is targeting Hezbollah bases with air strikes while staging a limited land incursion into southern Lebanon to root out the Muslim group's strongholds near the Israeli border.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday told members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that Israel will try to establish a two-kilometer strip from the border into southern Lebanon that is free of Hezbollah fighters so that light arms can't be used to hit Israeli towns, a government official who asked not to be identified said.

Southern Lebanon, adjacent to Israel's northern border, is controlled by Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Syria and Iran. A United Nations resolution calls for its disarmament and for the Lebanese army to take over the area.

Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a July 12 cross-border raid, sparking the conflict. Israel hasn't mounted a full-scale military attack on Lebanon or Hezbollah since its troops were pulled out of a swath of southern Lebanon held for 18 years until May 2000.

Hezbollah, formed in 1982, has claimed responsibility or been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombing that killed 241 US soldiers in Beirut, and the 1994 attack that killed 95 at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The US and Israel have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation.

Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri warned in a tape broadcast yesterday by al-Jazeera television that the terrorist network won't stand idly by as Israel carries out its offensive in Lebanon.

“I'm not surprised people who use terrorist tactics would start speaking out,” President George W. Bush told reporters at the White House. The US is “working hard” to solve the conflict, Bush said. “As soon as we can get this resolved, the better. But it must be real, and it can't be fake.”

In the Gaza Strip, 22 Palestinians were killed and more than 50 wounded yesterday in air strikes and tank attacks on northeast Gaza City, said Mo'aweya Hassanein, chief of emergency at the Health Ministry. He said that among the dead were four children under the age of 10, eight adult civilians and 10 militants.

Israel started its attack on Lebanon two weeks after it sent its forces into Gaza when a group led by the Islamic Hamas movement kidnapped a soldier in a cross-border raid on June 25. A total of 154 Palestinians have died in raids since then, the Palestinian Health Ministry said yesterday.

Hamas said yesterday there is no progress in negotiating the release of the soldier, 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit. The group wants all female Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18 freed from Israeli jails in exchange for Shalit being released.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, rasing Jewish settlements it established after seizing the area from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War.

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