Israeli commandos attacked the eastern Lebanon town of Baalbeck in the deepest raid into the country since fighting with Hezbollah began four weeks ago, the army said.

The Shiite terrorist group responded by firing a record 155 rockets into northern Israel, hitting cities including Acre, Dir al-Assad and Kiryat Shmona. One person was killed and 49 were injured, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said by phone.

“It is the highest number of rockets that have landed in Israel since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah fighters began on July 12,” Rosenfeld said. Israel July 31 halted air operations over Lebanon for two days after a raid on the town of Qana killed 62 civilians. The suspension ended at 2 a.m. Israeli time today.

Both Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamic group that triggered the fighting by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers July 12, say they won't stop their operations and end the conflict.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday Israel won't agree to a cease-fire until a strong multinational military force is deployed to contain Hezbollah.

“If we have to go deeper into Lebanon, then we'll go deeper,” Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, Israel's military chief of staff, told reporters in remarks broadcast from Beit Hillel, about five miles south of the Lebanese border. “If we have to go even deeper than that, we'll also be there.” Ground troops were operating today in southern Lebanon, engaging in “sporadic exchanges of fire,” after intense over night clashes in Baalbek, about 100 kilometers inside Lebanon, resulted in the death of five Hezbollah members and the capture of 11 others, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman said, anonymously by regulation.

Fighting in Baalbek lasted several hours after soldiers were brought in by helicopters, the army said. Israeli aircraft carried out at least five strikes before the landing took place.

Hezbollah's al-Manar TV denied any of the group's fighters were seized and said Israel is holding three Lebanese citizens not connected to the group.

Al-Manar said Hezbollah is trying to prevent Israeli forces from advancing toward the towns of Ayta a-Shab and Rmeich. The group, which claimed to have destroyed four Israeli tanks, said it fired rockets at the Israeli towns of Carmiel, Nahariya, Acre, Kiryat Shmona and Safed. Al-Manar said later that Misgav Am and Kefar Gila were also fired on.

Ground fighting remained mostly limited to Lebanese villages adjacent to Israel's border, an army spokeswoman said. Residents in villages near the Litani River, which is as much as 29 kilometers inside Lebanon, have been advised to leave, the army said.

An officer and two soldiers were killed and 25 soldiers injured yesterday in exchanges of fire with Hezbollah in Ayta a-Shab, one of the villages, the army said. The casualties brought the number of soldiers killed since the conflict started July 12 to 36, it said.

Between 70% and 80% of Hezbollah's missiles and rocket launchers have been destroyed since the fighting began, Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said yesterday. The campaign will be finished in “a matter of weeks, maybe even less,” Peres said after meeting President George W. Bush and Rice at the White House.

The European Union demanded an immediate end to the conflict that has claimed the lives of at least 570 Lebanese and 51 Israelis. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes by Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel and Israeli air raids on Lebanon. Some 2 131 people are injured, a Lebanese police spokesman said.

EU foreign ministers, meeting yesterday in Brussels, demanded an “immediate cessation of hostilities to be followed by a sustainable cease-fire.”

Israel won't set a “specific date” for leaving Lebanon and may try to push Hezbollah as far north as the Litani River, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said yesterday.

Olmert said Israel was in the early stages of a diplomatic process that would create safer conditions on its border with Lebanon. He gave no specifics and didn't say when the fighting might stop.

“We are at the beginning of a political process that I believe will end with a cease-fire that will create totally different conditions on our northern border,” Olmert said.

There's been little progress at the United Nations toward hashing out the terms of a cease-fire and a political framework that could end the fighting. A French draft resolution calls for an immediate cease-fire. The US has resisted such a halt to Israel's military operations until a political framework can be put in place that would disarm Hezbollah and bar the group from retaining control of southern Lebanon.

“War is unlikely to end soon as long as the US and Israel keep on talking about conditions,”Ali Fayyad, a senior member of Hezbollah's central council, said yesterday. He said the group objects to the deployment of international peacekeeping soldiers in southern Lebanon.

Thousands of people fled southern Lebanon yesterday for the north, taking advantage of the lull in air strikes, UN spokesman Khaled Mansour said in an interview. The number of people displaced across Lebanon ranges from 700,000 to 900,000, or one-fifth of the population, he said.

Hezbollah, founded in 1982, is sponsored by Syria and Iran.

It has been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombings that killed 241 US soldiers and 58 French soldiers in Beirut and the 1994 attack that killed 85 at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The US and Israel classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.