RAMALLAH An officer in Yasser Arafat's guard and an Italian war photographer were killed on Wednesday as Israel pressed on with its biggest offensive in decades against the Palestinians on the eve of a U.S. peace mission.

Abu Fadi, deputy commander in Ramallah for Arafat's Force 17 elite guard, was killed in new fighting, Palestinian security sources said. They gave no details.

Photographer Raffaele Ciriello, who had worked in many of the world's hot spots, was shot six times in the chest while covering the Israeli takeover of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the first foreign journalist to die in 17 months of conflict.

Palestinian hospital sources said Ciriello, a freelance journalist, was killed by Israeli gunfire after tanks stormed into Ramallah on Tuesday, a day in which 41 people were killed on both sides in one of the bloodiest cycles of violence so far.

But the army, which tightened its grip on Ramallah on Wednesday against the backdrop of daily Palestinian attacks in Israel, said it did not know the circumstances of Ciriello's death and had opened an investigation.

"It is important to remember that there have been exchanges of fire in Ramallah, and that this was the reason the army closed off the area to journalists yesterday," said Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, an army spokesman.

The latest bloodshed left little room for hope that U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni, due to arrive in Israel on Thursday, would be able to convince Israelis and Palestinians to end the bloodshed after failed missions in December and January.

Some 150 armored vehicles, including tanks, thrust into Ramallah and nearby refugee camps on Tuesday, tearing up roads and crushing cars in the main Palestinian commercial and political hub in the West Bank, witnesses said.

Hundreds of spent bullet cartridges were scattered around Ramallah's central Al-Manara Square following heavy shooting in the area overnight. Israeli tanks and armored vehicles were stationed at schools and on road junctions throughout the city.

Machinegun and rifle fire continued sporadically in many parts of Ramallah, the main commercial and political center in the West Bank, just north of Bait-ul-Moqaddas.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his harshest criticism of Israel, urged it to stop "the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians".

The UN Security Council passed a U.S.-drafted resolution referring for the first time to a Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel.

The 14-0 vote late on Tuesday, with Syria abstaining, marked the first time the 15-nation council had approved a resolution on the Middle East since October 2000 and was the first recent text touching on the region to be written by Washington.

Palestinian officials cited initial reports which said troops killed five Palestinians before dawn in the Al-Manara area.

Troops searching house-to-house for weapons and militants exchanged fire with Palestinians as tanks rumbled through the deserted streets of Ramallah, a city of more than 200,000.

The latest operations are Israel's biggest offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since it seized the two areas in the 1967 Middle East War, said AFP.

In the meantime, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said yesterday that the United States and Europe shared blame for the Middle East violence for having accepted Israeli policy for too long.

Vedrine wrote in **** Le Monde *** newspaper it was time to stop holding Palestinian President Yasser Arafat solely to blame for the failure of Camp David peace talks and of assuming his Palestinian Authority had started the September 2000 Intifada.

Wrong too had been the insistence until recently on a period of calm before the launch of new political talks and the assumption that military action by Israel in Palestinian territories would bring security to Israel.

"Nearly 1,400 deaths and a year later, it has been demonstrated that this policy, with which the United States has gone along and to which the Europeans should earlier have come up with alternatives, is not working," he wrote.

He said there was no alternative to new peace talks and called on Arab countries at a meeting on March 27 to support the efforts of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to promote a peace plan.

He called on European Union leaders to try to come up with concrete contributions to solving the conflict at their summit in Barcelona on Friday and Saturday.