Lebanon border attracts the curious
By Hugh Sykes
BBC News, Kyriat Shmona

The Israeli army have improvised a small sightseeing area for tourists visiting the Israel-Lebanon border.

It is north of Kyriat Shmona, on the edge of a peach tree orchard, with views across a valley towards two hilltop towns in south Lebanon.

For a while, it's so peaceful you can hear the wind rustling the leaves of the fruit trees.

A van laden with tomatoes speeds silently along a Lebanese road about 500 metres to the north.

Then a coach load of visitors arrives from Tel Aviv. They babble with excitement and peer across the trees and take photographs and scrutinise a map.

I ask Benyamin if the war had been right.

"For sure! It wasn't enough," he said, laughing, "but never mind - next time!"

Soldier's mission

Amiyad Cohen's family are here. He's a young Israeli soldier, showing his parents and his sister where he fought Hezbollah - in Lebanon, just beyond the peach trees.

He told me: "All the Hezbollah in our area ran away."

Amiyad is critical of the government led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "The main problem was that they didn't let us finish the job. If we'd been allowed to get north of the Litani river, we would have won the war."

He went on: "The Israeli nation has a mission - to bring the moral message of God in the world. We have a more important mission. We have more responsibility because we're better."

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