Truce Ends Israel’s Lebanon Offensive : Mideast: U.S.-brokered cease-fire also calls for Hezbollah to stop cross-border rocket attacks. Beirut and Syria agree to ensure guerrillas’ compliance.

Israel halted its weeklong military offensive against Iranian-backed guerrillas in southern Lebanon on Saturday after the United States negotiated a cease-fire agreement with Lebanon and neighboring Syria.

After their most intense air, naval and artillery bombardment in a decade, Israeli forces stopped firing at 6 p.m. Jerusalem time in line with an agreement that fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas belonging to Hezbollah, the Party of God, would stop firing rockets at northern Israel.

A government statement issued after a rare Cabinet meeting on the Jewish Sabbath said, “In light of the understandings and the achievement of the goals of the military operation, the Cabinet committee on security directed the chief of staff to order defense forces to stop military actions in Lebanon.”

“All (Israel Defense Forces) guns are silent on the U.N. zone,” a U.N. officer reported from the southern Lebanese port of Tyre. “It has gone completely quiet since the Israeli cease-fire announcement.” The U.N. area is just north of Israel’s self-proclaimed 9-mile-deep “security zone.”

A deadly series of attacks on Israeli troops in the zone sparked Israel’s retaliatory strike.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, announcing terms of the cease-fire, declared that “Operation Accountability” had restored the security of his country’s northern communities, which the guerrillas have repeatedly rocketed, and laid the basis for renewed progress in Israel’s overall peace negotiations with its Arab neighbors.

In Beirut, Hezbollah said it would continue fighting Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon but would end its cross-border rocket attacks on the Jewish state as long as Israeli forces refrained from hitting civilian targets in Lebanon.

Rabin warned that Israel would respond harshly to any breach of the understanding reached with Lebanon and Syria, and its forces remained on alert in northern Israel.

“We are not talking about guarantees (from Lebanon or Syria)--we know the realities of Lebanon,” Rabin told a news conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. “The principal guarantee is the strength of the Israel Defense Forces, which used only part of their power.”

According to Lebanese authorities, the Israeli offensive drove an estimated 500,000 villagers from their homes in southern Lebanon and killed about 130 people, mostly civilians. Three Israelis, two civilians and a soldier were also killed, and 100,000 have remained in bomb shelters through the week in northern Israel.

In a week of fighting, Israeli artillery fired more than 30,000 shells, according to U.N. military observers, and its planes and helicopters flew more than 1,200 combat missions.

The cease-fire agreement, as outlined by Rabin, requires the Lebanese government of President Elias Hrawi, with Syrian support, to ensure that there will be no further rocket attacks on northern Israel. And it makes clear that Israel and the local militia it backs, the South Lebanon Army, will continue to defend its security zone.

This nevertheless falls short of Rabin’s original demand that Lebanon and Syria disband Hezbollah, which Iran has supported for more than a decade and used in efforts to upset Arab-Israel peace talks.

But Israeli officials said they were satisfied that an understanding was reached so quickly through U.S. mediation and came before it had committed ground troops to the operation.

“I am not looking for victory,” Rabin said. “I am looking for solutions to problems. I hope this understanding will be implemented on the ground.”

The agreement also clears the way for the Middle East visit this week of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who spent much of the last four days talking with Rabin and Arab leaders by telephone to work out the cease-fire and ensure that the crisis did not bring the peace talks to an end.

Christopher is scheduled to arrive in Cairo on Monday morning and later travel to Syria, Jordan and Jerusalem before returning on Friday or Saturday. His week of shuttle diplomacy is designed to revive momentum in the longer-term Middle East peace negotiations--the same mission he had planned before the violence broke out.

In Washington on Saturday, State Department spokesman Mike McCurry issued a statement expressing U.S. satisfaction with the truce and urging all sides in the dispute to “work to assure that calm prevails.”

Israeli leaders attached considerable importance to the U.S. mediation, noting that the Lebanese and Syrian commitments were made to Washington, not directly to Jerusalem, and thus make the United States the guarantor of the agreement.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres commented: “We are all very happy that the operation came to an end quickly. It could have developed into something much more serious. The fight against Hezbollah was actually an operation for the peace process because Hezbollah has tried to destroy the peace process.”

Under the agreement, villagers driven from their homes in south Lebanon will be allowed to return to their communities if the situation remains calm, an Israeli spokesman said, and farmers and townspeople began streaming back almost as soon as the cease-fire was announced. Many, however, will find their villages heavily damaged and perhaps destroyed.

“In order to deal with the Hezbollah terror, we had to cause the movement of the Lebanese residents of south Lebanon,” Rabin said, referring to the barrages used to force people out of their villages. “I wish for them a return to a quiet life, but their demand for quiet must be directed at the Lebanese government.”

Arab League foreign ministers, meeting in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday to discuss the Lebanon crisis, promised $500 million to rebuild devastated Lebanese villages and to repatriate refugees. The money also would be used to equip and rehabilitate the Lebanese army to enable it to extend its control across the entire country.

In Tyre, word of the truce brought hundreds of jubilant residents into the streets.

“I hope Hezbollah is not going to provoke the Israelis again,” said Mohammed Hijazi, 35, a baker who spent the last three days in one of Tyre’s six bomb shelters with at least 35 other civilians.

Another Tyre resident, Mohammed Baydoun, 42, who runs a seaside fish restaurant, was skeptical.

“I am happy with the cease-fire declaration, but I can’t take it seriously right away,” Baydoun said. “I’ll give it two days before I bring back my family from Beirut.”

Residents of northern Israel reacted cautiously to the cease-fire announcement, especially because they were told to remain in their bomb shelters.

“I really hope its over, but we are still waiting for the police to tell us it is OK to come out,” said Alica Assor of the northern town of Kiryat Shemona.

Rabin urged Syria to use the 40,000 troops it maintains in Lebanon to help the Lebanese army disarm Hezbollah. “If that happens, there will be calm, and if there is calm, it will be possible to find a solution to the entire problem of south Lebanon,” he said.

Until now, both the Lebanese and Syrian governments have supported attacks by Hezbollah and other guerrilla groups on Israeli troops who for eight years have occupied the border zone.

Israel is betting that, because the recent violence in southern Lebanon threatened the peace talks, both governments might rein in the guerrillas.

Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said that Hezbollah would only be disarmed after a withdrawal of Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon and not as part of this cease-fire agreement.

“They (Hezbollah) launched the rockets because they were cornered,” Hariri said. “The Israelis were killing villagers, destroying their homes.

“But this did not destroy Hezbollah. The people gave them more support. These displaced will also join Hezbollah. What would you do if Israel destroyed your house and killed your children? You would join them. Operation Accountability equals revenge.”

Rabin ordered the operation, first developed last autumn, after guerrillas killed seven Israeli soldiers in a series of attacks in the security zone last month; the guerrillas had also stepped up firing Katyusha rockets on northern Israeli communities.

Half an hour before the truce went into effect, Israeli jets and warships struck a base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, according to Lebanese authorities. Guerrillas, meanwhile, fired 16 Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and the security zone.

Times staff writer Art Pine, in Washington, contributed to this report.