Part of the reason for the slow movement through the town also had to do with the IDF's moral code. A high-ranking Northern Command officer, asked this week by reporters why the military didn't just level the village, explained simply: "We don't work that way."

Soldiers of the Golani Brigade return to Israel after rescuing the bodies of their comrades killed in battle.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

Indeed, that is also what Peretz explained to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit here earlier this week. The defense minister said the IDF works according to a system called the "Post Office Theory," according to which Israel looks for the right address to respond to before opening fire.

Despite the enemy's tactics, he told Rice, the IDF was still operating as a moral and ethical army. Hizbullah, he told her, fired at Israel from within mosques and homes, using civilians as shields. "We called up one home and told the residents that we were going to attack, and that they needed to evacuate," Peretz told Rice. "They fled the home and only then did we level the building. A home whose occupants didn't answer the phone, he added, was not targeted.

At the beginning of the week, on the eve of Rice's visit to Israel, IDF Military Intelligence predicted that the army had perhaps 10 days left for the operation. "Rice will pressure us into stopping the war," a high-ranking officer said Monday, just hours before she landed in Tel Aviv.

But that didn't happen, leading the commanders to go back to their maps. Defense Ministry sources said this week that Rice did not pressure Israel into stopping its operations in Lebanon. Indeed it is understood that the US would not seek to prevent Israel from attacking Syria, to punish it for hosting and supporting Hizbullah and global terrorism - a move that for now Israeli officials have repeated is not only not on the agenda, but far from getting there.

Just exactly what kind of orders the tank crews near Avivim might soon get was hinted at when Peretz resurrected a term from Israel's last experience with Lebanon for the first time this week - "security zone" - claiming that until a multinational forces takes over southern Lebanon, Israel would not be so quick to leave. Judging by the cacophony in Rome, the deployment of such foreign troops could take longer than initially expected.

That is also why the IDF was asking to escalate the offensive now, since without diplomatic pressure from abroad, Buhris and his men believe they have an opportunity to deal Hizbullah a blow that could prevent the IDF from having to go even further up the busy road from Avivim, returning to the forts and outposts it evacuated a mere six years ago.