Clashes on the border between Lebanon and Israel on Friday were a breach of UN resolutions, Secretary General Kofi Annan said in an appeal for an end to violence.
In a statement, Annan said he was "very concerned" about an incident in which the Lebanese Hizbollah movement killed an Israeli soldier and wounded two others, said AFP.
Israel responded with artillery and mortar fire.
"The secretary general notes that these hostilities contravene binding resolutions of the Security Council, and calls on those concerned to cease all violence," Annan's spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
The attack took place in the disputed Shabaa Farms area, which remained under Israeli occupation after Israeli forces withdrew from south Lebanon in May last year.
At least two Hizbollah fighters were reportedly killed by artillery fire while retreating from the scene of the ambush, said the Daily Star newspaper.
The United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, condemned that attack as a "clear violation" of the UN-delineated Blue Line, said the Star.
"We are very concerned that this incident took place at the same time as we have an extremely volatile situation in the Palestinian areas," Larsen told a news conference in New York.
The paper said that Israel instructed its UN ambassador to submit to the Security Council "a harsh complaint against Lebanon."
Hizbollah dedicated the attack to "the lord of martyrs," Sayyed Abbas Musawi, a former party secretary-general who was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter gunship in 1992, and "the sheikh of martyrs," Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the founder of the resistance who was killed in a bomb blast in Jibsheet in 1983.
A Hizbollah statement said the "Al-Aqsa martyrs" group attacked at 12.15pm an Israeli motorized patrol on the Moghr Shebaa outpost road, added the daily.
The statement claimed a direct hit on a 'Humvee' vehicle.
An eyewitness in Ain Arab village, 4 kilometers away, told the Daily Star that he heard the explosion and saw the vehicle burning. He said that the vehicle was hit by a missile and not a roadside bomb as was initially believed.
Israeli retaliatory shelling began around 30 minutes after the ambush, said the paper, addin that more than 90 heavy artillery and mortar rounds pounded the area between Kfar Shuba, Halta and Majidieh, a former training base for the South Lebanon Army militia (SLA).
Hizbollah insists that the 20 square kilometer-farms are occupied Lebanese lands and should be liberated.
Meanwhile, Haaretz quoted outgoing Israeli premier, Ehud Barak as saying in a speech at the Eretz Israel Museum after the incident that "we are currently at a time when terrorist attacks are taking place and will continue to take place. A complicated incident has taken place at Har Dov (Shabaa).” -- Albawba.com
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