About 300,000 Israelis living near the Lebanese border in the north of the country have been given the all-clear by the Israeli army on Thursday to leave their shelters.

The residents were ordered to take cover on Monday evening from possible rocket attack from Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon in retaliation for Israeli air strikes.

Soldiers used megaphones to announce that life should return to normal, although more than half of the inhabitants are reported to have left earlier in the week seeking safety in the south.

Air raids

Israel launched fresh air attacks on Wednesday on suspected Hezbollah guerrilla targets in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli army said its planes had struck "terrorist targets" in the Majdel Silim area, just outside Israel's self-declared security zone.The attacks were the latest phase in a round of tit-for-tat violence between the two sides over the last few days.

They came after a Hezbollah rocket attack killed an Israeli soldier in south Lebanon on Tuesday - the sixth such fatality in the last fortnight.

Prior to Wednesday's raids, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy warned "the soil of Lebanon will burn" if Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israel to retaliate for bombing raids on southern Lebanon.

"Let everyone hear: Vital interests of Lebanon will go up in flames and it will take many years to restore them," he warned.

But the remark was shrugged of by Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss who said the threat was part of Israel's "terrorism" against his country.

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"In making these threats, he reminds us of the genocide mentality that characterised Nazism in Hitler's time," Mr Hoss said.

He added that as the guerrillas were responding to Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, "we say that the solution, simply, would be to terminate the Israeli occupation".

Hezbollah, which has vowed to continue its operations against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, refrained from further rocket attacks on Wednesday.

But Mr Levy appealed to Syria, the main power-broker in Lebanon, to rein in the guerillas.

"I appeal to Syria not to put the fate of peace in the hands of those who declare their intentions of torpedoing the peace," he said. "I appeal to Syria to prove its intentions of peace."

Lebanese police said Israeli jets had carried out four raids on Hezbollah strongholds early on Wednesday morning.

Israeli fighter-bombers made two sorties on the hills around Zaoutar, a village on the edge of the central sector of the Israeli-occupied zone.

Israeli planes also fired four air-to-ground missiles at the hills of Jabal Dahr, on the border of the western sector of the zone, the police said, with Israeli artillery targeting the southern sector of the Bekaa valley.

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