JERUSALEM – A U.N.-imposed cease-fire went into effect today, designed to end a month of violence that killed more than 900 people, devastated much of southern Lebanon and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis into bomb shelters.

In the final hours before the truce, Israeli aircraft struck targets in the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon and a Palestinian refugee camp in the south, but soldiers were ordered to halt their offensive as of 1 a.m. EST.

Before that, both sides prepared for a delicate period of limbo between the end of fighting and the planned entry of Lebanese troops and a bolstered U.N. force to southern Lebanon.

After Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday that his group reserved the right to fight Israeli troops still in Lebanon, an Israeli general warned that his forces would respond to any attack.

“If it will be quiet there, Lebanon will have quiet. If they will act against soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces or against the state of Israel, we will have to act,” Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz, the commander of Israeli ground forces, told Channel Two television.

Hezbollah fired more than 250 rockets, including several long-range missiles, at towns and villages across northern Israel, the highest number of rockets fired in a single day in more than a month of fighting. A man was killed in Yaara, a community near the Lebanese border, and nearly 30 people were reported injured, three seriously. A barrage of more than a dozen rockets hit the port city of Haifa.

In Lebanon, Israeli warplanes bombed southern Beirut and areas in the south of the country, killing at least 15 people, the Associated Press reported.

On the ground, Israeli forces continued battling Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon after pushing north toward the Litani River. Five soldiers were killed and 25 were wounded, the army said.

An estimated 30,000 Israeli troops are in southern Lebanon after hundreds were airlifted into the area by helicopters in a major widening of the ground offensive that began Friday night. In the first 24 hours of fighting, 24 soldiers were killed, including the crew of a helicopter hit by a missile, the first shot down by Hezbollah.

After a heated debate, the Israel cabinet voted 24-0 with one abstention to approve the U.N. cease-fire plan, which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as ensuring that Hezbollah would no longer be “a state within a state,” according to an account of his remarks given to Israeli media. Under the plan 15,000 Lebanese troops and an equal number of U.N. forces are to be stationed in southern Lebanon as Israeli forces withdraw, leaving the area up to the Litani free of armed guerrillas.

In the face of widespread public skepticism in Israel about the results of the military campaign, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called a news conference to argue that the new arrangements in Lebanon were a substantial gain for Israel.

“The Security Council resolution is good for Israel and if it is implemented, it will lead to an essential change in the rules of the game in Lebanon, in the relationship between Israel and Lebanon,” Livni said.

But many questions remained about whether the arrangements outlined in the U.N. resolution would in fact leave south Lebanon free of Hezbollah guerrillas. A Lebanese Cabinet meeting to discuss the deployment to the south of Lebanese troops was canceled amid disagreements over disarming Hezbollah, a step the group has rejected.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora insisted that government troops would be the only armed force in the south. “There won’t be any weapons in the country; starting from the area which is the zone that will be south of the Litani, there won’t be any weapons other than weapons of the central government,” he told reporters.

The Israeli bombardment of Beirut hit the southern Dahiya suburb, a Hezbollah stronghold that has been bombed repeatedly during the Israeli campaign, and whose residents have mostly fled. Reports on Lebanese television said eight residential buildings were destroyed. The AP said one of its photographers saw the body of a child being removed from the wreckage.

Reports from Lebanon said that Israeli planes attacked villages near Nabatiyeh north of the Litani River, killing three men, and that four other people were killed in a strike near Baalbek in the eastern Bekaa Valley. Israeli warplanes fired missiles into gas stations in the southern port city of Tyre, and huge fires were reported in the area, AP said.

The Israeli army said it shot down two Hezbollah drones in southern Lebanon, apparently as they headed to Israel. An army spokesman said the military was checking whether the drones carried explosives.

The mounting Israeli casualties in Lebanon included Staff. Sgt. Uri Grossman, the son of one of Israel’s best-known novelists, David Grossman, who last week urged the government to halt its military campaign and accept an offer by Siniora to station Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon, bolstered by U.N. peacekeepers, a proposal that later formed the basis of the U.N. plan.

David Grossman, a peace advocate, initially backed Israel’s military response to the Hezbollah attack on July 12 in which two soldiers were seized and three killed. But on Thursday he joined two other prominent authors, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, at a news conference to call for a halt to the fighting. A day later, an expanded ground offensive was launched to seize more territory before a cease-fire.

Staff Sgt. Grossman, 20, was killed when his tank was hit by anti-tank missile in southern Lebanon, the army said.

The conflict has claimed more than 900 lives. More than 750 have been killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 152 Israelis, including 113 soldiers.

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