IT WAS a muggy, grey spring day on the Beirut sea front, and the first rumble sounded like the last of the winter storms, a bleak coughing sound high above us.
After almost 14 years, the Israelis had returned to Beirut with a vengeance.
Almost before we had seen them, two of the helicopters American made Apaches turned over the sea front and there was a sullen pop popping sound like a toy gun and two small puffs of white smoke rising from the southern suburbs of Beirut, the canyons of high rise apartment blocks and narrow streets in which many of the Hizbullah leadership live.
There were few Lebanese who did not believe that Mr Shimon Peres' battle to convince Israeli electors on May 29th that he can strike at what he calls Islamic terror" lay behind the appearance of those helicopters over Beirut.
Mounting casualties among Israel's occupation troops in southern Lebanon and repeated Hizbullah missile retaliation on Galilee for the Israeli shelling of civilians inside Lebanon meant that the "red line" which had for so long restrained the Israelis from attacking Beirut would almost certainly be crossed.
Yet when it was crossed, it took less than a minute for Beirut to melt back into the wartime nightmare that so many Lebanese thought had ended.
And the gunmen were back in the southern suburbs, bearded Hizbullah men with American M16 rifles and rocket propelled grenades, kitted out in webbing and camouflage jackets and captured Israeli helmets.
Even the Lebanese radios reverted to their wartime role of endless news bulletins interspersed with the haunting laments of Fairuz, that most famous of Lebanese singers whose voice is forever linked to the horror of the 16 year conflict that was supposed to have ended.
The news was all bad a 27 year old woman killed in her car by a missile firing helicopter near the Jiye power station south of Beirut, a civilian killed in an air raid in the inland town of Nabatea, a 60 year old man cut down by the Beirut rockets.
The raids were in retaliation, said the bulletins, for the Katyusha attacks on Israel which were retaliation for the killing of a 14 year old Lebanese boy which might have been retaliation for a suicide bombing against Israeli troops which was retaliation for. . . It was like listening to The House that Jack Built.
When I called an old friend on his mobile telephone in the southern city of Tyre, he just had time to tell me that Israeli Apache and Huey helicopters were hovering over the city. "They're mounting mobile checkpoints in the air," he said. "They're watching everything that moves." Then the line went dead.
The lines went dead all over Lebanon, just like the peace of Beirut that expired yesterday morning. By early afternoon, it was turning into a ghost city, its streets largely deserted, its shops closed, its restaurants empty.
When I drove into the southern suburbs at dusk, the only men standing on the street corners were armed. The Hizbullah's green painted central offices supposedly the "operational nerve centre which the Israelis said they had attacked apparently unharmed.
But in a dingy office where Donald Duck cartoon was playing on a miniature television on the sideboard, a bearded man close the Hizbullah announced to me that the Israelis had crossed a red line. When the Israelis killed civilians, the Hizbullah always fired back into Israel, he said. He blamed the Israelis for the death of a boy in Bradchit village at weekend.
"But there is a balance of now," the man went on. "The Israelis used to hold the Now the balance is shifting to resistance. Hitting civilians in crossing a red line for our resistance forces. This has nothing to do with targeting of military headquarters.
"I tell you this the hand of the resistance is long and is capable of hurting the enemy. We have an expression here that we and the Israelis are biting each other's fingers. The biting of fingers has begun and we shall see who screams first."