With the US continuing to reject the idea of an immediate ceasefire in the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah on the grounds that this would serve the interests of the Shia organisation, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is unlikely to encounter any pressure to end Israel's military offensive when he meets secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in Jerusalem this morning.
In recent days, Dr Rice has made her views clear, calling the idea of an immediate ceasefire a "false promise", blaming Hizbullah for the eruption of violence and insisting that the situation that existed before the fighting, when Hizbullah fighters moved freely along the Israeli border, was intolerable.
White House press secretary Tony Snow reiterated that view yesterday - a view that largely overlaps with Israel's - stating that an immediate ceasefire would not end the violence.
Last night, before going into her meeting with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Dr Rice said that peace "has to be based on enduring principles. Ultimately, a Middle East that is peaceful and democratic will be a place where peace is sustainable."
She also said the US was "concerned about the humanitarian situation [ in Lebanon], and nobody wants to see when innocent civilians are harmed."
The secretary of state arrived in Israel after a surprise stopover in Beirut where she apparently failed to convince Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and the man appointed by Hizbullah to negotiate on its part, to accept a ceasefire package.
The deal is said to have included a cessation of hostilities, to be accompanied simultaneously by the deployment of the Lebanese army and an international peacekeeping force in south Lebanon and the distancing of Hizbullah and its weapons some 30 km from the border with Israel.
Mr Berri insisted that a ceasefire and negotiations over a prisoner swap must precede any talks over arrangements in south Lebanon, which is controlled by the Shia organisation.
Tzachi Hanegbi, head of the foreign affairs and security committee in the Israeli parliament, said he expected Dr Rice to tell Mr Olmert that Israel should press ahead with its aim of sufficiently weakening Hizbullah as a military force to allow the Lebanese government to impose its authority in south Lebanon. "
We are on very firm ground," Mr Hanegbi said.
At the outset of the fighting, Mr Olmert said Israel's goal was to bring about the release of two captured soldiers, as well as implementation of UN resolution 1559, which calls for the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south and the disarming of Hizbullah.
However, as the offensive has progressed and Hizbullah rocket-fire into Israel has shown no signs of ending, the Israeli leader has begun to talk about the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in south Lebanon.
Mr Olmert, who is said to support the idea of a combined force from European and Arab states, is insisting that it have powers of enforcement. Such a force, he believes, will have to have sufficient muscle to strip Hizbullah of its rocket capability and prevent the transfer of arms from Syria to the Shia organisation.
While four Israeli soldiers were killed yesterday and some 100 rockets again hit Israeli towns, there were still no discernible signs that the broad public and political support for the offensive was beginning to crack.
Israel's political and military leadership believes the war will not be won on the battlefield alone, but also in the civilian rear, and they are attaching great weight to the ability of the public to withstand rocket attacks and to its readiness to accept losses on the battlefield.
For this reason, military officials view the fierce battle that was still being waged last night in the village of Bint Jbail, a Hizbullah stronghold in south Lebanon, as being also of symbolic importance. It was here, after Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in mid-2000, that Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that Israeli society was as weak as a "spider's web".
"Next time Nasrallah comes to Bint Jbail, if he ever does, he may want to choose his words a little more carefully," a senior Israeli officer quipped.