JERUSALEM, Oct 3, 2008 (AFP) - A senior Israeli military commander said on Friday that any Hezbollah strike would bring 'enormous destruction' on Lebanon that would exceed that caused by the 2006 war on the Shiite militant group.

'What happened in Beirut in 2006 will occur in every village that fires on Israel,' Major General Gadi Eisenkot, the top commander in northern Israel, said in an interview with Israel's mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

'Firing from the villages of Lebanon would cause a disaster, and (Hezbollah chief Hassan) Nasrallah has an interest in thinking 30 times before giving such an order,' he added.

'We will use disproportionate force against these villages and cause enormous destruction because from our point of view these are not villages but military bases.'

He added that the policy of massive retaliation would be employed against other regional foes should they carry out a first strike on Israel, saying 'what applies to Hezbollah applies even more to Syria.'

The Shiite militants fought Israel to a bloody 34-day stalemate in the summer of 2006 after they seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap earlier this year.

The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.