The Israeli army says it has seized a number of Hezbollah fighters in a raid on Baalbek, a town deep inside Lebanon.

The rocket onslaught came as Israel Defense Forces stepped up its offensive against Hezbollah, raiding an eastern Lebanese hospital in Baalbeck overnight that the IDF said was a base for militant fighters.

Israeli forces killed 10 militants and captured five others in the assault on the Baalbeck facility, according Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli army's chief of staff. No Israeli forces were injured in the raid, he said. Hezbollah fighters were using the hospital and surrounding area as a logistical base, housing many leaders, Halutz said.

Israeli forces seized intelligence information in the hospital, Halutz said. The IDF also reportedly destroyed a large supply of missiles. "There are no patients there; there is no hospital," Israeli Prime Minister Olmert Ehud Olmert said. "This is the basis of Hezbollah in disguise. It's named a hospital precisely to mislead you and others that will consider it a place no army will intervene with."

Lebanese security sources said that reports from the area suggested that Israeli troops were pursuing suspicions that the two abducted Israeli soldiers were being held or treated inside the hospital.

Meanwhile, Israeli reports said that the mission was intended to capture Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, an official of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia based in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah denied that any of its fighters were being treated inside the hospital.

Israeli's capture prisoners from hospital

After inspecting the identification of everyone in the hospital, the IDF soldiers proceeded to arrest several Hizbullah officials, who were later transported back into Israel. The officials' names and positions in the organization were not revealed.

Israeli troops had the time to enter the hospital, check everyone's identification, round up Hezbollah officials, and then extricate both themselves and their prisoners without taking a single casualty.

This makes Hezbollah look like a bunch of amateurs playing out of their league -- and it demonstrates that Israel can hit them pretty much at will. Hezbollah leadership has to understand that if they can't be protected in their own strongholds, they live pretty much at the whim of Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz. More importantly, their sponsors in Damascus and Teheran now understand that their liaison teams have a substantial risk of capture, which would be more than embarrassing in the current conflict.

Lebanese police gave the names of the five captured civilians as Hassan Dib Nasrallah, Bilal Hassan Nasrallah, Ahmad Auta, Hassan Burji and Hussein Shokr