FOUR Israeli soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb just across the northern border in Lebanon, the army said yesterday, in the bloodiest such incident on the Lebanon border so far this year.
The attack reinforced the sense of siege prevailing in Israel after four suicide bombings in the past 11 days have killed some 60 Israelis.
Israel's embattled Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, taking a brief pause from his consultations on tackling the Hamas suicide bombers, visited the scene of the attack, which took place just across the border from the Israeli farming settlement of Margoliyot.
Israel placed hundreds of West Bank Palestinian villages under curfew yesterday, closed down schools and offices linked to Hamas, and sealed the homes of alleged key Hamas activists, at, the start of a crackdown.
Mr Peres claimed that the new measures were already harming the Ham as militants' infrastructure. "We can be as cruel as they can, he warned. But few Israelis believe the steps ordered so far can thwart the bombers, and the State President, Mr Ezer Weizman, whose position is supposed to be merely ceremonial called publicly for far more wide spread action.
"In war, you attack," he said, during a visit to the hospital bedsides of those wounded in Monday's Tel Aviv bombing.
"We need to strike a major strike."
The Iranian back Hizbullah claimed responsibility for the attack, which Israeli military sources acknowledged was fairly sophisticated. Hizbullah gunmen opened fire on an Israeli border patrol, luring troops into Lebanon, and then detonated the explosive device. Two Hizbullah gunmen were reportedly killed in the ensuing gunfight.
Thirteen Israelis were killed in the Tel Aviv blast on Monday, almost half of them in their teens or younger. And protesters at the scene of the blast, and at other semi permanent demonstration hot points in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, derided Mr Peres's counteroffensive as too little, too late.
Rhetoric has escalated to the point where, protesters are now regularly shouting "Death to Peres". Some `of' the graffiti is more subtle. In central Jerusalem, where a Hamas bomber blew up a bus on Sunday, one scrawl wondered sarcastically "Peres, which bus is peace coming on?
Mr Peres is trying hard to avoid a direct confrontation with the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, that would destroy their strained peace partnership. Thus, the Prime Minister has so far refrained from sending troops' into the major Palestinian cities where Mr Arafat has been granted full control under the peace accords.
Instead, Israeli troops placed roadblocks around the 465 Palesatinian villages, where Mr Arafat has been granted only limited authority, with Israel retaining, overall control. And the also closed down Hamas linked institutions only in these areas.
Although he has pledged co-operation with Israel, Mr Arafat denounced yesterday's Israeli measures as being "completely against the agreement" on peace.