|TOP|The Church of Ireland has launched an emergency appeal to help resettle people left displaced by the current Middle East crisis.

The appeal was launched by the Archbishop of Armagh Robin Eames and the Archbishop of Dublin John Neill.

Both archbishops have already earmarked an emergency allocation of £20,000 for the Bishops’ Appeal and are seeking contributions towards the emergency relief fund from Church of Ireland parishes.

The launch of the appeal follows a statement released previously on the current Middle East crisis in which the Church of Ireland’s House of Bishops described the ongoing “tragic situation” between Israel and Lebanon as a “challenge to all of us”.

|AD|“Arabs, Jews, Lebanese, Palestinians and Christians are caught up in events which bring death to the innocent and destruction to homes and essential services. The cries of the suffering cannot be ignored,” the statement read.

The House of Bishops added that, “The complexities of the Middle East mean that only a painstaking and determined effort will resolve the conflict and produce any long-term settlement”.

It said, however, that it supported calls for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East and for the establishment of contacts between the warring parties.

“We appeal to people in Ireland to pray for an end to the violence and the emergence of a just and lasting settlement to a situation of such suffering and complexity,” the House of Bishops read.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said that although he wanted the killing to end, conditions had to first be put in place before any ceasefire would be respected by both sides.

He now heads for talks with US President George W. Bush Friday amid growing criticism that he is blindly following the position of his US ally.

"I defy any person watching TV not to cry out loud for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon. Yet our government and that of the U.S. have weasel-worded their way through this tragedy," Stephen Wall, a former foreign policy adviser to Blair, wrote in this week's New Statesman magazine.

Wall added that Blair's government had "too readily lost sight of the fact that Britain's interests, and those of the U.S., are not identical".

Aid agencies Oxfam and Save the Children were among 14 organisations behind an advertising blitz launched Friday in British newspapers condemning Blair’s policy and urging him to call for an immediate halt to the fighting during his meeting with Bush.

As the conflict enters it 17th day, an estimated 600 people have been killed, mostly civilians.

Blair has expressed his support for a peace plan that will include an end to fighting, the return of captured Israeli soldiers and an international force to act as a “buffer” between Israel and Hezbollah, although Britain itself will not contribute to such a force due to its military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.