Syria worked behind the scenes yesterday to rein in the Hizbullah guerrilla movement, and thus to restore a strained quiet to the Israeli-Lebanon border after the hostilities of late Thursday which left seven Lebanese and two Israelis dead.
Residents of Beirut emerged from a night punctuated by Israeli raids to find two power stations blown up, electricity cut in many neighbourhoods, and millions of pounds of damage to infrastructure - a heavy blow to the Lebanese capital, which had been gearing up for a flood of summer tourism. Most of the dead were firemen, killed fighting a power station blaze; dozens more Lebanese civilians were injured in the Israeli strikes.
Residents of northern Israel emerged from their underground bomb shelters to bury the first of two victims of Katyusha rocket attacks on the city of Kiryat Shmona, and to praise the air force for strikes that many argued had been long overdue. The two men who died, the first to be killed in rocket attacks for four years, were standing near City Hall when the salvoes landed.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader for the Iranian-armed Hizbullah movement, which is fighting to force Israel out of the buffer "security zone" it occupies in southern Lebanon, declared that the Israeli bombings "will not go by without punishment".
President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon pledged solidarity with Hizbullah. Across the border, Gen Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israeli army, promised to hit Beirut again "with the same power" should the "murderous rocket attacks" on civilian targets in Israel resume. But away from the microphones, Syria was responding to pleas from the Israeli, Lebanese and US governments to rein in the Hizbullah fighters and prevent a further escalation.
Damascus, which maintains a force of at least 30,000 soldiers inside Lebanon and seems able to control the flow of weaponry to Hizbullah, moved to ensure that the confrontation did not grow to threaten prospects for peace raised by last month's election of Mr Ehud Barak as prime minister of Israel.
Mr Barak, who is still working to build a majority coalition, has not yet taken office. And the indications are that Thursday's night's raids, ordered by the outgoing government of Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, were carried out without his approval or even support. The Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr Salim Hoss, insisted that Mr Barak must have been a party to Israel's decision to launch the strikes on Lebanon. Mr Netanyahu, argued Mr Hoss, "couldn't have done it alone."
But state radio in Syria, Lebanon's patron, had an entirely different assessment. The Israeli assault was solely Mr Netanyahu's responsibility, it reported, and constituted a last effort by him to harm hopes for regional peace and to embarrass his more moderate successor, Mr Barak.
Coming as Syria worked feverishly to prevent a further intensifying of the cross-border hostilities, Damascus Radio's interpretation of Thursday's violence appeared to raise hopes that this latest round of violence could turn out to be the storm before the calm - and that, once Mr Barak is sworn into office, Syrian and Israeli negotiators will settle down to negotiate a peace deal.
In a recent interview with his biographer, the British journalist Patrick Seale, President Hafez Assad of Syria said he saw Mr Barak as a strong and decent man, who was genuinely seeking peace.
The Syrian president was not always an overt supporter of Mr Barak. Indeed, when Mr Barak, heading unsuccessful peace talks with Syria in the early 1990s, demanded that Syria reduce the size of its army, President Assad dismissed the suggestion as an "outrageous" intervention in his interal affairs, and broke off all dialogue for six months.
But Mr Barak evidently impressed the president by pledging, in his election campaign, to bring Israeli troops out of Lebanon within a year of taking office - a pledge that can only be kept in the framework of a wider deal with Syria, and one that indicated that Mr Barak was finally ready to pay the price for peace that President Assad has always demanded: the return of the Golan Heights.