The drama she watched from her back garden in the Galilee border village of Shtulah last Wednesday, as Hezbollah gunmen ambushed an Israeli patrol on the road running along the frontier with Lebanon, was the trigger for the worst crisis in the region for two decades.

Sources in Hezbollah, the radical Islamic organisation that runs a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, say the attack was five months in the planning. The purpose was to seize hostages and hold them to ransom for prisoners in Israel.

The Hezbollah assault unit had clearly done their reconnaissance. After infiltrating overnight they smashed Israeli CCTV cameras that monitor the border and hid in a peach orchard to wait for two Israeli armoured “Hummers” to begin a daily 9am patrol.

The border area had been mostly quiet since May 2000, when Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon. Now the Hatans, an Israeli Kurdish family, watched in horror.

“They waited in the best location,” said Assaf, Kokhi Hatan’s husband, pointing to a curve in the patrol road through his fields.

The two Hummers were hit by rocket-propelled grenades and went up in flames. Three soldiers were killed outright and two taken prisoner by the Hezbollah unit, which crossed back into Lebanon before a nearby Israeli base even knew what was happening.

The attack made clear how well-trained and equipped Hezbollah has become with the help of Iran, its main backer, since the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon. It has built outposts along the border, in some places only a hundred yards from the Israelis.

As Israeli reinforcements scrambled, Hezbollah units inside Lebanon began a harassing barrage. Mortars crashed with a sickening sound close to the Hatans’ back garden as soldiers with megaphones urged villagers to take cover.

About 500ft above, two Israeli Cobra assault helicopters fired missiles to stop the Hezbollah mortars. Every five seconds they released a puff of hot metal balloons to divert Hezbollah anti-aircraft rockets.

By the end of the fight, eight Israelis were dead including the tank crew, killed as they came to the rescue.

In the chaos it was 10.30am before the Israeli military realised that two soldiers — Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26 — had been captured. It was another 15 minutes before the military secretary to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, passed him a note: two soldiers were confirmed abducted by Hezbollah.

Olmert could not believe what he was reading, Israeli sources said. He had been in an emotional meeting with the distressed parents of Gilad Shalit, 19, the Israeli soldier abducted in Gaza on June 25. They had just been pressing him to order an immediate exchange of prisoners to free their son.

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