Truce holds as Lebanese hold mass funeral for guerrilla slain by Israel

BEIRUT (AP) - Shouting "Death to Israel" and waving yellow Hezbollah flags, thousands of people marched Monday behind the coffin of a guerrilla killed in the heaviest combat in six years along Lebanon's border with Israel.

A United Nations-brokered truce held a day after Sunday's fighting, but tensions remained high. Ten Israeli warplanes flew over Lebanon's south, east and north, the Lebanese army said.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed concern at the weekend fighting and called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and respect the border drawn by the United Nations after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in 2000.

While commending leaders of both countries for heading off further escalation, Annan "particularly urges the government of Lebanon to make every effort to exercise its control over the use of force from its territory," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in New York.

The United States and the United Nations have unsuccessfully pressed Lebanon's government to implement a 2004 Security Council resolution that calls for the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, including Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups.

Sunday's fighting erupted when Hezbollah guerrillas fired rockets into northern Israel. The Israeli military retaliated with air strikes on guerrilla positions, and both sides then traded artillery and rocket fire.

Two militants died and six were wounded in the clashes, while two Israeli soldiers were wounded. An Israeli general said Monday that his forces destroyed most of Hezbollah's military positions in southern Lebanon.

Israeli fire also wounded two Lebanese civilians, including a 14-year-old girl.

In Lebanese towns a few kilometres north of the border, people swept up broken glass and reopened shops and schools Monday. Squares filled with market stalls and customers, and police surveyed the extent of damage.

At the village of Sohmor, some 8,000 people turned out for the funeral of Youssef Mohammed Alaeddine, a 36-year-old Hezbollah fighter killed in the fighting.

Hezbollah supporters carried the coffin, wrapped in a Hezbollah flag, as women showered it with rice and rose petals, a traditional sign of greeting because the Shiite Muslim militant group considers those killed fighting Israel to be martyrs.

Addressing the crowd, a senior Hezbollah official, Sheik Mohammed Yazbeck, pledged that the movement would continue to attack Israel and would never disarm.

"We will keep our weapons as long as there is blood in our bodies. The resistance will continue," he said.

It was not clear where the other guerrilla killed Sunday, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, would be buried.

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