"Does anyone imagine that we will stop halfway through so that in two months it will come back again? No way," he said.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that any cease-fire should be based on fundamental changes that would have a lasting impact on the region.

"We all want a cessation of violence. We all want the protection of civilians. We have to make certain that anything that we do is going to be of lasting value," Rice said.

The week-old offensive was sparked by the soldiers' capture, and Olmert said Iran, a patron of Hezbollah, was behind the raid to distract the world and the G-8 summit from the country's nuclear program. "To my regret, Iran's trick succeeded, everybody remembers the G-8 decision on the subject of Lebanon and are not dealing with the Iranian issue," he said, according to the statement.

The commander of Israeli forces on the border said the operation would take a few more weeks, and the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski, said Israel has not ruled out deploying "massive ground forces into Lebanon."

Israel, which has mainly limited itself to attacks from the air and sea, has been reluctant to send in ground troops because of still-fresh memories of Israel's ill-fated 18-year-occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.

Meanwhile, a proposal to send a new international force to bolster the current 2,000-member U.N. force in south Lebanon gained steam.

Western nations have proposed the beefed-up force as part of a possible cease-fire agreement, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday in Brussels, Belgium, that a new force must be "considerably" larger and better armed than the current force, which is viewed as weak and ineffectual. Rice also called for the introduction of a strong peacekeeping operation.

In the statement, Olmert belittled the current force in Lebanon, but said he would be cautious about discussing the new force. "It seems to be its too early to debate it," he said.

As the diplomatic efforts continued, the Israeli air force kept up its strikes across southern Lebanon, hitting a military base at Kfar Chima before dawn Tuesday as soldiers rushed to their bomb shelters, killing at least 11 soldiers in an engineering unit and wounding 35 others, the Lebanese military said. The base is in a hilly area next to Hezbollah strongholds in southern Beirut that were frequently targeted by recent Israeli strikes.

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr denounced the strike as a "massacre," saying the regiment's main job was to help rebuilt damaged infrastructure. The Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, confining itself to firing anti-aircraft guns at the Israeli planes. But Israeli jets have struck Lebanese army positions.

At least five people also were killed when a bomb hit a house in the village of Aitaroun, near the border, witnesses said. Israeli warplanes hit four trucks that Israel said were bringing weapons into Lebanon.

Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman, denounced the shipments. "That is intolerable terrorist activity," he said. "They are using civilian infrastructure to bring in weapons, which they are using against us and killing Israelis, and we will exercise our right of self defense to stop the flow of weapons into Lebanon."

Syrian Vice Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad denied the charge. "We don't supply Hezbollah with weapons, and Hezbollah does not want or need our weapons," he told CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer.

Hezbollah guerrillas fired a new barrage of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday afternoon, killing a man as he walked down the street toward a bomb shelter in the town of Nahariya and setting fire to the top of a two-story apartment building.

At least 100 rockets fell into Israel, hitting a string of towns, including the city of Haifa.

More than 750 rockets have hit Israel since the violence began, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take cover in underground shelters.