Lebanese police said Israeli fighter-bombers launched 19 raids in less than an hour on the Uzai sector near the airport crossed by the highway leading to south Lebanon and also carried out a series of raids in the east of Lebanon.

Warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut causing panic among residents.

A huge pall of smoke mixed with flames rose over Uzai, beside the sea, as the sound of jets screeching across the capital was interspersed by the impacts of exploding bombs.

A few hours earlier Israel had threatened to spread its bombardment to new areas of Beirut's southern suburbs, bastions of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement, and dropped leaflets calling on residents to flee.

Missiles were fired at the Rweiss and Haret-Hreik districts in south Beirut, police said. Rweiss, which had initially been spared, was first targeted the previous night after a week's respite in strikes on the capital's suburbs.

Haret-Hreik and Bir al-Abed, where Hezbollah's headquarters is located, were pounded for two weeks and are in ruins.

Hezbollah chief Nasrallah threatened late Thursday to strike at Israel's commercial capital of Tel Aviv if Beirut were hit by air strikes.

"If you bombard our capital we will bombard the capital of your aggressive entity," he said in a televised speech, referring to Tel Aviv, which Arab militants consider the capital of Israel rather than Jerusalem.

Israeli public television quoted a senior military official as saying that its army would destroy all Lebanese infrastructure if Hezbollah carried out its threat.

Dozens of raids overnight Thursday to Friday shook several villages in the southern regions of Tyre and Nabatiyeh, relatively far from the border where there were violent clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters, Lebanese police said.

The United States said Thursday a UN resolution aimed at ending the conflict in Lebanon was close, and ordered its diplomats to work through the weekend if no deal was reached by Friday.

As haggling went on at the United Nations on a resolution, Washington again denied it had opposed a ceasefire to allow its ally to crush Hezbollah.

"We're certainly getting close," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but backed away from comments she made at the end of her Middle East trip on Monday that a ceasefire and political deal on the crisis could come this week.

"We're now working on a Security Council resolution and hopefully we can get that passed and I think it certainly will be within days," said Rice in an interview on "Larry King Live" on CNN.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said that he was "optimistic" for a resolution soon, as a senior State Department official said Rice expected to go to the UN when a deal was clinched early next week.

Critics have claimed that Washington's insistence on a "sustainable" ceasefire once a political framework has been laid out, is designed to give its staunch ally Israel time to blast away at Hezbollah.

But Rice denied in the interview that Washington had blocked a halt to fighting.

"We've never opposed a ceasefire," Rice said in the interview, arguing that Washington simply opposed one that "falls apart practically the minute it's in place."

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy meanwhile said he believes "more than ever" that a durable ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel will be in place soon.

Interviewed by BBC television, Douste-Blazy declined to give a date for a truce as Paris and Washington worked to narrow their differences at the United Nations over how to achieve a ceasefire in Lebanon.

However, he said: "We are working day and night so that a durable ceasefire can take place as soon as possible. I believe it, I believe it more than ever after my trip to the Near East, after coming back from Beirut two days ago."

The French, backed by fellow members of the European Union, have been pressing for an immediate cessation of fighting followed by a permanent ceasefire and a political deal that will involve disarming Hezbollah.

Israel poured thousands of ground troops into southern Lebanon Thursday, aiming to flush Hezbollah fighters from the border zone as the Jewish state saw its bloodiest day in the three-week conflict.

Four soldiers were killed in firefights with the Shiite guerrillas as Israel stepped up its ground offensive while more than 100 rockets hammered northern Israel, killing eight civilians.

"Overall in terms of casualties, this is the hardest day," an army spokeswoman told AFP.

Israeli warplanes had earlier thundered over Beirut, ending a six-day lull in an onslaught that Lebanese officials say has killed more than 900 people in the 23-day conflict.

Leaflets later landed on the south of the capital warning that bombing of the area would be extended and urging civilians to leave, and Defence Minister Amir Peretz's spokesman said the army had been ordered to prepare to take control of southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said his country would pursue its drive against Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon until an international force of some 15,000 combat-ready troops was deployed there.

"There should be overlap in terms of time so that we will pull out and they will come in without a time gap that will allow Hezbollah to rebuild their position in the south of Lebanon," he told The Times of London.

Up to 10,000 ground troops were battling Hezbollah around more than a dozen villages in south Lebanon, Tzvika Golan, a spokesman for Israel's northern command, told AFP.

The troops were to establish a "security zone" six to eight kilometers (four to five miles) deep along Lebanon's border with Israel in order to "push Hezbollah further north," he said.

The difficulty of assembling an international buffer force was highlighted when the United Nations postponed for the second time a meeting of countries that might contribute troops.

With the West in diplomatic disarray, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country is a staunch supporter of Hezbollah, told a Muslim summit: "The real cure for the conflict is elimination of the Zionist regime, but there should be first an immediate ceasefire."

The summit of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference demanded an immediate truce, with Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi telling delegates: "Muslims are angry even in moderate Muslim countries."

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