Nasrallah's charisma captures hearts of revolutionary zealots

One thing is certain about Israel's military onslaught in Lebanon: the Israeli leadership does not want it to end without Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah lying dead beneath a heap of rubble.

Israeli planes on Wednesday night dropped a reported 23 tonnes of bombs on what the army says was the underground bunker of the leader of the Shi'ite fundamentalist group, termed 'Public Enemy No1' by the Israeli media. It was the second attempt to kill Sheikh Nasrallah, 46, by an aerial bombing in a week.

If he is assassinated, it would mark an Israeli settling of accounts with a man whose fighters forced the Israeli Army to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation. More recently, he made good on promises to kidnap Israeli soldiers and strike Israel's third-largest city, Haifa, if Israel bombed Beirut's southern suburbs.

'Every cab driver in Israel knows that Nasrallah is a man who keeps his promises,' Israel's Yediot Ahronoth daily admitted on Thursday.

The ominous aspect of that for Israelis is that Sheikh Nasrallah - whose forces have killed 29 Israeli civilians and soldiers, and even disabled a navy ship, during the first eight days of fighting - has said he has more 'surprises' in store. In a speech last Sunday, he referred to the killing of eight Israelis in the Haifa missile strike.

'As long as the enemy has no limits, we will have no limits,' said Sheikh Nasrallah, which means victory of God in Arabic. But his confrontation with Israel has come at enormous cost to Lebanon, with more than 300 people, mostly civilians, killed in air strikes that have ravaged the country's infrastructure.