Hizbullah Representatives on the Group's Interest in Parks and Pollution

The first thing you need when you want to call on Hizbullah is not a flak jacket but a photograph. This is what the lady from the hotel explained.

"You take the photograph to the Ministry of Information then you go to see Ibrahim X at this address" - she had scribbled it out in Arabic - "and he will pass you on to Ghassan Y who will take you into Haret Hreyk".

Haret Hreyk is the part of southern Beiruit occupied, in ascending chronology, by Shia Muslims, the Hizbullah militia, and a great deal of destructive Israeli ordinance. It was curious that accessing it required no more protocol than a bus pass application.

City Photos, just off the city's corniche, supplied eight passport-sized prints for $6 (£3.21)- good value for spies, as technicians camouflage the tell-tale skin blemishes that intelligence agencies routinely rely on. A portrait of Rafik Hariri, the late former prime minister of Lebanon, hung on the office wall.

As Mr Hariri is, rightly or wrongly, generally supposed to have been assassinated by the Syrians, Hizbullah's patrons, it felt wiser not to disclose any travel plans.

An hour later, the cosmetically-enhanced image had been stapled to an A4 form by a vivacious secretary clad in diamante-studded denim and dagger-toed shoes. Her Armani-shirted boss in his office off the Ministry of Information's spartan "Press Roo" [sic] was creditably relaxed about expediting contact with an organisation that effectively views his employer - the Lebanese government - as a waste of Middle Eastern space.

After a half hour taxi drive and a clamber up four flights of a dowdy office building, the newly minted pass was presented to a Hizbullah representative. Ibrahim and Ghassan had vanished, but Ms Z, a graceful figure with feline eyelashes, a fashionably cut black coat and chic, Hermes-style, blue-striped headscarf, made a charming substitute.

The Islamo-bourgeois face of the 24-year-old Party of God was not entirely unexpected. As well as contributing two ministers and 14 elected members to Lebanon's precisely-calibrated administration, Hizbullah runs a slick satellite TV station (al-Manar, broadcasting from an unknown location after Israeli jets flattened its Haret Hreyk studio) and a highly-professional PR division. The road in from Beirut airport is lined with expertly crafted illuminated posters of smiling children and unruffled fighters, overlaid with the punchy 'Divine Victory' slogan. The billboards for Pepsi and Tropicana look drab by comparison.

The hearts and minds operation has its hiccups, though. A colleague and myself were abruptly requested to return tomorrow. Ms Z was unmovable for five minutes, then, just as abruptly, relented - we could go to "the tent", after all, but no questions must be asked and no photographs taken.

Mystified, but grateful for small mercies, we were soon sitting with one other journalist inside a long cinnamon-coloured marquee facing Dr Naim Bilal who was happy to field questions from any quarter. A stocky, bearded member of Hizbullah's central council with a pin-striped brown suit, tan slip-ons and excellent murmured English, Dr Bilal was keen to portray his colleagues as something akin to the armed wing of Friends of The Earth.

"We prefer the European media to come to Lebanon to see directly what happened," he said." Hizbullah is not a terrorist organisation; it is a civilian movement, not a state within a state, but an NGO." Compensation of £32,000 had been paid to the surviving owners of the 5,500 Haret Hreyk apartments the group said were destroyed by the Israeli assault.

In addition, Dr Bilal explained, Hizbullah had agreed with the government that a core element of the master plan for rebuilding Haret Hreyk would be the provision of parks.

"We want to make the suburb breathe," Dr Bilal declared. "There should be less traffic, more green."

Dr Bilal did acknowledge that this particular NGO, credited with developing the suicide bomber among other things, had been involved in the recent deaths of Israeli civilians. He shrugged: "You can't compare, though." Of the 1,200 Lebanese killed in the 34-day war, 80 % had been civilians, he said, whereas only 20 % of Hizbullah's victims were non-combatants. "Hizbullah is concerned about human rights," he insisted."Our law prevents us to kill civilians. If any are killed, that is a reaction, not an action."

Dr Bilal organised a car tour of the area. In the two months since hostilities ended, Hizbullah wrecking crews have done an impressive clean-up job, but the familiar iconography of urban devastation, from Stalingrad to Manhattan, lingers: lop-sided tower blocks stare down on acres of shredded concrete, buckled metal and ragged mattresses. Demolition teams still toiled like diamond miners in the giant craters gouged out by bunker-busting bombs.

"Here 12 people were killed," the driver announced, indicating another heap of rubble. "Seven children, two mothers, two fathers and a grandmother. "Earlier, he had handed each of his dusty passengers a bottle of water and a can of Pepsi Cola. The attentive hospitality contrasted with Hizbullah's security: there were no bag searches and Dr Bilal's aides barely glanced at the diligently acquired ID.

The atmosphere, in fact, was oddly peaceful. A few yards beyond every pulverised block shoppers thronged Hart Hreyk's cracked pavements. Dr Bilal's maxi-tent had a neatly mounted display of anti-US and Israel cartoons, but elsewhere the paraphenalia of grief, and revenge, were absent.

Dr Bilal was equally calm when invited to consider the possibility of the Israeli military renewing its interest in Haret Hreyk in general, and his canvas redoubt, in particular.

"No," he reflected, "I think it will rather try a war with the state than the resistance - Syria and Iran, with a classic army!"

Could he see a time when Hizbullah and Israel might co-exist peacefully? Dr Bilal brushed an imaginary fly off his lapel before murmuring the perfect, gnomic, PR response: "As soon as Israel leaves the Arab lands."