Cold military logic takes over in Israel-Hezbollah conflict

But Givat Avni is 20 miles (30km) from the Lebanese border, far from the evacuation zone established by the authorities almost a year ago.

An hour later, as we arrived at nearby Kibbutz Lavi, home for the past year to families evacuated from further north, sirens sounded once more.

Rockets appeared in the sky overhead and as we were ushered into an underground shelter full of children and their artwork, we heard a series of deep resonant booms.

An hour later, more alerts, another safe room and more distant explosions.

Hezbollah had been firing rockets further into Israel, even before the latest escalation. But now an even larger swathe of northern Israel is in the firing line.

All of this is adding a sense of urgency to the government’s actions.

Speaking after a meeting with defence chiefs, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel was changing the balance of power in the north.

“We are facing complex days,” he warned.

“We do not wait for a threat,” he said. “We anticipate it. Anywhere, in any arena, at any time. We eliminate senior officials, eliminate terrorists, eliminate missiles.”

Having seized the initiative, Israel’s military seems determined to keep Hezbollah on the back foot, in the hope of realising the government’s aim of returning civilians to homes evacuated along the northern border.

On Monday morning, it stepped up another gear, telling Lebanese villagers to leave places where they believe Hezbollah is concealing its bigger weapons.

Military officials showed journalists a video of an air strike in which Israel says it destroyed a modified Russian cruise missile, hidden inside a house.

In another “illustration”, we were shown a skeletal 3D mock-up of a village in southern Lebanon, full of concealed weapons and equipment.

The mock-up, and the instructions to civilians to leave, all carried echoes of Israel’s efforts to explain its actions in Gaza.

But military officials insist that, unlike Gaza, the warnings do not mean that the army is poised to move in on the ground in southern Lebanon.

“We are currently focusing on Israel’s aerial campaign only,” a senior official said on Monday.

It seems that for now, Israel will see what it can achieve from the air. A former commander, speaking on Israel’s Channel 12, said that so far, the air force had shown only a fraction of its capabilities.

But there’s only so much Israel can achieve from the air, even if, as seems possible, jets are about to lay waste to entire villages.

At some point, a ground invasion – however limited – seems unavoidable.