3 Israeli Soldiers Killed in Fighting in S. Lebanon : Mideast: Fatalities rise to five in second day of intense battles with guerrillas. Jerusalem vows a strong response.

Three Israeli soldiers were killed Friday in a second day of heavy fighting with Palestinian and Iranian-backed guerrillas in southern Lebanon.

Israel warned that it would respond strongly to ensure there would be no further escalation.

The Israeli fatalities, on a day of artillery, rocket and mortar bombardments by both sides, brought to five the number of Israeli soldiers killed there this week. Eight others have been wounded.

The three paratroopers killed Friday afternoon were trapped in mortar fire that poured down on an Israeli hilltop outpost called Sojoud on the northeastern edge of Israel’s self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon, a military spokesman said. The barrage was so intense, military sources added, that the helicopters that came to carry out the wounded were prevented from landing for 3 1/2 hours.

The intense fighting prompted a sharp warning from senior Israeli officials to both Lebanon and Syria, which controls security in much of Lebanon, that Israeli forces would beat back any attempt to escalate the confrontation in its security zone, a nine-mile-deep buffer strip along the border established in 1985.

“I do not rule out the possibility that we will come into a wider confrontation with Hezbollah (the radical, pro-Iranian Party of God militia), making wider use of force of all sorts,” said Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, the army’s chief of staff. “But it is necessary that such a thing, if and when it happens, will be something we control and are not dragged into.”

Israeli helicopter gunships had already attacked a Palestinian guerrilla base near Naame, about 10 miles south of Beirut, in reprisal Friday for the ambush a day earlier in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and three wounded.

Israeli gunners, supported by allies in the South Lebanon Army, a local militia recruited and paid by Israel, pounded guerrilla-held areas north of the security zone with more than 270 rounds of artillery fire from heavy 155-millimeter howitzers; at one point, they were hitting at the rate of five shells a minute.

Palestinian and Lebanese casualties were not known precisely, though news reports from Lebanon said one or two people had been wounded in the helicopter attack.

“The policy of self-restraint is not going to last forever,” Uri Lubrani, the Israeli delegate to the peace talks with Lebanon, declared in a broadcast from a radio station in the security zone.

In Jerusalem, Lubrani told Israeli Army Radio, “We are looking for a way to get control of this terrorism without a large-scale operation that would require us to enter Lebanon and put things in order there.”

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who is also defense minister and a former army chief of staff, flew to the area along with top generals to direct the Israeli counterattack. He had sent what Israeli officials called a “grave message” to Syria on Thursday evening through visiting American mediators.

But the Israeli right was already demanding that the government suspend negotiations with Syria until the country’s northern border and the security zone, the buffer established in 1985, are quiet and safe from rocket bombardment.

“Because of the (negotiations with the Arabs), the government is tying the hands of the army in the north,” said Uzi Landau, a member of Parliament from the opposition Likud Party. “Thus, the government is exposing the towns in the north to terrorist attacks, which will only increase.”

Ori Orr, chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs and defense committee from the governing Labor Party, said of the clashes: “There is a war going on there, and we need to rethink our policy. Something is wrong with the government--it’s not doing enough.”

Like many Israeli officials, Orr blamed Syria--with an estimated 4,000 troops in the country--for the upsurge in fighting, saying that while it may not have been directly involved, it had not prevented Hezbollah, the militia of Lebanese Shiite Muslims, or guerrillas from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical group led by Ahmed Jibril, from launching attacks.

“We have to find a way to make this strip (the buffer zone) quiet and to protect our northern communities,” Orr said.

But other Israelis saw the heightened confrontation as a warning from Syria itself that, if the peace talks, now effectively stalemated, ultimately fail, Damascus and more broadly the Arabs have a military option--a war of attrition in the hills of southern Lebanon.