Earlier this week, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi censured Israel when he opened the meeting of foreign ministers gathered for the Asian regional conference.

"We should condemn Israel's latest use of disproportionate force in Gaza and the West Bank," said Abdullah, who heads the world's largest Islamic political conference. "We should not tolerate Israel's excessive military reprisals against Lebanon."

As the death toll and devastation rise, world attention has increasingly focused on the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri weighed in Thursday, calling for Muslims to unite in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza until Islam reigns from "Spain to Iraq."

The Bush administration's insistence that a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israeli border address tough-to-negotiate regional disputes isolated Rice from many U.S. allies.

International leaders including U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan are seeking a quick end to the fighting that has cost millions of dollars and hundreds of lives. He and others want to stop the violence before sorting out how to disarm Lebanon's well-armed Hezbollah militia, strengthen the country's central government and other difficult issues.

As a result, a meeting of senior diplomats in Rome on Wednesday failed to produce a unanimous, concrete course for a cease-fire, falling back to a broad outline aimed at peace.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Snow disputed what he said was a "presumption" in some quarters that the U.S. diplomatic prescription wasn't a success unless Rice had a cease-fire.

"What she has said is, `What on earth is the good of having another empty-handed cease-fire in the Middle East?'" he said. "What is the purpose of having something that is not enforceable at this juncture, and is not realistic?"

He said U.S. diplomats in the region are working toward a U.N. resolution, U.S. diplomats in Europe are talking about troop contributions and the United States also is helping organize humanitarian aid.

Even as Rice and representatives of the nations attending the conference were preoccupied with what is happening in the Middle East, they also faced another festering diplomatic problem with North Korea's determination to develop a nuclear weapons program.

Opening a meeting Friday of 10 nations discussing security concerns that Rice described as "bedeviling" northeast Asia, she said it's unfortunate North Korea has been unwilling to return to the negotiating table.

"The United States remains ready at any time, at any place and without any conditions to engage those discussions," Rice said.