Residents of northern Israel took to bomb shelters yesterday morning as Hizbullah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets in revenge for an attack by Israeli-allied militias on the Lebanese city of Sidon on Monday, which killed seven people.
While three people were slightly injured in the Katyusha attack, the rockets - almost 60 - fired by the Iranian-backed Shia guerrillas, also cut off power to several small settlements. But damage was greatest in the often-targeted border town of Kiryat Shmona, where several homes took direct hits.
One family escaped death or injury by a fateful last-minute decision to extend their holiday in the centre of the country by a day, because of the escalating border tension. A rocket ploughed through the roof of their home, causing extensive damage to a child's bedroom.
The latest round of violence was triggered on Monday by a Hizbullah roadside bomb which killed the son and daughter of a commander in Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army (SLA), who was himself killed in a Hizbullah attack four years ago. The SLA retaliated by shelling Sidon, and that was followed by yesterday's rocket attack on Israel - the heaviest assault since Israel's massive bombardment of Lebanon in April last year.
Yesterday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, said Syria, the dominant force in Lebanon, should rein in Hizbullah. "If there's quiet on the Israeli side of the border, there'll be quiet on the Lebanese side. And one can draw the opposite conclusion as well."
But Mr Netanyahu and the Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, both said they wanted to head off any further escalation - a suggestion that Israel might follow a policy of restraint.
Israeli leaders are seen by some to be facing a dilemma: if the army does not respond to the rocket assault, military sources said, then its deterrent capability will suffer. But if it does hit back, it risks undermining an already faltering set of US-brokered agreements which were put in place following Israel's "Operation Grapes of Wrath" last year, and which bar all parties involved in the conflict from targeting civilians.
Israeli officials have tried to distance themselves from the Sidon shelling, describing it as a local SLA initiative, carried out without their knowledge. The 2,500strong SLA, though, is trained and armed by Israel, and several thousand of their family members, who live largely in villages in Israel's self-imposed security zone in south Lebanon, cross the border into Israel every day to work.
In indirect criticism of the SLA, Mr Mordechai said he deeply regretted "the attack on innocent civilians", and added that "attacks of this type are totally against Israeli policy".
Peter Hirschberg is a senior writer at the Jerusalem Report