The UN Security Council met in an emergency session yesterday to discuss an Israeli attack on a suspected Palestinian militant camp north of Damascus as tensions in the Middle East reached the boiling point.

Council members were not expected to vote before today on a demand from Syria that the council condemn the most serious Israeli attack on that country in three decades, calling it a "flagrant violation by Israel of international laws and a new and serious escalation" in the tense Middle East.

Israel called the attack a legitimate act of self-defense against a state that supports terrorists.

A draft resolution presented by Syria "strongly condemns the military aggression carried by Israel against the sovereignty and territory of the Syrian Arab Republic ... in violation of the charter of the United Nations, the rules and principles of international law and relevant Security Council resolutions," says a copy obtained by a publication.

The draft also calls on the Security Council to declare the attack a violation of a 1974 disengagement deal between Israel and Syria and to demand Israel not act in a way that threatens regional security.

The draft would task UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to report to the council in a month on Israel's compliance.

Earlier, Annan warned of escalating tensions in the wake of the Israeli airstrike, spokesperson Fred Eckhard said, urging all parties in the region "to respect the rules of international law and to exercise restraint".

Imad Mustafa, Syria's acting ambassador in the US, told CNN Damascus was counting on the United Nations to solve the crisis.

"We have made a strategic option for peace. This is what we want," Mustafa said.

"We are going to the United Nations because we believe that the United Nations Security Council is the only internationally legitimate venue to solve crises".

Israel's UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, criticised the council for rushing into session on the eve of the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur while ignoring repeated Palestinian attacks on Israel, calling it a double standard that puts the world body's credibility at risk.

"There are few better exhibits of state sponsorship of terrorism then the one provided by the Syrian regime," Gillerman said.

"For Syria to ask for a debate of the council is comparable only with the Taliban asking for such a debate after 9-11," he said, referring to the deadly terrorist attacks September 11, 2001, on the US.

"It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad." French Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere condemned the ongoing violence as "neither acceptable nor particularly effective," declaring the Israeli airstrike an "unacceptable violation of international law and rules of sovereignty".

Earlier, Israel said it had launched an air raid overnight on what it said was a training camp some 16 km northwest of Damascus used by the Palestinian militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

It was the deepest military strike by Israel inside Syria since the Yom Kippur war 30 years ago.

The area was sealed off by Syrian authorities and reporters and photographers stopped from entering.

Damascus said the attack hit a civilian area, causing material damage.

A Syrian official in Syrian-controlled eastern Lebanon said that Israel's target was an abandoned training camp used by a leftist Palestinian group.

The camp used to serve the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical group based in Damascus and headed by Ahmad Jibril, according to Lebanese shepherds who graze their flocks east of Baalbek, in an area bordering on the Syrian border.

The shepherds said that flares and flashes from bombs lit up the sky over that area during the night.

The strike was mounted the day after an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber blew herself up in a restaurant in Haifa, northern Israel, killing 19 other people. – Sapa-AFP.