Sharon's war breathes new life into Hizbullah

"Nice houses!" my Lebanese taxi driver said, gazing at an Israeli village through three formidable layers of wire fencing.
We were standing at the Fatima Gate, a once-famous flashpoint on Lebanon's southern border where visitors are expected to shout abuse and hurl stones at the Israelis, not to admire their houses.

A solitary Hizbullah flag on a long pole leaned provocatively into Israeli territory and a bearded man kept watch over two Hizbullah collecting boxes - the contents of which the US Treasury would like to seize as part of the "war on terrorism".

Apart from a couple of Kuwaiti tourists who took a quick stroll and drove off, there was nobody else around when I visited the border last November. That is how the border has looked for almost all of the time since the Israelis pulled out of southern Lebanon two years ago, and that is how it would probably have remained if Ariel Sharon's troops had not gone on the rampage in Palestinian cities.

Mr Sharon's efforts have breathed new life into Hizbullah, the Shi'a organisation that was credited with ending Israel's 22-year occupation of the south but has since been struggling to maintain its popularity.