"We have no intentions, no plans, no need to occupy Eritrea," an Ethiopian commander, Col. Gabre Kidane, said tonight as he stood on the old Italian fortress in this hilly town 45 miles inside Eritrea. "The only intention we have is to weaken the forces that have occupied our country and to regain our sovereignty. That is all."

A week after Ethiopia started an offensive that it says is aimed at ending the two-year-old war, it is now clear that the whole of Eritrea could become a battlefield. With hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the region, Colonel Kidane said Ethiopian soldiers continued to skirmish with Eritrean soldiers on the run here in western Eritrea.

Tonight, Ethiopian officials said planes bombed the main Eritrean military training center at Sawa, an American-built base 100 miles west of Asmara, the capital. The officials also said they had taken a village, Maidema, 30 miles from Asmara, on the way from the western front to the central front along the disputed border. That is where the next round of fighting, already heavy, is generally expected.

For Eritrea, Ethiopia's rapid advance out of the border trenches into the countryside is not merely a military setback. For 30 years, when Eritrea was the northernmost province of Ethiopia, rebels fought two successive governments in Addis Ababa for their independence.

Those rebels, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, now are in power in Eritrea, and they say this advance is a frightening continuation of Ethiopia's attempts at domination.

An Eritrean government statement said today that a bombing on Thursday south of the port of Massawa killed a civilian. That death, the statement said, was "further evidence of Ethiopia's resurgent aim to annex this country and, in so doing, to make targets of Eritrea's civilian populations."

Ethiopia said the target was a military installation.

The paradox is that the leaders of Ethiopia fought side by side with the Eritreans to oust the military government of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.

For the first few years, the two governments were close friends, so close that they never demarcated the border when Eritrea became independent in 1993.

But tensions grew over personality clashes and economic rivalry, exploding in May 1998 when Eritrea claimed the Badme border region based on old colonial maps. Eritrea moved troops into the area.

Ethiopia said it was invaded, and a war ignited that has defied long peace talks and claimed tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

Until Ethiopia began its offensive last Friday, the fighting had been confined to three fronts along the 620-mile border. But since then, Ethiopia has pressed 65 miles into Eritrea, displacing 340,000 people, the World Food Program said today.

Officials in neighboring Sudan said today that an additional 50,000 Eritreans had fled across their border. In both places, relief officials said, people lack food and shelter. Even without the war, the United Nations says 800,000 Eritreans face food shortages because of drought.

Most civilians fled from around this town, the regional capital and a strategically important point because the area was a main supply route for Eritrea's westernmost front.

The battle has been intense. Starting on Monday, Colonel Kidane said, Ethiopian troops had pounded areas around the town with bombs, tanks and artillery and then engaged Eritrean troops along a mountain pass eight miles from town.

Along the heavily mined road from the south, the route of Ethiopia's advance, huge numbers of empty mortar shells, captured Eritrean ammunition and destroyed trucks from both sides remain. At spots, the smell of rotting corpses was strong. Colonel Kidane would not give the number of casualties.

On Thursday morning, Ethiopian troops took the town, the biggest one that they have captured, and called it a major victory. The Eritreans said they had staged a tactical withdrawal.

This evening, Ethiopian troops milled around and ate their rations at the hilltop building that was once a fortress for Italian troops in the colonial period and that, until Thursday, according to the Ethiopians, was the command center for Eritrean troops in the region. The Ethiopians joked about marching on to Asmara.

Up to one million people are fleeing their homes and thousands are crossing the border into Sudan, the United Nations said.

In an effort to end the fighting between two of the world's poorest nations, the European Union's special envoy on the conflict said he was preparing a visit to both countries in a bid to help reopen negotiations between them.

After a week of spectacular battlefield gains, Ethiopian forces consolidated their control of the strategic town of Barentu and chased fleeing Eritrean soldiers away from the western front of the two-year-old border war.

Burned out tanks and jeeps lay abandoned on the roads through a mountain pass about 10 miles (15 km) south of Barentu, the remnants of a fierce battle that raged all around here for two days.

Jubilant troops waved Ethiopian flags as they rode through the dusty plains and mountain roads of the region, while others established a firm base in Barentu and a string of battered villages seized over the past week.

With most civilians fleeing ahead of the offensive and Eritrea's western army apparently in disarray, the Ethiopians' task appeared easy and they continued to make gains.

Officials said Ethiopian fighter jets had bombed Eritrea's main military training base at Sawa in the west and seized another town on the main road linking Banteru with the front on the central part of the 600-mile (1,000-km) border.

But military commanders insisted they had no ambitions other than to so weaken enemy forces that the Eritrean army is forced to pull out of other pockets of disputed territory on the central and eastern fronts.

"We have no intention, no plans, no need to occupy Eritrea. All we are doing is bringing back our sovereignty," Colonel Gebre Kidane, a senior military commander on the western front, said in Barentu on Friday night.

"Our problem here is not with the people but the government and armed forces of Eritrea. Never, ever with the people," he said.

PEOPLE'S PLIGHT

With the situation threatening to deteriorate, UNICEF said on Friday about half of Eritrea's estimated population of 3.1 to 3.8 million people could be dependent on international relief to keep them alive or provide subsistence aid.

"In the space of one week we've seen an overwhelming humanitarian crisis develop," said Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF.

"I can't recall another instance when such a serious natural disaster was followed so quickly by a man-made disaster. And it's the innocent civilians, including a quarter of a million children under the age of five, who have their backs against the wall," Bellamy said."

In Rome on Friday, EU special envoy Rino Serri said "intense" diplomatic efforts were under way to try to halt the war.

"I am preparing a visit to the two capitals to try to contribute to reopen negotiations," he said.

Serri said he had met the European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the Organisation for African Unity's (OAU) special envoy on the conflict.

The OAU has appealed for an immediate ceasefire and for new talks under its auspices.

Eritrea was once a province of Ethiopia but won its independence in 1993 after a long guerrilla war against the former Marxist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Ironically, Ethiopia's current leadership led a rebel army force that worked closely with Eritrea's guerrillas in the fight against Mengistu, and the two nations were allies until a simmering border dispute exploded into war in May 1998.

But the ferocity of the war appears to have killed off any chance of the two nations again enjoying close relations while their current leaders are in power.