Almost three weeks later at the IDF headquarters at Tyre, a place I would visit often on my way in or out of the country, the Shi’ites took their revenge by detonating a truck loaded with explosives at the front entrance of the two-storey building. Altogether 61 people were killed by the blast, roughly equal numbers of Israelis and Arab political prisoners.

In her book, Sacred Rage, my former colleague Robin Wright tells us that it was the largest single toll Israel had incurred since the invasion: ‘A lone Shi’ite suicide bomber had killed more in one day that the PLO had claimed in the five years leading up to the invasion.’¹

She goes on: ‘As one of the most hard-line Shia mullahs explained, “Israel could have won the southerners’ hearts and minds, but instead, its warlike style has turned people against it”.’

Looking back, one was always left with the impression that Nabatiya was a most unusual place. Other Lebanese towns – then and now – are noisy and rambunctious with everyday activity. There were always people fixing things, women calling, children shrieking and, if you listened carefully towards late afternoon, Arab flutes, which, to our Western ears might have sounded a little discordant. It was the kind of music you needed to get used to, as, with time, I did. To me these were reassuring echoes, some still resonating long after we’d left a settlement.

In Nabatiya, by contrast, you could almost feel tingles of hatred on the back of your neck. While going through the place, nobody spoke as we passed, there was no music, no kids playing in the street and you just knew that there was trouble waiting to happen. Most often, we couldn’t wait to get out of there, yet time after time we’d go back, almost as if we were tempting the gods.

The IDF soldiers who travelled with us felt much the same. When they returned to Israel from Beirut, they’d groan when they were told that their route would take them through Nabatiya. Unpleasant things happened there, they would comment among themselves and, as we approached, they’d be that much more vigilant.

When I visited the town a decade later, very little had changed. Nabatiya had become a regional headquarters for Hizbollah and, according to Jerusalem, almost all attacks launched into Upper Galilee were planned from there; which is why the town is still blasted so often by the Israeli Air Force today.

To me, Sidon wasn’t much better. I once spent two days there, ostensibly to visit some of the Palestinian camps south of the town. What an experience that was.

The camps – which were like concentration camps without towers and manned by troops with machine-guns – were appalling. They were cesspits of misery, as I wrote in one of my reports. The children looked as though they were starving, the majority clad in rags and playing in some of the slimy pools that formed during winter months. Most families were housed in little more than shacks that gave almost no shelter from the cold and the wet. Even so, in this inner circle of purgatory, the occasional incongruity of a youngster bubbling with enthusiasm couldn’t be missed.

It was during one of my earlier visits that I joined an Israeli patrol checking vehicles and civilians in the centre of Sidon, which was not unlike some Israeli towns in the north, perhaps 40 years before. A section of eight paratroopers was doing a fairly good job of a distasteful task and hating it. It was as much an insult to unit elán as to the civilians who were subjected to their pawings.

De’Ath and I went about with them, filming or taking stills, and we soon saw that the people viewed us just as they did the soldiers who were making their lives a misery. We were regarded as the enemy, because we’d arrived with this hated ‘Zionist Scum’ as Lebanese propaganda leaflets called the Israeli Army. We were in the process of recording on film their activities as they stopped traffic, searched vehicles and persons, checked IDs and asked impertinent questions. It mattered little that we were foreign journalists with foreign passports. The local Arabs even had a name for us: jundi, which in their dialect meant hated foreigners. That we were hobnobbing with the aggressor spoke for itself; by our very actions we were darkening shadows within shadows.

What the Israeli troops in an occupied area were doing to the locals was harassment, pure and simple, and things sometimes turned violent. When George and I spoke about it afterwards, we agreed to give the opportunity a miss should it be offered again. Journalists in other parts of the world have had similar experiences and generally, you cannot avoid seeing it, because it is part of the job.

During the course of many years of visiting the region, much had taken place, especially after I returned to the Israeli border in 1996.

I met some members of an IDF unit that had had a few uncomfortable moments with a landmine. Earlier, one of the soldiers had found some wires alongside the road, which was something nobody ignored.

Each potential bomb had to be investigated and it was invariably a risky process. Experience had taught that anything involving batteries or wires could be attached to command-detonated bombs. It was also apparent that those opposed to these occupiers, quickly learnt to excel in the unconventional, as they do today in Iraq and Afghanistan.