Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels said Sunday that peace talks with the government were impossible while the two sides remained locked in the worst fighting since a 2002 truce.

The government had said it received a message from the Tigers through ceasefire monitors on Friday, hours before clashes erupted on the northern Jaffna peninsula, saying that they were keen to talk.

"We have made no proposals for peace talks," S. Puleedevan, head of the Tiger peace secretariat, said by telephone from the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi.

The government had said it was willing to talk.

"We accepted," said head of the government peace secretariat Palitha Kohona. "The Tigers also wanted to know if there were any conditions. We said there would be no conditions but since then there has been no response."

On Saturday the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) broke through army defences on the army-held peninsula, where some 40,000 troops, mainly from the Sinhalese majority, are based in a Tamil-dominated area cut off from the rest of the island by rebel territory.

Telephone contact with Jaffna is extremely difficult. A senior army source in the area said that the night had been relatively quiet but that the military had launched an operation around first light.

The military said government jets went into action after Sea Tigers attacked positions on a navy-held island. Aid workers reported heavy shelling, but truce monitors said fighting seemed slightly less than on Saturday when the army said 27 of its personnel were killed and 87 wounded.

After early talk of routing the rebels, by the afternoon the government media office simply said it had lost communication with the Jaffna troops.

Truce monitors said they believed the LTTE were trying to cut supply lines to Jaffna, which has changed hands several times in two decades of civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people.

The birthplace of most of the rebel leadership and cultural center of their fight for a homeland for minority Tamils, Jaffna has long been seen as a key Tiger objective. Some diplomats believe the LTTE want to move closer before going to peace talks.

Aid workers said people inside rebel territory were fleeing south towards Kilinochchi, some of them sheltering at the roadside as spotter planes flew overhead.

The first ground fighting since the ceasefire erupted over a week ago further south, initially sparked by the closure of a rebel-held sluice gate providing water to government territory. The Tigers later opened the sluice gates but violence continued.

The fighting has been accompanied by targeted attacks in the island's south, far from the front. On Saturday, gunmen shot dead the deputy head of the government peace secretariat Kethesh Loganathan, an ethnic Tamil.

The government blames the rebels, who have long silenced dissenting Tamil voices. Loganathan supported the government's military campaign against the rebels and last week said the international community was "mollycoddling" the LTTE.

(China Daily August 14, 2006)