BEIRUT. June 5: Iran and Syria are seeking to prevent a ^full-blown war between Israel and Shiite Muslim guerillas in south Lebanon after the deadliest Israeli air raid in a year, sources said Sunday, reports AP.

Official Lebanese sources said Syria. Lebanon s main power-broker, and Iran, the patron of Shiite fundamentalists in Lebanon, advised Hezbollah militants to stop firing missiles at Israel.

The sources said they had no word on a response from Hezbollah, or Party of God. But they noted thefe had been no missile strikes or, northern Israel since Friday morning.

Up to 50 people, most of them young Shiite guerilla trainees, were killed Thursday In the Israeli air assault on a Hezbollah training*base near Lebanon's IxjrtJer with Syria.

After the attack, the United States urged all Middle Eastern parties Involved to avert further clashes that could ' threaten the Arab-Israeli peace process.

The Lebanese sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the advice to the guerilla leaders was made during Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati's trip to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

on Saturday.

Velayati met with his Syrian counterpart Farouk al Sharaa and then with Syrian President Hafez Assad. Both sides publicly declared support for Lebanon against Israel's "escalating aggression.

But the sources said that during a meeting at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. Velayati urged restraint in talks with Hezbollah's leader. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and with the party’s political bureau chief. Sheik Naim Kassem.

Hezbollah guerillas unleashed 60 Katyusha missiles that crashed in northern Israel and an enclave that Israel occupies as a "security zone" in south Lebanon. They said the attack was to avenge .Israel’s air raid.

The death .toll from the air ' strike was the highest from a single air raid since .Israel’s weeklong air, sea and artillery blitz last July In which 147 people were killed and 500 wounded.

That onslaught was halted by a US-brokered truce that included an agreement that Hezbollah would refrain from firing rockets on Israel's northern flank.

Hezbollah's attacks Thursday and Friday caused no casualties or serious damage in

Israel or In the self-styled "security zone" in south Lebanon.

But Israeli government and military leaders branded the attacks a violation of the US-sponsored understanding and threatened severe reprisals if the missile attacks continued. Israel rushed tank and artillery reinforcements to the border region.

Since then, there have been minor skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israel's South Lebanon Army surrogate militia in which three guerillas were killed.

Syria has 40.000 troops deployed in Lebanon, ostensibly as peacekeepers to prevent a resumption of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. which ended in 1990.

Assad’s government is Iran's main Arab ally, even though Tehran bitterly opposes the US-sponsored peace process.

Syria allows the Islamic guerillas to operate in areas under its control in east Lebanon as a means of putting pressure on the Arab-Israeli peace talks

In the wake of the latest , missile strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appealed to the United States to pressure Syria to curb Hezbollah.