A return to the days of bloodshed

Beirut/Tel Aviv: With Beirut's airport bombed and its hotels rapidly emptying, the resort town of Saida, half an hour's drive along the coast, is one of the very few places in Lebanon pulling in sightseers this weekend.

The main attraction, however, is not the old Crusader castle or the fine Mediterranean beaches, but the twisted remains of the bridge which took a hit from an Israeli warship on Thursday.

For the commanders who fired it, the message is as blunt as the method of delivery: hand over the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah on Lebanon's southern border the previous day or face dire consequences - starting with the decimation of Lebanon's pounds 2.2 billion-a-year tourist industry.

Yet for all the devastating volume with which the warning arrived, it still appears to have fallen on deaf ears. "I have told my young boy that this is the work of our enemies, that one day we will claim victory," says Mariam Jana Gharamti, 23, who turned up to view the mangled bridge with her son, Hadi, 5, and daughter Nira, 1, despite the risk of further shelling from a warship on the horizon.

"When we see this damaged bridge, we just feel angry," she says. "I am proud of what Hezbollah has done. It will cause us problems, yes, but what else can we do?" As she spoke, another shell sent up a plume of smoke several miles down the coast.

In the town, however, Zahi Baba, 22, a cake shop manager, yearned for more conventional family outings.

On what should have been one of the busiest days of the season, his huge eatery - a major employer and a favourite day trip for sweet-toothed Beirutis - was all but deserted. Scores of orders for wedding cakes have also been cancelled as fearful Lebanese couples postpone their marriages.

"From my personal point of view, I do not care about politics, I care about business," he says. "This is not the way to resolve our political issues, because we are all going to lose our incomes if things go on like this. We have 300 families in this town depending on this shop for a living - what are they going to do?"

After nearly a decade and a half in which the focus of the Middle East's political troubles took a welcome shift elsewhere, Lebanon is once again in turmoil, an escalating and largely unexpected stand-off with Israel threatening to undo 15 years of painstaking rebuilding after the devastation of civil war.

As of yesterday, Beirut resembled a ghost town with the only noise coming from the Israeli jets buzzing overhead. It was the same in the Jewish-populated towns on Lebanon's southern border where Hezbollah fighters are making fresh incursions.

"It's scary," says Moshe Parizat, as he headed to the synagogue in the largely religious northern Israeli town of Sefad. "You hear the whine of the rocket and you know you have 10 seconds to run for cover. What's so scary is that you don't know which way to run."