THE Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, and the US Defence Secretary, Mr William Perry, yesterday announced a joint programme to defend Israel against attacks, including terrorist actions and missile attacks.
The announcement came in Washington as hundreds of thousands of refugees continued to return to their homes in southern Lebanon and began burying the 200 people killed in over two weeks of Israeli attacks.
Mr Peres arrived in Washington yesterday on a three day visit for talks with President Clinton, Mr Perry, and senior White House and Pentagon officials.
Mr Peres said he felt confident the truce, which followed a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy by the US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, would hold. Mr Peres added the next step would be to renew negotiations with the Palestinians.
Mr Perry, in announcing the cooperative defence plan, said a US team would head to Israel next week to start setting up a programme designed to destroy incoming rockets, and to look at ways of giving Israel an interim defence against the Katyusha rockets used by Hizbullah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, which sparked this month's massive Israeli offensive.
With Saturday's ceasefire holding, Lebanese held the first of many funerals for their dead, almost all of them civilians and one a new born child.
A funeral for four guerrillas in Majd al Zoun showed Hizbullah unbowed. Some 1,000 supporters marched through the front line village with coffins draped in Hizbullah flags, vowing to pursue the fight against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon.
"We will continue the resistance no matter what it costs us," read a black Hizbullah banner in the mosque. Outside, the road was strewn with debris, while two Israeli planes flew overhead.
A funeral in the town of Nabatiyeh for nine civilians killed by Israeli bombing - Fawziyya al-Khawajeh, her son in law and seven of her children - was a sombre apolitical affair in which thousands of Lebanese accompanied the bodies to the cemetery.
As the body of the youngest killed only four days after she was born - was placed in the grave with her mother, an anguished cry went up from the mass of mourners. Tears appeared in the eyes of even the most impassive.
Noor - her name means "alight" in Arabic - had been born at home because Israeli shelling prevented her mother reaching a hospital.
The father, a farmer who had left Nabatiyeh for a pilgrimage to Mecca, helped bury his family. Only two children, both in hospital from the same air attack that crushed their brothers and sisters, remain alive.
"I have just one question for Shimon Peres," said Mr Youssef Hamze, a Lebanese Canadian civil engineer from the town. "Who is the terrorist?"
A funeral was held in the village of Mansouri for four children and two women killed when an Israeli helicopter fired a rocket into the ambulance in which they were riding.
In the village of Qana, 103 graves were prepared for tomorrow's funeral of civilians slaughtered when Israeli artillery shells hit the UN peacekeeping base where they were sheltering. Their funerals had been delayed until Saturday's ceasefire allowed the return of some 400,000 Lebanese driven from their homes.
The bulk of the population, used to such evacuations in previous conflicts with Israel, returned within hours of the ceasefire to discover the extent of the destruction.
Many houses and shops lay in ruins. Some villages near the pan of south Lebanon occupied by Israel for the past 18 years had barely a building unscathed.
Rebuilding infrastructure could take months. Roads, electricity and water supplies were systematically destroyed.