Israel Seeks to Ease S. Lebanon Conflict : Mideast: But at the same time Rabin moves sizable forces into the ‘security zone.’

Determined to preserve the peace negotiations with its Arab neighbors, Israel sought on Tuesday to ease the deadly confrontation in southern Lebanon with guerrillas from the militant pro-Iranian Islamic movement Hezbollah. The move came after three days of attack and counterattack.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who only a day earlier ordered Israeli forces to “liquidate Hezbollah” after a roadside bomb killed five soldiers, said a wider conflict would endanger the peace talks and probably lead to guerrilla attacks across the Lebanese border into Israel.

“We will try to take the measures to reduce the tension and to return . . . to the normal situation along the Lebanese-Israeli border,” Rabin said.

“But we are prepared, in case there is an escalation by Hezbollah, and then we will have to take measures to ensure the safety of our settlements and settlers along the border,” he added, even as Israel shifted sizable forces into the southern Lebanon “security zone” in a show of strength.

Rabin’s stance was notably conciliatory for Israel, which traditionally views toughness as a deterrent. He effectively rejected calls from conservative critics for an all-out military campaign against Islamic fundamentalists, who have been attempting to upset the peace negotiations with their attacks.

Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai, the northern regional commander, backed Rabin with a similar plea at Kiryat Shmona, the Israeli town hit by a pre-dawn barrage of rockets apparently fired by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon.

“Israeli troops will not initiate action, but we will respond to further hostilities from across the border,” Mordechai said.

Tensions among Israelis ran high Tuesday after the death of a 14-year-old Russian immigrant in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Kiryat Shmona, a town in Upper Galilee that was shelled so often in the past that a generation of children grew up in bomb shelters.

In what it hoped would be only a show of strength, Israel moved military reinforcements north on Tuesday, filling the nine-mile-deep “security zone” with armored and artillery units and bringing more infantry units close to the border. Israel normally has about 1,000 troops alongside 3,000 allied Lebanese militiamen in the zone.

On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes attacked suspected Hezbollah units and facilities belonging to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a military spokesman here said.

The artillery and rocket bombardments faded during the day on both sides. U.N. observers along the Lebanese-Israeli border reported that by midafternoon the region was unusually quiet. But Tuesday evening, virtually all the Israeli children in the region were again, as a precaution, in their shelters, which have been largely unused for the past decade.

Near the West Bank town of Janin, meanwhile, an Israeli man and his wife were shot and wounded by a Palestinian gunman, and in the Gaza Strip an Israeli farmer was attacked with an ax by two Palestinians, Israeli authorities said.

The escalating violence--which includes an attack that claimed the life of a sixth Israeli soldier in another incident, besides the roadside bombing--has brought calls from more Israelis for Rabin to withdraw from the peace negotiations in Washington.

“To ignore these events at the Washington talks is wrong,” former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told Jewish fund-raisers from overseas. “On the contrary, they must be taken up, and if we cannot obtain assurances of security, then we should leave.”

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered around Rabin’s house in Jerusalem on Tuesday in a protest that grew increasingly rowdy and was finally broken up by police after a dozen scuffles.

But Rabin replied that pulling out of the peace talks in Washington would only encourage more violence by removing the restraints created by the yearlong negotiations and would end the new prospects for resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Rabin, a cautious, unflappable former general, has shown no sign of panic, and most Israelis believe that he will not let the fighting in Lebanon get out of control. The Labor Party won election in June partly because Rabin appeared to be a leader able to deliver peace with security.

In Washington, Israeli negotiators took up the violence issue with their Syrian and Lebanese counterparts in the U.S.-sponsored peace talks--and got relatively conciliatory responses.

“We shall be free to deal with security problems in Lebanon as we see fit, and we will continue to do so,” Israeli negotiator Uri Lubrani said after three hours of talks.

Souheil Chammas, chief of Lebanon’s delegation to the talks, said he told the Israelis “that we understand their sensitivity” about attacks on Israeli troops in Lebanon. But he added that even more people have been killed in his country than in Israel during more than a decade of conflict, and he protested the Israeli attacks as an “overreaction.”

Meantime, President Bush said in a television interview that the peace talks are solid enough to withstand strains. “I would hope that nothing could come up that would derail (the talks), and it is my view that they’ve gone far enough and there’s enough commitment that no incident will derail” them.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.