UNITED NATIONS – A Security Council resolution attempting to define terrorism was watered down by its Russian sponsor, and Islamic and Arab states were hoping to make it even less definitive by this afternoon, when the council is expected to adopt it.

The U.N. has been deadlocked over the issue since the council adopted a forceful anti-terrorism resolution after the September 11, 2001, attacks against America. The Arab and Islamic blocs foiled any attempt to include in that definition acts against Israelis, or, as they put it, “foreign occupation.”

The resolution was initiated by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and received increasingly strong support from America and others on the council. But yesterday, even Russian Ambassador Andrey Denisov was disillusioned about the prospects of arriving at a clear definition for terrorism.

“We don’t pretend to give any definition of terrorism. It’s a very complicated thing,” he told The New York Sun. “It brings a lot of trouble to this or that country.”

He added however that the Russian initiative is a “step forward” that would add to the world-wide attempt to enforce anti-terrorist measures, such as freezing assets of terrorist groups and punishing anyone who supports them. It has to be adopted quickly “because terrorists wait for no one,” he said.

Trying the argument inside the council room in meetings, Mr. Denisov elicited a derisive remark from the Algerian ambassador, Abdallah Baali, who said that another council resolution is not going to stop terrorists, according to a participant in the closed-door consultations.

Mr. Baali and Pakistan’s ambassador Munir Akram leaned on the Russians to change the key paragraph, which originally made a clear definition of terrorism, to one that in the latest version talks about “criminal acts” instead.

They also wanted to avoid any direct reference to the U.N. composing a list of terrorist groups. This, they feared, might add Arab groups like Hamas to the current terrorist organizations the U.N. recognizes, which include only Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

“If you put somebody on the list, how could you defend it in international court?” Mr. Akram told the Sun. If Hamas is put on the list, an international court would need some evidence that it is a terrorist organization, which would be hard to prove, he argued.

Another big problem was an insistence by Spain that the term “criminal acts, including against civilians,” would be left in. Spain, which suffered from Basque groups that targeted its police, judiciary, and military, wants to leave the door open for including such entities, which might not strictly be defined as “civilians” in the reference to terrorism.

Opponents, however, are concerned that the provision, which Mr. Akram defined as a “loophole,” would allow for groups such as Hezbollah and the ones active in Iraq to be tagged as terrorists even as they act not directly against civilians, but against the Israeli or American military.

The American ambassador, John Danforth, told the Sun that despite the hardships, the resolution is still significant, in particular because of the paragraph that “states quite clearly that intentional attacks on civilians should be punished.”

According to the resolution, he stressed, such acts “are never justified by political reasons by religious reasons, or philosophical. They are never justified by claims that these are so-called wars of liberation. They are not justified. That is a very strong statement on the part of the Security Council.”

Separately, the council yesterday heard a report by Secretary-General Annan that indicated that Syria violated the early September resolution that called on “all foreign forces” to leave Lebanon and stop interfering in its internal politics.

The French ambassador, Jean Marc de la Sablierre, who co-sponsored the original resolution with America, said he hoped that as early as today there would be some “text” that would allow the council to support Mr. Annan’s report.

Sources inside the closed-door meeting told the Sun that France, which has leaned hard on Damascus to ease its grip on occupied Lebanon recently, met Arab resistance to its demand that either a council statement or a new resolution would explicitly refer to Syria’s violations of the resolution.