The memorial is more like a crime scene than a monument. On the road along the border with Lebanon a painted black rectangle marks the outline of an army lorry with the names of the passengers where they sat: Razeq, Toma, Eldad and Udi.

After the last are the words “My beloved” — a cry of grief for Ehud “Udi” Goldwasser, one of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped in an ambush here, triggering war with Hezbollah.

A year later, Israeli patrols like Udi’s crawl past this spot watchful for any attempt by Hezbollah to launch an ambush similar to the one that left four of their comrades dead, two wounded and two kidnapped — and still missing. Many Israelis believe that a new war with Hezbollah is inevitable, and military analysts fear that the next conflict could be complicated by the emergence of Gaza — run by Hamas and already styling itself on Hezbollah’s model of a well-drilled, professional guerrilla army — on Israel’s southern flank.

Worse, the Government is anxious that the intensive retraining of the Israeli Army in the Golan Heights could trigger fighting with Syria, from whom it seized the land.

The Lebanon border remains tense, despite the presence of more than 13,000 United Nations peacekeepers with a beefed-up mandate to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding their rocket bunkers in the frontier zone. “It’s just a question of time. They’ll try to attack Israel,” reservist Colonel Kobi Marom, a former deputy commander of the border’s eastern sector, said. “As a guerrilla organisation they have to continue to raise the flag of resistance against Israel. Otherwise, they’re just another political party in Lebanon.”

Laura Shukrala, who runs the Beirut Nights restaurant in the border village of Jish, also fears a renewed onslaught of Katyusha rockets against the Israeli north. “There’s going to be another war,” said the 38-year-old Arab Israeli, who saw rockets fired into the fields next to her village last year. Her clientele has been reduced to passing Israeli soldiers heading for the front. “The people talk about it all the time. They say it will be in September.”

Few in the Israeli command think that a war will come that soon. Hezbollah lost at least 650 fighters in last summer’s conflict, a heavy blow to a movement of about 3,000 guerrillas that recruits youths from mosques and grooms them for years into tightly disciplined units. Israeli commanders believe that Hezbollah has restocked its supplies of short-range missiles from Syria and Iran, but that the UN-patrolled border zone has prevented them from being deployed within range of most of Israel.

But the retraining of Israeli forces for a future war with Hezbollah has raised the temperature with Syria. President Assad has been sending mixed messages to Israel, calling for negotiations to retrieve the strategic Golan plateau, which Israel took in 1967, but also threatening “resistance” alongside his Hezbollah allies.

Syria has also, according to Israeli media reports, deployed 200 of its best surface-to-air missile batteries close to the border, described as “the densest antiaircraft deployment in the world”.

Israel has emphasised that it does not want a war with Syria. Colonel Marom said there was a chance that if hostilities were renewed with Hezbollah and Hamas, Syria could join a limited conflict to force Israel back to the negotiating table.

The Israeli Cabinet has been meeting every week to discuss the issue and the dangers of a Syrian “miscalculation”. Last week’s session was deemed to be so sensitive that even ministers’ mobile phones had to be left outside.

Brigadier-General Yossi Baidatz, the head of the research division of military intelligence, was reported to have told the Cabinet that Syria was preparing for a war; increasing production of long-range missiles and positioning antitank missiles closer to the border. But he also said that Mr Assad had not ruled out trying to reach a political settlement with Israel.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces remain on high alert. At the army listening post of Zarit, on the rocky border, an Israeli unit made up entirely of young women watches video cameras monitoring frontier sectors 24 hours a day. Some days the women replay the video that captures the beginning of last year’s war. On it, a Hezbollah guerrilla, his head covered in a scarf, approaches a hilltop security camera, wielding a rocket-propelled grenade. He takes aim and fires. The camera goes blank. The war has begun.

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