A few miles away, another unit huddles beneath foliage, guarding hundreds of 4.5m (15ft) Texan-manufactured Haz rockets being readied to blow something or someone into pieces.

Artillery, rockets, tanks and Humvees are massing on Lebanon’s southern border as Israel reveals the true extent of its ambitions. It is determined not merely to punish Hezbollah, but to destroy it once and for all as a military threat.

Unperturbed by international criticism, the Government of Israel continued to pound Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, destroying roads, bridges, fuel dumps and mobile telephone installations as well as Hezbollah targets, including a Beirut radio station.

It believes that Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shia group, badly overplayed his hand on Wednesday by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in a daring cross-border raid and killing eight others.

Israeli generals and diplomats are now arguing that their attacks are simply a belated effort to achieve what the Lebanese Government and United Nations have consistently failed to do: implement UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for all Lebanese militias to be dismantled.

“As long as Hezbollah is in the south of Lebanon this will lead to a destabilised region,” Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Foreign Minister, told The Times.

Taking heart from President Bush’s stance that Israel had the right to defend itself, she said that Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, would not rest until the Shia group was removed from southern Lebanon.

“The international community has to understand that this is an opportunity to push the Government of Lebanon to put more pressure on Hezbollah and change the situation,” she said.

Mr Olmertalso has the overwhelming support of the Israeli people for avenging their country’s ignominious retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, leaving Hezbollah claiming victory.

Banner front-page headlines in Israeli newspapers yesterday included “Smash Hezbollah”, “The Target: Nasrallah” and “Beirut Will Pay”.

Normally moderate Israeli analysts praised Mr Olmert, a lawyer, for reversing the “errors” of his military predecessors, who allowed Hezbollah to move right up to Lebanon’s border with Israel.

“This was a very bad gamble,” Alex Fishman of Yedioth Ahronoth wrote of Hezbollah’s attack on Wednesday. “(Israel) is acting as if every valve that had been locked for six years has been released and all restraints are off. Everything is permissible.”

In Maariv, Ben Caspit demanded Churchillian resolve from Israelis facing Hezbollah rockets — about 80 missiles hit Israeli towns yesterday, killing a woman and her five-year-old grandson and wounding more than 40 people,. “Not for naught is a parallel being made here between terminology from the World War Two period, the tenacious British resistance against Hitler’s blitz. This threat must be abolished. Nasrallah must die.”

It is no accident that Israel has named its huge military air, land and sea strike Operation Just Desserts and the three conditions that Mr Olmert listed yesterday for stopping the offensive included the disarming of Hezbollah as demanded by UN resolution 1559. The other two were the return of the captured Israeli soldiers and halting the rocket fire. Israel said yesterday that the captured soldiers were still alive and in good health.

Israeli officials insist they have no intention of reoccupying Lebanon, repeating the 1982 invasion that led to the slaughter of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Chatila.

Lieutenant-General Yossi Kuperwasser, who recently stood down as Israel’s head of military intelligence research, told The Times that Israel made a costly mistake by failing to halt Hezbollah’s build-up of missiles and rockets in southern Lebanon over six years.

“We are paying the price for not acting in advance,” he said. It would be stupid to ease the pressure until Lebanon’s Government showed that it was serious about acting against Hezbollah and preventing arms arriving from Iran and Syria, he said.

“We want to hit Hezbollah really hard and enable Lebanese reform groups that want to see Lebanon prosper and become a real democracy be courageous enough and understand the need to do something themselves.”

Lebanese police say that 66 people, almost all civilians, have been killed and at least 200 wounded in the past three days. The Lebanese accuse the Israelis of needlessly killing scores of civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure. But Israel says that its F16s and artillery are striking buildings holding rockets and other Hezbollah weapons.

Although Israel’s previous incursions into Lebanon have ended in disaster, there are only a few voices of caution amid the clamour for action.

After helping to find the body of his neighbour, Monica Lerer, in the wreckage of an apartment hit by an Hezbollah shell, Moshe Arad, 44, an army veteran, had no desire for a lengthy operation north of the border.

“Lebanon is a swamp. I don’t think we should go in and stay there,” he said. “But we are only the small people, we leave it to the generals.”

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