By Lin Noueihed (additional reporting by Jerusalem bureau, Nadim Ladki, Alaa Shahine and Laila Bassam)

BEIRUT, July 17 (Reuters). Israeli air strikes killed 42 people across Lebanon on Monday, including 10 civilians hit on a southern bridge, on the sixth day of a bombardment that has wreaked the heaviest destruction in Lebanon for over 20 years.

Rescuers also pulled nine bodies from the wreckage of a building in the southern city of Tyre that was bombed on Sunday, raising the death toll since Israel's offensive to 204, all but 14 of them civilian.

Israeli planes hit coastal targets in the north and south, struck Beirut and damaged homes in the east belonging to members of Hizbollah, which fired more rockets deep into Israel.

Blasts rocked Beirut through the day and smoke rose from a blazing fuel depot. Civilian installations, petrol stations and factories elsewhere were also hit, security sources said.

"I can't believe they are doing all this for two captives. This is just an excuse", said Ali Sharara, 21, who fled his home in south Beirut to sleep in a city park for the last two nights.

Hizbollah fired dozens of rockets at the Israeli city of Haifa on Monday and medics said a three-storey building collapsed, wounding two people. Israel closed Haifa's port.

Twenty-four Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 12 civilians hit in rocket attacks.

The fighting was triggered when Hizbollah, the guerrilla group which is backed by Syria and Iran and is part of Lebanon's government, seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on northern Israel on July 12.

ISRAEL TO PURSUE OFFENSIVE

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in Beirut after talks with the Lebanese government, called for an immediate truce on humanitarian grounds.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said his country would pursue its offensive until the two captured soldiers were returned and Lebanese army troops control all of south Lebanon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Security Council members would start work on a detailed agreement on deploying a multinational security force to south Lebanon.

The United States gave only a guarded welcome to the proposal and Israel said it was premature. "We're at the stage where we want to be sure that Hizbollah is not deployed at our northern border", government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said.

An Israeli source said Israel may step up attacks in coming days, mindful that its chief ally, the United States, might not resist indefinitely international pressure for a ceasefire.

A U.N. team sent to Lebanon to seek a solution to the fighting said it had made a promising start but that more diplomacy was needed before there could be any optimism.

FREE-FIRE ZONE

Three Israeli tanks briefly crossed a few hundred metres (yards) into Lebanese territory on Monday afternoon, a U.N. source said, following a similar incursion overnight in which Israel said Hizbollah positions were destroyed.

Israeli Army Radio, quoting a top officer, said the country would enforce a one-km (half-mile) "free-fire" zone to bar Hizbollah from the border, without keeping troops on the ground.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said that Israel's offensive has inflicted billions of dollars of damage.

"What Israel has been doing is cutting the country to pieces", he told Reuters in an interview.

The commander-in-chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, among Hizbollah's closest allies, said Israel could end the conflict by agreeing to a prisoner swap proposed by the Lebanese group.

Israel radio said Hizbollah tried to fire an Iranian-made missile with a range of 100 km (60 miles) but the rocket malfunctioned. It said the missile was probably the object shown falling from the sky over Beirut by Lebanese television.

Israel is demanding the disarming of Hizbollah in line with U.N. resolutions - a task beyond the fragile Beirut government.

France, the United States, Britain and a host of other nations scrambled to evacuate their citizens from Lebanon.

Israel's campaign in Lebanon followed the launch of its offensive in the Gaza Strip on June 28 to try to retrieve another captured soldier and halt Palestinian rocket fire.

Air strikes on Monday flattened the eight-storey Palestinian Foreign Ministry building in Gaza City and gutted the offices of a Hamas-led force in the northern Gaza Strip.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen ambushed a group of Israeli troops, killing one and wounding six others in the city of Nablus, witnesses and military sources said.

BEIRUT, 17 Jul 2006 (IRIN). Local health workers say they face difficulties reaching the injured in southern Lebanon following furious Israeli artillery barrages and air strikes that came in response to the 12 July kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah.

"We're cooperating with NGOs and other humanitarian associations to help us cope with the situation", Minister of Health Muhammad Jawad Khalifa told IRIN. "But we're experiencing difficulties in accessing affected areas to help the injured". Khalifa added that 175 deaths and 500 injuries had been reported since the bombing began on 12 July.

Hizbullah has been fighting back with rockets fired at Israel, killing 12 people. The militant group says it will release the two soldiers in exchange for Lebanese prisoners held in Israel.

Dr Abdel Rahim Hennawi, director of the Hammoud Medical Centre in Sidon, 45 km south of Beirut, expressed particular concern about the lack of dialysis treatment.

"We were known for having the best facilities for dialysis in southern Lebanon", he said. "Now we're short of bloodline solutions because the roads are closed, and patients keep coming in". Hennawi added that the centre had received 48 injury patients from towns and villages in the south, mostly consisting of burns or head, abdomen and limb injuries.

Health institutions in the capital have also warned of waning medical supplies amid rising numbers of casualties. "We've received injured civilians from Haret Hreyk a southern suburb of the capital, as well as the bodies of two civilians killed this morning in raids on Beirut harbour", said one official at Beirut's Rafik Hariri University Hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official added that, should the Israeli attacks continue, supplies would be exhausted within a few days. "We're being assisted by the health ministry because the emergency service wasn't ready to receive patients", he said. "We're coping, but we can't predict what will happen in the future".

Meanwhile, Lebanese Doctors Syndicate head, Dr Mario Aoun, called on the country's thousands of doctors and medical workers to report to the university hospital to help treat the injured. "We weren't expecting the rising number of victims, but we're trying to cope with the disaster", said Aoun, adding that a special crisis unit was working to transport doctors to medical facilities in affected areas.

Reuters AlertNet

Integrated Regional Information Networks

Enlaces sobre Direitos Humanos