Hezbollah Unleashes Fiery Barrage

About 200 Hezbollah operatives have been killed, including fighters and others involved in the war effort such as truck drivers and messengers, the Lebanese source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. Hezbollah has announced only about 40 such deaths. Israeli officials say between 300 and 400 Hezbollah fighters have been killed.

Lt. Col. Ishai Efroni, deputy commander of the Israeli army's Baram Brigade, said Israeli forces had sustained heavy losses because Hezbollah had spent years preparing the terrain for an invasion. Near the border town of Maroun al-Ras, his forces found a bunker complex with a one-square-yard opening and a vast cavern 35 feet underground, he said. It was rigged with a camera mounted at the top and a monitor below to observe advancing forces.

Hezbollah forces are now "massing in a few towns, which shows you they can hardly defend themselves," Efroni said. "Most of the towns we pass through, there is not even a shot. They are picking a few places to fight because they have to."

"The infrastructure of Hezbollah has been entirely destroyed," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday during interviews with several news organizations. "More than 700" of the Iranian-backed group's command posts "were entirely wiped out by the Israeli army," he added.

The offensive would stop only when a "robust" international force was in place in southern Lebanon, Olmert said.

Hezbollah's total fighting strength has been a closely held secret. Timur Goksel, who was a senior U.N. peacekeeping adviser in southern Lebanon for two decades, estimated that the militia has about 700 full-time trained fighters and anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 farmers and others who train in secret and can fight when called upon. Israeli officials have said they now face between 2,000 and 3,000 fighters.

At an outdoor briefing in the northern town of Kiryat Shemona, before a backdrop of at least seven columns of smoke from rocket impacts rising from a nearby hill, Israel's army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, said: "We never took upon ourselves a mission of reaching zero Katyushas landing in Israel. It's not going to happen."

The number of rockets and rocket launchers still in Hezbollah's arsenal can only be guessed at, the Lebanese source with access to military intelligence said, because Hezbollah has been building up its forces in secret for more than a year. More than 1,000 rockets may have been destroyed and around 1,800 fired at Israel, he suggested, but that leaves a large amount available for continued barrages.

Some Israeli and other officials had estimated Hezbollah's total arsenal at around 10,000 rockets when the conflict erupted July 12 after the militia captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. That would mean less than a third of its rockets have been destroyed or fired.

"There is a big amount that was destroyed," the Lebanese source said. "But there is a big amount that is still buried under the ground and difficult to get."

Efroni said the Israeli army thinks it has destroyed the vast majority of Hezbollah's longer-range rockets but believes the group still has many more of the shorter-range Katyushas, which can be set up and launched in a matter of minutes, making them nearly impossible to stop.

The Hezbollah fighter "wakes up in the morning, drinks his coffee, takes a rocket out of his closet, goes to his neighbor's yard, sticks a clock timer on it, goes back home and then watches CNN to see where it lands," he said.