It was the mid 1980s and there were about a dozen of these small gunboats which could easily maintain 30-knots for extended periods while out on patrol. Searches would sometimes take them hundreds of miles from home, but that involved planning and back-up and only happened when intelligence indicated that something was happening in distant waters. Some operated out of the naval base at Haifa, a moderate-sized, well-fortified complex north of the main harbour. As with all Israeli military establishments, security was stringent and uncompromising. You didn’t go near that section of the harbour unless you had very good reason to do so.

Since the 1980s, naval gunships doing that work have been replaced by larger, faster, better-armed and equipped warships. They’re described in Jane’s Fighting Ships as light missile cruisers, which confirms that the level of security throughout the Eastern Mediterranean has escalated.

The threat of infiltration by armed enemy agents is constant and usually involves a few zealots at a time who try to infiltrate the country. These efforts, too, have become more sophisticated. The Israelis have widened their searches to look for one-man submarines as well as some fancy propulsion devices that might propel a scuba diver for miles, perhaps 30 or 50 feet under the surface of the sea.

At one of the border camps I visited near Metullah in the far north, there was a poster on the wall of the radio room, which detailed some of the gadgets. Hizbollah, it seemed, had acquired a dozen mini-subs. The one displayed was made of stainless steel.

At that time, I was also able to run through some of the scuba equipment acquired by Israel’s foes and, being a diver, I found pretty advanced equipment. There was some of German manufacture, mainly from Draeger, together with American stuff, the kind you can rent at any dive club.

Said, my military escort, whom I’d picked up earlier at my hotel in Tel Aviv, said: ‘They’ve used some of it to get through, but for every action they take, we’ve had to devise a reaction.’ I was aware that a year before, some aspirant infiltrators had used jet-skis in a bid to run the blockade from Tyre. They were blown out of the water and nobody survived.

Jet-skis, miniature one-man submarines, microlights, light aircraft and ‘Go-For’ speedboats have all been brought into action by Hizbollah in their efforts to penetrate Israeli defences. Most of the time the assignments were suicide jobs. Like many such operations, Israeli shore radar installations tended to pick up insurgent groups within minutes of their leaving Tyre, or whatever other Lebanese port the insurgents used. That set the chase in motion. However, with time, even this routine has evolved into something more complex.

For some years the IDF had a sensitive radar station at Al-Bayyadah in Lebanon, some miles north of Naqoura, the main UN base in the Mediterranean. Those who took the coast road built by Alexander the Great 2,000 years ago from the border to Tyre, couldn’t miss this sophisticated electronics facility with its tall masts and multiple antennae on high ground on the mainland side of the road. It was illegal under international law, since the facility was not on Israeli soil, but the IDF was the most powerful presence in the region and nobody could do anything about it.

That was the way it stayed until Hizbollah exerted pressure and took enough young Israeli lives to force the IDF back across its own lines.