Quotes of the Day

From his swimming pool in Metula, Amir Melzer surveys the new front line in Israel's campaign against Palestinian terrorist groups. Beyond the apricot orchard at the foot of his garden, white pickets mark the Lebanese border. The plain stretches from there to the dusty heights of Syria, where Israeli jets last week struck a training camp of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At the other edge of the fruit field on Monday, a sniper hid in the Lebanese village of Kafr Kileh, which abuts the border fence, and shot dead an Israeli soldier in revenge for the air raid. "It's a new era of terror," says Melzer, a lawyer in this northernmost Israeli town. "It's the most unpredictable time we've ever known."

Israel leapt into the unknown last week, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the bombing of the camp in Syria, after an Oct. 4 suicide bomb in Haifa killed 20 Israelis. Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in Lebanon braced for more attacks, while Melzer and the Israeli soldiers whose base looms above his home went on high alert for attempts to kidnap them from across the border. Sharon himself hinted the raid on the camp, at Ein Saheb, 15 km west of Damascus, may not be the last. "If they don't understand the message," he said, "Israel will ... defend itself whenever [it] is convinced that Syria is assisting the Palestinian terrorist organizations."

Metula (pop. 2,000) and the other small towns along Israel's northern border have seen violent times before. During Israel's 18-year occupation of a strip of southern Lebanon, there were occasional rocket attacks. Now they are once again vulnerable as tension between Israel and Syria mounts. President Bashar Assad accused Israel of "trying to terrorize Syria and drag it and the region into other wars." Syrian officials denied that the training camp was active, but Israel says the base was run by Ahmed Jibril's Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and had been used by the Tehran-funded Islamic Jihad. A senior Islamic Jihad source in Gaza told TIME that Iranian military officers visited Ein Saheb in early summer, intending to equip it specifically for Islamic Jihad.

If the Israeli strike was meant to stop the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign, it failed. Last Thursday a bomber killed himself and wounded two Israeli soldiers and another Palestinian at a checkpoint in the West Bank. Hopes for a cease-fire also faded when Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, sworn in on Tuesday, threatened to quit on Thursday over differences with Yasser Arafat on the control of Palestinian security forces. Arafat's own survival came into question when his gaunt appearance sparked health concerns. A source in his Ramallah compound told Time he may in fact be suffering from stomach cancer.

If more Israeli attacks in Syria do come, no one will be surprised. Israel has already killed or arrested all the Islamic Jihad and Hamas kingpins in the West Bank, and a series of assassinations over the summer sent most of the Hamas chiefs in Gaza underground. But both groups have leaders in Beirut and Damascus, from where they coordinate attacks within Israel. The Islamic Jihad official said Lebanese intelligence had warned all the Palestinian groups that Israel would try to strike their offices in Beirut. Some Israeli ministers worry the air strike against Syria made Israel look aggressive and risks opening a conflict across the northern border. In a concrete-lined trench at the Narkis post above Metula, Lieut. Colonel Lior screws up his eyes against the hot, dry wind that sweeps down from the Syrian desert and watches for the next move in that battle. A deputy brigade commander on the border, Lior points out the nearby farmhouses from which Hizballah operatives monitor Israeli patrols. His soldiers have been warned that Hizballah will try to kidnap them for use as bargaining chips. The same warning was issued to Israeli farmers, who are nearing the end of the apple harvest and whose orchards reach to the very border, yards from the Hizballah watchers. "At this dangerous time," says Lior, whose family name can't be used due to Israeli army restrictions, "this place is really the end of the line." But not the end of the story.

• MATT REES | METULA
• Israeli border towns may face trouble as tension increases.