JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published yesterday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

He also dismissed as "megalomania" any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was responsible for the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges -- he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in -- Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

"What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me," Mr. Olmert told Yediot Aharonot newspaper in the interview to mark the Jewish new year that runs from last night till tomorrow night. "The time has come to say these things."

NAIROBI -- The American military deployed more warships yesterday to tighten a naval noose around the arms-laden freighter hijacked by pirates and thwart any possible escape in a standoff near the craggy Somalia coastline.

The ship, operated by a Ukrainian arms supplier, was hijacked Thursday. The American military, among others, fears the pirates could sell the cargo to Islamist insurgents battling Somalia's weak government.

Two Western diplomats in Nairobi, a maritime official and the pirates themselves said the arms were headed for Sudan or other neighboring countries, not Kenya, as the Kenyan government has repeatedly claimed.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Commando forces from Egypt and Sudan yesterday freed 19 hostages grabbed by desert gunmen during a tourist expedition in a remote corner of Egypt 10 days ago, government officials announced.

The rescue took place early yesterday in the Sahara desert somewhere near the borders of Sudan, Egypt and Libya, one day after soldiers chased and killed at least half the kidnappers, government officials said.

The rescue ended a tense stand-off which began more than a week ago when masked gunmen grabbed five Germans, five Italians and a Romanian who had hired an Egyptian tour company.

NEW YORK -- U.S. diplomat Chris Hill will try to re-engage North Korea on how to verify its nuclear claims and rescue a crumbling disarmament-for-aid deal in Pyongyang this week, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Mr. Hill's trip to Pyongyang tomorrow on the invitation of the North Koreans is a concerted effort by the Bush administration to revive a six-nation deal after Pyongyang reversed its promises and said it would restart its Soviet-era Yongbyon nuclear plant.

Last Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the North was expelling U.N. monitors from the plant.

The North, which conducted a nuclear test in October 2006, is believed to have produced enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make at least eight or nine nuclear weapons.

SHANGHAI -- China said yesterday that it had detained 22 people for operating an underground network that intentionally contaminated milk with melamine, which can be used to illegally inflate the nutrition value of foods by fooling testers measuring protein levels.

Police officers in north China, the nation's biggest dairy producing area, raided more than 40 dairy farms and milk stations in Hebei province and seized more than 220 kilograms of melamine, a chemical commonly used to make plastics and fertilizer.

The government accused the group of operating as a kind of criminal syndicate, producing melamine in underground factories and then marketing it to dairy farms and milking stations in Hebei province in order to adulterate the milk for profit.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- A remote control car bomb packed with ball bearings ripped through a military bus yesterday, killing four soldiers and a civilian.

It was the second deadly attack targeting troops in northern Lebanon in less than two months. Suspicion fell on an al-Qaida-inspired Islamic movement that has been locked in bitter conflict with the army since last year.

The blast came two days after a car bombing in the capital of neighboring Syria killed 17 people and wounded 14.