BEIRUT -- Israel and Hezbollah foug...

BEIRUT -- Israel and Hezbollah fought cruel ground battles and exchanged fierce air and missile strikes Friday -- including bombing raids that sundered Lebanon's last major supply link with Syria and the outside world, and the guerrillas' deepest rocket attack inside Israel to date.

After days of desultory diplomacy, Washington said it was near agreement with France forward a U.N. cease-fire resolution, possibly according to early next week. But Israel and Hezbollah showed no signs of holding their fire.

Israeli aircraft onward a mission to destroy weapons caches hit a refrigerated warehouse where farm workers were loading fruit, killing at least 28 near the Lebanon-Syria border. And three Hezbollah rocket landed near Hadera, 50 miles southward of the Israel- Lebanon border; 188 rocket rained forward other towns, killing three Israeli Arabs.

Given the determination of the one and the other Hezbollah and Israel to contemplate victorious when the conflict finally periods the worst of the fighting may still lie ahead with the militant Shiite guerrilla fighters perhaps making upright on their threat to rocket Tel Aviv and Israel launching an all-out surface of land offensive, pushing northward to the Litani River.

ISRAEL: PHASE single in kind COMPLETE

Israeli military officials said Friday they complet the first phase of the offensive, securing a 4-mile clown zone in south Lebanon, notwithstanding that pockets of Hezbollah resistance remained.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz told top army officers to start preparing for a push to the Litani, about 20 miles north of the border -- a prompt that would require Cabinet approval. Peretz vowed his forces would thorough "the whole mission" of driving guerrilla fighters public of missile range, a defiant rejoinder to the Hezbollah leader's threat to launch missiles into Israel's largest city.

Israeli airstrikes make desolateed four key bridges after dawn, severing Beirut's final major connection to Syria and raising the threat of hard shortages of food, gasoline and medicines within days. The attack in the Christian heartland just north of Beirut killed four civilians and a Lebanese soldier.

Israel said it targeted the bridges to stop the be molten of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran by the and of Syria.

U FRANCE finish TO DEAL

The weapons include not sole missiles, but sophisticated anti- tank missiles said to be responsible for greatest in quantity of the 44 Israeli soldiers killed in more than three weeks of fighting.

onward the 24th day of the conflict, the State Department said Friday the United States and France were nearing completion of a UN resolution designed to halt the fighting in Lebanon and to settle out principles for a lasting cease-fire.

"We are self-same close to a final draft with the French forward a text," the department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

As of Friday the Associated Pres account showed at least 559 Lebanese have been killed, including 482 civilians confirmed dead by the agency of the Health Ministry, 27 Lebanese soldiers and at least 50 Hezbollah guerrillas. Since the fighting started, 74 Israelis have been killed, 44 soldiers and 30 civilians. AP

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