Rear Admiral Noam Feig told a news conference the Israelis shot dead five other Hezbollah fighters as they fought their way back to base after the two-hour raid. Commando casualties were seven wounded, two seriously, he said.

Feig said the marines lobbed grenades into a second-floor apartment to kill the four Hezbollah men who, he alleged, were responsible for a rocket attack on the Israeli town of Hadera, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Tel Aviv.

Friday's attack was the deepest missile strike into Israeli territory, 70 kilometres south of the Lebanese border. It caused no casualties.

Illustrating his remarks with a video, Feig said "marine commandos, acting on very precise intelligence, hit an apartment on the second floor of a four-storey building in the north of Tyre."

The marines "localised four Hezbollah leaders in one of the apartments and attacked it with grenades," he said.

Two of the commandos were seriously wounded in an exchange of automatic gunfire at "point-blank range," he said.

Earlier, a senior Israeli officer said "at least three" Hezbollah fighters had been killed during the raid, which was carried out under cover of darkness.

Feig told the news conference: "We carried out this particularly risky and daring raid in order to spare innocent lives and to prove that we are capable of striking at terrorists wherever they may be."

He said the commandos, members of one of the most elite units of the Israeli armed forces, were brought back to Israel by helicopter.

Lebanese police said a large group of Israeli helicopters flew over Tyre before dawn, strafing roads into the city as well as the seafront with heavy machine-gun fire.

One Lebanese soldier was killed when an Israeli missile destroyed an anti-aircraft battery, the police said.

Hezbollah, for its part, claimed to have thwarted the Israeli operation and to have killed one Israeli commando and wounded three.

The commando raid on Tyre was the second this week, following Tuesday's operation in the central city of Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of the Israeli-Lebanon border.

Swooping into Baalbek in helicopters, some 200 elite troops snatched five Hezbollah suspects from a hospital, along with documents, computers, data disks, maps and radio communication equipment.

Military commanders said the raids were likely to continue.

"There have been, and will continue to be, other operations of this kind," General Udi Adam, chief of northern command, told public radio on Saturday.

Friday's rocket strike on Hadera came after three days in which Hezbollah pummelled Israel with a daily barrage of more than 200 rockets, killing 12 civilians, despite more than three weeks of intense Israeli bombardments by air, land and sea.

On Saturday, a 68-year-old woman and her two daughters were killed when a rocket slammed in the courtyard of a house in the Arab Israeli village of Al-Aramsha, upping Israel's total civilian death toll of the conflict to 33.

The Israeli military has defended its performance, saying Hezbollah had thousands of rockets at the beginning of the campaign, and that the army's first priority was to take out the medium- and long-range missiles that could reach the Jewish state's most populous central area.

"The medium-range rocket disposition has been severely damaged," a senior military official told reporters last Thursday. "Our main problem is destroying the extended version of the 122-millimeter Katyusha. They have fired lots of them."

Out of an estimated 13,000 short-range rockets that Israeli intelligence thought Hezbollah to possess at the outset, the army has taken out some 1,500.

More than 2,500 have been fired at Israel, leaving the militants with some 9,000 of the small, mobile rockets left in their arsenal.

Israel has faced worldwide condemnation of the civilian toll of its war on Hezbollah, which the Lebanese government says has killed at least 880 civilians. Hezbollah and another Shiite militant group, Amal, have confirmed that 55 of their fighters have been killed.

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