KFAR KILA, Lebanon — U.N. peacekeepers asked Israel’s army yesterday to pull down a new barbed-wire barrier that Lebanon said encroached on its territory, but Israel denied it was on Lebanese soil — a test of the month-old cease-fire.

The handover of south Lebanon continued, with Lebanese troops taking control of a large border zone in the war-ravaged area for the first time in three decades.

Blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers inspected the disputed barrier — two coils of barbed wire that were unfurled some 15 yards inside Lebanon, just across from the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona.

Prime Minister Siniora of Lebanon protested the barrier, and a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Lebanon said the peacekeeping force had asked Israel’s army to remove it.

“We expect them to do so as quickly as possible,” Alexander Ivanko said.

But the Israeli military, which said it was repairing the fence along the route set down in a 2000 U.N. resolution, denied it was inside Lebanese territory.

At the border, a new dirt track controlled by Israelis could be seen running between the tall border fence and the barbed-wire coils laid inside a Lebanese field.

“The Israeli soldiers moved in and began unfurling their wire in the middle of my land,” a farmer, Mahmoud Sheikh, who was harvesting hay nearby, said. He said the incident occurred three days ago and that the troops waved him off as he tried to intervene.

New barriers were put up in several places, including the Khiam plain and the town of Gadjar, covering an area about two miles long, Lebanese army and U.N. officials said.

About six miles away, Lebanese soldiers in a long column of old jeeps and armored vehicles took control of a 125-square-mile zone for the first time in decades.

Children clapped, women threw rice, and men waved yellow Hezbollah baseball caps to greet about 300 soldiers, their trucks piled with mattresses and kitchen utensils as they deployed in abandoned buildings and schools across the severely bombed area.

The U.N. said it had coordinated the Lebanese deployment in the zone around Houla with the Israeli army, which withdrew from the area a day earlier. A Lebanese officer said Lebanon’s army had not been in the zone — previously controlled by warring militias and then by Israel — for decades.

“We’ve been studying maps and aerial photographs to find our way,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

“We’re overjoyed to have them all here,”the mayor of Minni Hayam said, as local Boy Scouts from his village greeted the troops.

“Finally, the sovereignty of Lebanon is restored here,” Mayor Salah Jaber said.

Under the U.N. resolution that ended the conflict, 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers are to secure a buffer zone with Israel in southern Lebanon, supporting an equal number of Lebanese troops.