Beirut, 7 August 2006: So the great and the good on the East River laboured at the United Nations Security Council - and brought forth a lemon. You could almost hear the Lebanese groan at this draft resolution, a document of such bias and mendacity that a close Lebanese friend read carefully through it yesterday, cursed and uttered the immortal question: "Don't these bastards learn anything from history?"

And there it all was again, the warmed-up peace proposals of Israel's 1982 invasion, full of buffer zones and disarmament and "strict respect by all parties" - a rousing chortle here, no doubt, from Hizbollah members - and the need for Lebanese sovereignty. It didn't even demand the withdrawal of Israeli forces, a point that Walid Moallem, Syria's Foreign Minister - and the man the Americans will eventually have to negotiate with - seized upon with more than alacrity. It was a dead UN resolution without a total Israeli retreat, he said on a strategic trip to Beirut.

A close analysis of the American-French draft - the fingerprints of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, were almost smudging the paragraphs - showed just who is running Washington's Middle East policy: Israel. And one wondered how even Tony Blair would want to associate himself with this nonsense. It made no reference to the obscenely disproportionate violence employed by Israel - just a sleek reference to "hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides" - and it made only passing reference to Hizbollah's demand that it would only release the two Israeli soldiers it captured on 12 July in return for Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.

The Security Council said it was "mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue [sic] of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel". I bet Hizbollah were impressed by the "mindful" bit, not to mention the "sensitivity" and the soft, slippery word "settle" - an issue which can be "settled" in maybe 20 years' time. Then came the real coup de grâce. A demand for the "total cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks" and the "immediate cessation" by Israel of "all offensive military operations". Bit of a problem there, as Hizbollah spotted at once. They have to lay down their arms.

Had the council demanded an immediate resolution on the future of the Shebaa farms, the Israeli-occupied territory which once belonged to mandate Lebanon - and for whose "liberation" the Hizbollah have fought - the whole fandango might have stood a chance. After all, Shebaa is the only raison d'être that the Hizbollah can produce for continuing their reckless, ruthless, illegal war across the UN blue line in southern Lebanon. But the UN document wished only to see a delineation of Lebanon's borders "including in the Shebaa farms area". There was even a wonderful paragraph - Number 9 for aficionados of UN bumf - which "calls on all parties to co-operate ... with the Security Council". So the Hizbollah are to co-operate, are they, with the austere diplomats of this august and wise body? Isn't that exalting a guerrilla army a little bit more upmarket than it deserves?

No one was fooled and few disagreed with Syria's Walid Moallem when he said the UN's draft resolution was "a recipe for continuing the war". As both the Hizbollah and the Israelis did yesterday, the former killing 13 Israelis and the latter bombing houses in Ansar - once an Israeli POW camp - which destroyed five more Lebanese civilian lives. Mohamed Fneish, a Hizbollah government minister - who scarcely represents all Lebanese but talks as if he does - thundered away about how "we" [presumably the Hizbollah, rather than the Lebanese] will abide by it [the resolution] on condition that no Israeli soldiers remains inside Lebanese land."

There were more Israeli air attacks on Beirut's southern suburbs yesterday - though heaven knows what is left there to destroy - ensuring that even more Shia Muslim civilians will remain refugees. Fearful that the Israelis will bomb their trucks and claim they were carrying missiles, the garbage collectors of this city have abandoned their vehicles and the familiar 1982 stench of burning rubbish now drifts through the evening streets. Petrol is now so scarce that a tank-full yesterday cost £250.

About the only gift to Lebanon in the UN resolution was the expressed need to provide the UN with remaining Israeli maps of landmines in Lebanon. But Israel has again dropped lethal ordnance all over southern Lebanon. Oh yes, and as usual, the UN draft on these ambitious, hopelessly conceived ideas "decides to remain actively seized of the matter". You bet it does. And so, as they say, the war goes on.

What the UN wants...

* A full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;

* Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements:

* Strict respect by all parties for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Israel and Lebanon;

* Full respect for the Blue Line by both parties;

* Delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shebaa farms area;

* Security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed and security forces, and of UN-mandated international forces;

* Full implementation of the relevant provisions ... that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon;

* Deployment of an international force in Lebanon;

* The Secretary General to develop, in liaison with key international actors and the concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant provisions ... and to present those proposals to the Security Council within 30 days;

* The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), upon cessation of hostilities, to monitor its implementation and extend assistance to ensure humanitarian access to civilians and the safe return of displaced persons;

* The government of Lebanon to ensure arms or related material are not imported into Lebanon without its consent and requests UNIFIL, conditions permitting, to assist the government of Lebanon at its request;

* The Secretary-General to report to the Council within one week on the implementation and provide any relevant information in light of the Council's intention to adopt a further resolution.

Beirut, 8 August 2006: Beirut, Shortly after 4am, the fly-like buzz of an Israeli drone came out of the sky over my home. Coded MK by the manufacturers, Lebanese mothers have sought to lessen their children's fears of this ominous creature by transliterating it as "Um Kamel", the Mother of Kamel. It is looking for targets and at night, like all the massacres being perpetrated by the Israeli air force across southern Lebanon, you usually cannot see it.

Shortly after 4am, the fly-like buzz of an Israeli drone came out of the sky over my home. Coded MK by the manufacturers, Lebanese mothers have sought to lessen their children's fears of this ominous creature by transliterating it as "Um Kamel", the Mother of Kamel. It is looking for targets and at night, like all the massacres being perpetrated by the Israeli air force across southern Lebanon, you usually cannot see it.

The latest model can even fire missiles. Well, it flew around for a few minutes before it moved south-west over the city in search of other prey. Then an hour later came the hiss of jets and five massive blasts as the southern suburbs received their 29th air raid. The Israelis must be convinced that beneath the rubble of their previous strikes, the Hizbollah have secret bunkers to direct their war in the south, that Hizbollah's television station - its four-storey headquarters a pancaked pile of rubble - must be staying on air because it has ever-deeper studios beneath the debris. I doubt it.

After dawn, I drive out to see friends in the suburbs, among the few Shias not to have abandoned their homes. Hassan and Abbas live in two decaying blocks of chipped stone stairs and damp walls; each lives with only two other families in these rotting eight-storey tenements, their neighbours having sought refuge with Lebanon's 700,000 internal refugees - another 200,000 have fled abroad - in the Druze Chouf mountains or the Christian mountains to the north or in Beirut's slum parks and crowded schools.

"I don't have any other place to go," Hassan tells me mournfully as his two-year-old plays tug of war with a toy Pink Panther. "In the Chouf now, a two-room flat costs $800." Well, the Druze are certainly making money, I say to myself. "Nobody is coming to our help"

We glower at Al Manar, Hizbollah's TV station, in the corner of the room, whose Hizbollah announcer is proclaiming the merits - and demerits - of the Arab foreign ministers meeting to start shortly in Beirut. These wealthy princes and emirs of the Gulf and the utterly boring Amr Moussa of Egypt roared and strutted upon the stage, remaining silent only when Fouad Siniora - Lebanon's sweet Prime Minister - went through another of his public weeping sessions and demanded an immediate ceasefire. Lebanon's proposals must be added to the UN draft resolution, he said between sobs, sniffles and whimpers. Shebaa Farms must be returned to Lebanon. The Israelis must leave Lebanon. Only then can Hizbollah abide by UN Security Council resolution 1559 and lay down its arms.

The ministers decided to send a delegation to the UN in New York - which will have Washington shaking in its boots - and the Saudis agreed to an Arab summit in Mecca, but one which should not be rushed because it must be carefully prepared - which sounded very like George W Bush's equally mendacious remark that a ceasefire had to be carefully prepared. And that will have them shaking in the shoes in Tel Aviv.

It was preposterous, scandalous, shameful to listen to these robed apparatchiks - most of them are paid, armed or otherwise supported by the West - shed their crocodile tears before a nation on its knees. The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, had already said in Cairo that the Beirut meeting "is a clear message to the world to demonstrate Arab solidarity with the Lebanese people". In the southern suburbs - where they do not take this nonsense seriously - Abbas was telling me of a female neighbour who had supported the rival Shia Amal movement until her house was destroyed by the Israelis. "She told us, 'We are all Hizbollahi now'," And I recall that less than three years ago, we - we Westerners, we brave believers in human rights - were saying that we were all New Yorkers now.

What sent Fouad Sinioura into his bout of crying was a report that 40 Lebanese civilians had been massacred in the village of Houla by an Israeli air strike - 18 people were confirmed buried in one house. Two other buildings in the village collapsed. Yet there are far more terrible fears that hundreds more may lay dead in the ruins of their homes after the Israelis had blasted their villages, hill towns and hamlets.

According to the UN, 22,000 Lebanese are still - dead or alive - in the 38 most southern villages, out of an original population of 913,000. In Mays al-Jabal, for example, 400 civilians are believed to have stayed out of 10,000, though no one knows their fate. The Lebanese death toll - including the conservative figure for Houla - is 932, almost all civilians, although it may well have reached more than 1,000. There are 3,293 wounded.

At lunchtime, I paid a call on Suheil Natour, a Palestinian official in the little Mar Elias camp. His people - the Palestinians and their descendants of the 1948 flight from Palestine - are now hosting thousands of Shia refugees from southern Lebanon, just as those refugees' grandparents once hosted the Palestinians of 1948. This irony is not lost on Natour who points out that the Shias - the largest single community in Lebanon - are now spread over all the country after their flight. "What kind of Lebanon will emerge from this?" he asks me. "How many months have to pass before the Shias feel they belong to the areas of Lebanon to which they have fled - rather than to the wreckage of the homes they were forced out of by the Israelis?"

And when I go home, I find my landlord has treble locked the iron front door of my apartment block, just in case the refugees decide that they belong to his building - or that his building belongs to them.

Day 27

* Israeli attacks kill at least 45 people in Lebanon, mostly in eastern Bekaa Valley and border village of Houla. Five die in strike on crowded area in Shi'ite-dominated south Beirut. Israeli aircraft also hit last coastal crossing on Litani river between Sidon and Tyre.

* UN Security Council vote on a resolution to end conflict is delayed until tomorrow after Arab nations object to draft.

* Three Israeli soldiers are killed in battles with guerrillas in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah guerrillas fire rockets into northern Israel, wounding one.

* Lebanese health minister Mohammad Khalifeh says conflict has killed 925 people. About one-third of the dead have been children under the age of 13.