BEIRUT, Lebanon - An advance party of about 60 South Korean troops flew in to Beirut on Thursday to join the reinforced UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon that is now more than 13,000-strong.

They left the airport on board three buses headed for the south, where the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) monitoring the volatile border region with Israel is deployed.

South Korea is joining the multinational peacekeeping operation, which has been reinforced since last summer's devastating war between Israel and Lebanon's Shiite group Hezbollah, at a time of heightened alert.

A spokesman for Seoul's embassy in Beirut said the rest of the troops would follow by the end of the month, bringing the deployment to about 350 in total.

UNIFIL has been on high alert during its patrols in the south since a deadly June 24 bomb attack, which the force has said could have been linked to the Lebanese army's battle with Islamist militants in northern Lebanon.

The mostly Shiite residents of south Lebanon can look forward to a "summer of peace" in their region despite the menace of more attacks on peacekeepers, the UNIFIL force commander said in an interview published last week.

But Italian Major-General Claudio Graziano also called for more to be done in clearing the region of weapons, which used to be a Hezbollah bastion before the deployment of the Lebanese army up the border backed by UNIFIL.

Three Spanish and three Colombian-born troops from UNIFIL were killed in last month's bomb attack as they patrolled near the Israeli border.

It was the first fatal attack on peacekeepers since UNIFIL was reinforced in the wake of the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas that killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians.

Graziano said last week that 13,000 troops, including several Asian contingents, had deployed so far with UNIFIL, including about 1,800 patrolling on warships off the coast. -AFP