Guerrillas Step Up Attacks on Israelis : Lebanon: Three soldiers are killed in two incidents as Arab radicals try to disrupt the peace talks in Madrid.

Three Israeli soldiers were killed and six were wounded Tuesday in two separate attacks in southern Lebanon as Arab guerrillas stepped up their campaign to disrupt the Middle East peace conference in Madrid. Two Arab guerrillas were killed and one wounded in the exchange of fire, the Israel Defense Forces announced.

In retaliation, Israeli helicopter gunships strafed fields at the edge of the Rashidiyeh refugee camp near Tyre in southern Lebanon, local police said, killing one refugee and wounding three others. And Israeli artillery bombarded other areas in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli chief of staff, Gen. Ehud Barak, warned that more guerrilla attacks could be expected as tension in the region builds over the Madrid peace talks, which formally begin today.

Tuesday’s attacks came less than 24 hours after two Israeli civilians were killed and six were wounded in an attack on a bus in the occupied West Bank. The bus was carrying Jewish settlers to a Tel Aviv demonstration opposing any Israeli return of territory to the Arabs, a key issue that may arise at the Madrid talks.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--a radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization that opposes the peace talks--claimed responsibility for Monday’s bus attack. Its victims, a mother of seven and a father of four, were buried Tuesday.

An Israeli defense spokesman said that the soldiers were killed and wounded Tuesday when their patrol was hit by a bomb set off by remote control in the northern edge of Israel’s defense zone inside Lebanon. The Iranian-backed group Hezbollah (Party of God) said that its members had exploded the bomb in the attack on the Israeli patrol near the village of Aramta.

Condemning the Madrid talks as “a conference of liquidation,” Hezbollah leader Sheik Abbas Musawi, at a later Beirut news conference, vowed to step up the attacks. He said the Lebanese are “continuing their holy war against the United States and Israel, which would only be strengthened by the Madrid talks. The fate of this conference is failure.”

Musawi said that Wednesday should be proclaimed “a day of Islamic wrath and mourning” against American influence in the Middle East. But he added that there is no link between the fate of Western hostages held by his group and Islamic guerrilla opposition to the peace conference.

Earlier Tuesday, in a pre-dawn attack, guerrillas in southern Lebanon fired missiles and a rifle grenade at an Israeli army patrol as it moved along the northern border security fence, Israeli officials said. One soldier was wounded, and the patrol returned fire. Other soldiers joined them, and in a running, hours-long gunfight near Marwahnine, four more Israeli soldiers were wounded, one critically.

During the fighting, two Arab guerrillas were killed and one was wounded and taken prisoner, the Israelis said. The Arabs belonged to the Islamic Jihad movement and were attempting to reach Zarit, a frontier community inside Israel, the Israelis said.

But the army said it found no evidence of reports from Lebanon on Tuesday that three Arab guerrillas, flying hang gliders to attack Israel, were shot down during the night. A Palestinian suicide guerrilla used a hang glider in 1987 to fly past Israel’s border defenses and killed six soldiers at their military camp before he was slain.