BINT JBEIL, Lebanon - "We were waiting for combat like a man waits for his bride," said the Hezbollah fighter as he surveyed the battlefield of Bint Jbeil and told how they took on the Israeli army.

In a window of calm opened by Israel's pause in air attacks, the mortar man returned to the site of the battle for the border town and his memories of the bloodiest confrontation yet in Israel's three-week old offensive.

"You can imagine what weapons we have and what weapons they have," said the 42-year-old fighter, who identified himself simply as Husayn. "How did we defeat them? It's the secret of Jesus. It's the relationship between the fighter and his God."

Israel last week withdrew from its positions overlooking this rural hub-town after some of the fiercest fighting since July 12. The army said it had only ever intended to control the outskirts.

In their wake, the Israelis left trails of concrete wreckage a half mile long and the stench of corpses buried under sun-heated rubble where once-bustling markets had stood.

Torn Hezbollah flags lie at the foot of a scarred portrait of the movement's leader Hassan Nasrallah.

"Now the control is in our hands. We are winning," said the fighter. "The Israelis are suffering and the resistance hasn't even started. They did not retreat. They were defeated."

He pulled at his beard proudly and fought back tears as he alternately mourned the suffering of his fellow villagers and recalled the battle.

Husayn told his story alongside fellow Hezbollah fighter and longtime friend, 30-year-old Hamed, who he had not seen for 20 days during the fog of war.

Nine soldiers were killed in the area on July 26 in the heaviest Israeli single-day toll since the conflict began on July 12 with Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid just to the west.

A spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said the town was now "practically empty", although an Israeli military source said fighting was going on in the area Tuesday.

Israel says it has killed as many has 400 Hezbollah fighters since the beginning of the 21-day offensive. Hezbollah so far says it has lost 41.

When the Israeli attacks on Bint Jbeil first began, Husayn, Hamed and hundreds like them readied for battle as they had trained to do. A Hezbollah fighter's training begins as young as age 14, they said.

"The leadership gave its fighters one simple direction," said Husayn. "They said, 'When you see the Israelis, attack them.'"

When Israeli troops showed up on the fringes of Bint Jbeil, Hezbollah was quick to react, the two said.

Word spread that the advancing soldiers had commandeered the villa of a wealthy villager summering in the United States which lies atop Mount Masoud on the town's western edge.

"It started when the guerrillas of Hezbollah discovered the Golanis had put soldiers in that house," Husayn recounted, referring to members of an elite Israeli unit. "Hezbollah didn't give them any chance to stay and bring support. Immediately they started to attack."

They began their assault on the Israeli position at around 1:30 am, they said. Gunmen surrounded the house, while Husayn and his fellow mortar teams targeted the building from afar.

"(The fighters) say 'give me', and at that point you give him. That means fire your shells," Husayn said. "Then we attacked them."

They charged Mount Masoud with Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank rockets. The fighting lasted until dawn, with some 30 Hezbollah guerrillas battling a platoon of 35 Israeli soldiers, according to these fighters.

"You are a guerrilla. You hit and run, you hit and run, but sometimes you cannot be afraid. You have to keep fighting to the end."

The villa where the battle raged is now rubble.

Along the blasted driveway of the ruined mansion lie hundreds of spent shell casings, an indication of the ferocity of the close-quarters firefight.

Amid well-manicured tomato vines in the front garden, Hamed spots abandoned Israeli night-vision binoculars -- a valuable score for the Hezbollah fighters.

"This is a very costly loss for them," Hamed said. "We don't have any night vision."

The binoculars will be sent to Beirut and shown on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station as a trophy of war and then returned to the front lines, a rare item of advanced gear to supplement Hezbollah's rudimentary arsenal.

Hamed's two younger brothers, aged 23 and 28, were also Hezbollah fighters. They were killed during the punishing air bombardment of Bint Jbeil, and their corpses lie buried under mountains of rubble.

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