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Syri a told visiting United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan that Israel must withdraw from southern Lebanon and end its blockade of the country as part of the UN's cease-fire resolution.

“Talks underlined the necessity of preserving the cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon as well as lifting the maritime and air blockade imposed on Lebanon as it constitutes a violation of resolution 1701,” the official Sana news agency said late yesterday after Annan met Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem in Damascus.

Annan, who meets Syrian President Bashar al-Assad today, is in the region to win support for the Security Council resolution that ended a 33-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim group supported by Syria and Iran.

The resolution calls for the deployment of UN and Lebanese soldiers in southern Lebanon to act as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel wants the troops deployed on the Lebanese-Syrian border to stop Hezbollah receiving weapons, a move that Assad said last week would create a ``state of hostility'' between Syria and Lebanon.

Annan and Moallem stressed the need for the UN to play its role in ``working to achieve a just settlement in the region based on the return of land for peace formula,'' Sana reported.

Iran and Syria are still trying to smuggle arms to Hezbollah across the Syrian-Lebanese border, Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday. The weapons include Russian-made anti-tank missiles, Syrian and Iranian-made rockets and Iranian rocket-launchers, she said.

“The air and naval blockade continues to stop any smuggling attempts but the land route is not sealed,” Eisin said in a telephone interview. “Israel continues to stress the centrality of the embargo as an integral part of Resolution 1701.''

Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by the US and Israel, is refusing to lay down its weapons in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, approved in 2004, which calls for the disarming and disbanding of militias in Lebanon. The group has been blamed for rocket attacks on Israel, bombings in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 US Marines and 58 French soldiers, and an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed 85 people. It denies involvement in the bombings.

UN resolution 1701 calls for an international force of 15 000 soldiers to police Lebanon's border area with Israel alongside a Lebanese Army contingent of equal size. European Union nations have pledged about 7 000 soldiers to the expanded UN Interim Force in Lebanon. The resolution ordered a cease-fire that went into effect August 14.

Israeli forces yesterday pulled troops out of southern Lebanon, reducing Israel's presence to an area about a third of what it occupied during fighting with Hezbollah, an army spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity.

The conflict began July 12 when Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border attack, prompting Israeli air and ground attacks in Lebanon. Hezbollah fired rockets that struck towns and cities in northern Israel. The fighting killed more than 1 200 people in Lebanon and 159 people in Israel.

Donors led by the US, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait yesterday pledged $940-million to help Lebanon rebuild roads, bridges and homes destroyed in the war.

Forty-eight nations and a dozen organizations, including the UN, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, attended a conference yesterday in Stockholm. The pledges exceed the $540-million the Lebanese government estimated is needed in immediate aid to provide shelter for those displaced, restore power, repair roads and bridges in the south, clean up environmental damage and clear unexploded ordnance.

Almost 1 million people were displaced, and 15 000 homes and 630 km of highways were damaged, according to the US Agency for International Development in Lebanon. It put the cost of reconstruction at $3-billion, or a sixth of the eastern Mediterranean nation's gross domestic product.

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