TYRE, Lebanon, Sept 29, 2006 (AFP) - The revamped UN peacekeeping force may have new rules of engagement in south Lebanon but it remains powerless in the face of Israeli troops occupying their last positions.

The flying checkpoints which the Israeli army have been erecting outside the village of Marwaheen and Thursday's incident between French Leclerc and Israeli Merkava tanks showed the limits of the UN's mandate.

Standing some 50 metres (yards) apart, the tanks were locked in a 20-minute face-off, the first between the Israelis and the UN force, which has been boosted to more than 5,000 troops so far to consolidate an August 14 truce.

The French tanks then withdrew, as UN observers came to the scene.

"The prospect of that happening was raised earlier the same day at a meeting in Israel between Israeli liaison officers and UNIFIL," a senior official of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon told AFP.

The Marwaheen zone was Friday still under Israeli army control, a week after an initial departure date set by Israel, as the UN resolution which established a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel fixed no timetable for a pullout.

Israel's Channel Two television reported Friday the troop withdrawal will be complete by Sunday afternooon and ahead of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

It said the chief of staff had recommended the timeframe to the government as there was no longer any need for the several hundred troops still in the country to remain there.

Thursday's tank standoff was "a violation that we report. It's what we call a non-hostile situation," a UNIFIL officer said.

A copy of the rules of engagement, marked confidential but to which AFP had access, allows for "use of force beyond self-defence to ensure that UNIFIL's area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind".

It applies to zones without an Israeli presence, amounting to 95 percent of the area that UNIFIL is to deploy and patrol south of the Litani River, but not to the 10 zones along the border still occupied by Israeli soldiers.

To deal with armed guerrillas of the Shiite group Hezbollah, whose capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 triggered the devastating month-long war, the mainly European peacekeepers of UNIFIL have a different set of rules.

A key Israeli aim of the war was to neutralise the threat in the border zone from Hezbollah which rained rockets on northern Israel during the conflict.

"It is clearly stated in the resolution that it's not a matter of disarming Hezbollah or finding its arms but to stop it moving them around," explains Lieutenant Colonel Olivier de Cevins, commander of the French contingent.

Resolution 1701, which established the ceasefire, calls for peacekeepers to ensure the border area up to the Litani is "free of any armed personnel and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed forces and UNIFIL".

It also calls for the implementation of the 1989 Taif accords which halted Lebanon's 15-year civil war and of UN resolutions 1559 and 1680 demanding the disarming of all armed groups in Lebanon apart from the regular army.

"We can stop a vehicle in case of serious suspicions, for example if we information from an intelligence source that it could be carrying weapons," a UNIFIL source said.

The peacekeepers, however, do not have the authority to search.

But they have the right to back up the Lebanese army while it carries out such an operation, since its mandate is to support the Beirut government restore its sovereignty over the south.

"If the Lebanese army is not in a position to intervene, we have wide powers," said a senior official in UNIFIL.

"If we come across armed militiamen and they surrender, we will hand them over to the Lebanese army. But if they resist, we can open fire," he said. "This is a much stronger UNIFIL."

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