As the Israeli air force continues tightening the noose around Lebanon by striking at strongholds in southern Beirut, where Hezbollah is headquartered, the Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora went on television to plead with the UN for help and to ask for foreign aid.

Saniora publicly criticized both Israel and Hezbollah and threatened to send the Lebanese army to the southern border to stabilize all of Lebanon. Hezbollah has effectively had control over the south border for many years.

Whether the Lebanese people knew it or not, Hezbollah had been training and planning an attack on Israel for a long time, and that time had arrived last Wednesday. The fact that they were about to subject their own people to another bloody war apparently was not a major concern.

Lebanon plunged back to bloody past

It was with the first sip of her morning coffee that Kokhi Hatan saw the Israeli tank explode before her eyes.

"The tank had moved only few metres into a firing position when it was blown to bits by a huge mine," she said.

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 security 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, 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 less than 100m from the Israelis.

Leader: Hezbollah Has 'Complete Strength'

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Arabs and Muslims worldwide to support his guerrillas, saying Sunday that his group is fighting Israel on their behalf and that the battle has just begun.

A confident-looking Nasrallah said in a speech aired on his Al-Manar TV that Hezbollah guerrillas were at their "full strength" and that the group had "no choice" but to hit the northern Israeli city of Haifi with rockets Sundayh after Israel struck civilians in Lebanon.

Facing criticism by some in Lebanon that Hezbollah dragged the country into a fight with Israel by snatching two soldiers last week, Nasrallah sought to rally Lebanese and the Arab annd Islamic world behind his fighters., painted the battle as a chance for the Arab and Islamic world to deal a defeat to Israel.

"You Arab and Muslim people must take a position toward your future, the future of your children," he said. "The peoples of the Arab and Islamic world have a historic opportunity to score a defeat against the Zionist enemy ... We are providing the example."

"Hezbollah is not fighting a battle for Hezbollah or even for Lebanon but for the Islamic nation," he said.

"We will use all means," Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in an address on Lebanese television. "As long as the enemy has no limits, we will have no limits."

In the meantime the Lebanese Prime Minister sits on his hands waiting for others to do something, while his country gets destroyed little by little.

It may be time to SEND IN THE TROOPS Saniora.

Update: Hezbollah appears in control of Lebanon

Hezbollah and its backers, not the government, now appear in control of Lebanon's fate.

After moderating their stance in recent years, the guerrillas surged back to the war front with a surprise attack on Israel and a sophisticated arsenal, leaving Lebanon's politicians and army looking nearly powerless. The government seems paralyzed over how to deal with Hezbollah, whose Shiite Muslim fighters have had near autonomy in the south for more than a decade.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah acted Sunday like the man holding Lebanon's reins, though he looked tired and stressed as he vowed that his group had only begun to fight.

Update: Russia, France and Spain to mention only a few world leaders claim Israel is mounting a Disproportionate Response, I say, Bull Sh...

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