UNITED NATIONS – Advocating a more intense global war against terror, Russia yesterday proposed a new resolution that would name additional groups to the ones currently on the U.N. list of terror organizations and allow no exemption for terrorists, regardless of their cause.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who announced the initiative in his General Assembly address and circulated a draft resolution among the five permanent members of the Security Council, told Russian reporters, “We received a positive response,” especially from the Americans.

“We are looking at the proposal they put forward,” Secretary of State Powell told The New York Sun as he emerged from a meeting with Mr. Lavrov. American diplomats say they view the initiative favorably.

The proposed resolution calls for composing a “consolidated list of individuals, groups, and entities,” which would be added to the only two groups the U.N. has international sanctions against, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Composing the new list, however, might prove tricky. “If you are talking about Hamas and the [Islamic] Jihad and Hezbollah, I think it would be a mistake to include them in the same list,” the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Nabil Sha’ath, told the Sun yesterday.

A Yasser Arafat loyalist, Mr. Sha’ath contended that Hezbollah has been “very positive” in negotiations within Lebanon and that the two Palestinian Arab groups are currently involved in an Egyptian-sponsored attempt to reach a cease-fire declaration. All three are defined as terrorist organizations by America and the European Union.

Another hurdle would be the Russian attempt at defining terrorism. Since last year, Australian-led efforts to find agreement on a definition in the framework of a global war against terrorism were met by resistance, mostly from the Arab Group, which demanded to exempt terrorism against Israelis.

“In the mind of many there is a clear distinction between fight against colonial occupation – fight for self determination – and the fight against terrorism,” said the Algerian ambassador, Abdallah Baali, who is currently the sole Arab representative on the 15-member council.

The new Russian proposal defines terrorism as “any act intended to cause death or serious injury to civilians or taking hostages with the purpose to provoke a state of terror, intimidate a population, or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

It further undermines the Arab objections by specifically stating that terrorism is “under no circumstance justifiable by consideration of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious, or other similar nature.”

Israeli diplomats quickly embraced the proposal yesterday. “There was a time when the problems of terror, Islamic fundamentalism and Iranian nuclear ambition, were seen as local problems, Israel’s problems,” the foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said earlier in his General Assembly address. Today, he said, the world is “more united than ever in the battle against terrorism.”

Rather than Israel or America, the new initiative comes from Mr. Lavrov, who was highly esteemed at the U.N. in his long service as Russia’s ambassador, a fact that could help in its success, according to diplomats. They predicted, however, a long fight at the council.