Viewers of Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV network may have been surprised this week to see the sudden image of a dead guerrilla fighter. "This is the corpse of one of the members of Hizbullah's special forces," a mysterious text flashed. "Hassan Nasrallah lies. We're not the ones who are hiding the real numbers of our dead."
With that, Israel returned Hizbullah viewers to their regular programming.
Not to be outdone by the Israeli propagandists, Al-Manar newscasters on Wednesday night broadcast lists of Israeli "lies" about how many Lebanese fighters had been killed, how many Hizbullah rockets had been taken and what Lebanese villages had been captured. They also aired an image of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in a Hitler-style moustache.
In a war whose casualties, terrain and objectives are increasingly unclear, the conflict in Lebanon has moved inevitably into a battle of nerves, with Israel and Hizbullah each seeking psychological advantage with every weapon available, from clandestine television broadcasts to text messages and voice recordings. The calls start as early as 5.30am, waking Lebanese targets from a sound sleep.
"We don't want to harm you," a recorded voice says. "We're bombing the infrastructure so Hizbullah will have no means of firing its rockets."
"We know you wanted to hit Israel," said another anonymous message that Beirut resident Tilda Abu Rizk got the other day. "But you have confronted a house made of steel. This is the Israeli defence forces."
During three recent TV broadcasts, Israel has successfully hacked into Hizbullah's Al-Manar channel. Israel has also broadcast radio messages over Lebanese signals, with one monitored by the BBC warning that "Hassan sent men to fight the Israeli army, an army of steel, without preparing them. Stop listening to patriotic chants for a moment, think about it and come back to earth."
Hizbullah has struck back, keeping Al-Manar on air from hidden locations despite repeated Israeli air strikes and broadcasting reports from the Israeli media documenting public uncertainty there about the war.
Psychological operations are a key part of any war, but in few are they more crucial than the conflict in Lebanon, whose success or failure could be determined by whether Hizbullah is seen by the Lebanese public as a saviour or a poisonous liability.
Israel's punishing air campaign has been aimed not only at eroding Hizbullah's military capability, many analysts say, but at convincing the Lebanese public that continued support for the Islamic militia's attacks against Israel would be both misdirected and far too costly.
Hizbullah, for its part, aims to convince the world that it has the resilience and public backing needed to survive in conflict with one of the best-equipped armed forces in the world.
In one of the boldest such moves, the Hizbullah leader Nasrallah appeared on its television station after a massive Israeli air strike on the building that housed his living quarters and offices. "The surprises I promised you will start now," he said in a live broadcast.
"The Israeli war vessels that inflicted damage on our infrastructure will burn and sink in front of you."
Within minutes, an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast was struck by a missile.
"Psychological warfare has been going on since day one," says Charles Harb, professor of social and behavioural science at the American University of Beirut. "All of the pressure for the UN to leave the country, the rush that was happening in terms of evacuation from south Lebanon, this is all a part of psychological warfare.
The more friendly sounding phone calls and similar text messages, Mr Harb says, are a classic psychological ploy.
The aim is to make it look as if Hizbullah, and Shia refugees in general, are an "out group," while making recipients of the phone calls feel that they are part of the "in group" allied with the government against them.
The hitch, he adds, is that the rising number of civilian casualties, especially the attack at Qana that left dozens dead, many of them children, had the opposite effect, leaving a large number of Lebanese feeling like part of the same "out group."
Israeli psychologist Irwin Mansdorf, writing this week in the Jerusalem Post, says Hizbullah has engaged in psychological warfare of its own, attempting to undermine Israeli public support for the war by firing small rockets whose aim is, in large part, to undermine public support for the conflict.
But, he adds, the calculation has been off the mark. "Israelis, having endured some very intense years of home-front violence, seem no longer to be the same people that shook and cowed in fear at Saddam's Scuds in 1991," Mansdorf writes.
Ibrahim Farhat, public relations director for Al-Manar, says the Israelis had succeeded in creating static and other signal interruptions "at least 10 times" on TV broadcasts since the beginning of the conflict, while successfully broadcasting its own images for a few minutes on three occasions.
Al-Manar weighed in Wednesday with shots of Abu Ghraib prison, along with images of President George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Olmert with the offensive moustache. "Oh coward," intoned a deep, slow and thunderous voice, "you will never protect the settlements." - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)