NAQURA, Lebanon - Lebanese soldiers backed by UN peacekeepers deployed Saturday for the first time in decades at posts on the volatile border with Israel, as the Hezbollah chief boasted his Shiite guerrillas were stronger than ever.

After more Israeli troops withdrew from the region following the Jewish state's devastating July-August war with Hezbollah, around 400 Lebanese soldiers supported by tanks were deployed at five points on the border's western sector, an army spokesman said.

Two of the posts at Ras Naqura on the Mediterranean and Labbuneh, three kilometres (two miles) inland, set up with the support of a Ghanaian armoured unit of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), stand 100 metres (yards) apart from Israeli troops.

UNIFIL commander Major General Alain Pelligrini said Friday that more Israeli forces had withdrawn from more positions on the "Blue Line" demarcating the border and should have pulled out completely by next Saturday.

Israel has delayed the completion of its withdrawal until after the Jewish New Year holidays which end on Sunday evening.

Lebanese soldiers had not been deployed for four decades along the Israeli border, absent since 1968 when Palestinian guerrillas held sway and south Lebanon was considered "Fatahland", taking its name from the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organisation faction.

Hezbollah took control in 2000 after more than two decades of Israeli occupation.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which came into force on August 14 established a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah following their 34-day war in which more than 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon alone.

In Beirut, meanwhile, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah's defiant speech Friday before hundreds of thousands of supporters at a "victory" rally drew mixed reviews in Beirut newspapers, after he rejected UN demands to disarm his fighters.

The pro-government Al-Mostaqbal said the hotly awaited speech at a Beirut rally, where Nasrallah emerged from 10 weeks in hiding due to fears of Israeli assassination, "maintains the tone of escalation adopted for some time by Hezbollah".

But The Daily Star said the charismatic cleric had extended "an olive branch to even his harshest critics" on the Lebanese political arena, sharply divided between pro- and anti-Syrian camps since the February 2005 assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri.

"What Hezbollah wants is the opening of negotiations" to convert his battle against Israel into political gains, on top of the two ministerial posts which it has in the cabinet, explained political analyst Sami Salhab.

Nasrallah, whose group has called for a new national unity government, criticised the current administration in his speech as weak, incapable of defending Lebanon and not up to the task of post-war reconstruction.

He said Hezbollah had emerged even stronger from the conflict, with more than 20,000 rockets in its arsenal.

The Hezbollah chief also warned the beefed-up UN peacekeeping force being deployed in south Lebanon under Resolution 1701 to stick to its mandate and not to try to disarm or spy on his group.

"There is no army in the world capable of making us drop our weapons," he said.

Israel dismissed Nasrallah's victory boast as "ridiculous" but its foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Hezbollah had been flagrantly violating Resolution 1701 by rearming despite an arms embargo.

With Hezbollah keeping its fighters out of sight since the truce in the war sparked by its July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers in a border raid, the army is deploying 15,000 troops in south Lebanon in the mainly Shiite region.

The Syrian- and Iranian-backed guerrillas killed more than 100 Israeli soldiers and rained 4,000 rockets on northern Israel during the conflict.

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz said Saturday that Damascus held "the key to stability" in the region. The Jewish state should "establish talks with Lebanon and prepare the conditions for a dialogue with Syria", he said.

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