Lebanon battered, Hezbollah defiant: Israeli strikes leave nation in tatters yet guerrillas carry on.

Byline: Liz Sly

Jul. 30--BEIRUT -- Standing amid the smoking ruins of Beirut's pulverized southern suburbs, Hezbollah official Abu Fadel was defiant. "As you can see, we are still here," he declared. "Hezbollah is here, and it is everywhere." Fadel was leading journalists on what has become an almost daily event, a guided Hezbollah tour of the destruction caused by Israeli air strikes on the once-teeming southern neighborhoods of Beirut. This is where Hezbollah was headquartered, and where hundreds of thousands of people once lived, in densely populated, closely packed high-rises. The suburbs are now eerily deserted, their residents having fled in the first days of the war. Hezbollah's headquarters is a collapsed pile of masonry, the buildings housing the group's press office and TV station are gone, and the apartment block where Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah lived has pancaked into a single story of crunched concrete. Entire city blocks have been obliterated, along with the thousands of homes, shops and offices that they housed, by the tons of explosives dropped by Israeli warplanes in their effort to dislodge the Shiite militia. The scene at this ground zero of Israel's offensive offers a grim vision of what it would take to achieve Israel's goal of destroying Hezbollah as a fighting force. All indicators suggest Hezbollah has survived relatively unscathed. Its guerrilla forces are still firing rockets into northern Israel and putting up…