Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Mohammed Bzeeh spent the first hours of the ceasefire cleaning. After the Hezbollah-Israel agreement brought 13 months of fighting to a close last Wednesday, Bzeeh and his family arrived at their village of Zibqin in southern Lebanon to find their home ruined by an Israeli airstrike.
Bzeeh immediately set to work, the wiry 18-year-old hefting piles of concrete and metal scrap off his driveway using a rusty shovel. His family watched as he worked, overlooking the street that they had left two months earlier, now lined by the burnt-out husks of their neighbours’ homes.
“I feel overwhelmed. We came back to our land, our motherland, and there is so much damage here. But we will resist and stay here and fix our homes,” Bzeeh said.
He was not alone. His neighbours were already picking through the remains of their properties, hoping to find some heirlooms amid the rubble. In the days that would follow, hundreds of thousands of residents of south Lebanon would join them and a steady stream of cars backed up the highway for days.
Most arrived to find similar scenes of destruction. There was no water, electricity or mobile phone service south of the Litani river, two months after Israel started its intensified aerial campaign and ground invasion of south Lebanon at the end of September. By the end of Israel’s campaign, nearly 4,000 people had been killed in Lebanon, more than a million displaced and dozens of villages had been rendered uninhabitable.
Despite the massive damage to their homes and death toll among their communities, many in south Lebanon viewed their very presence as a victory and a form of resistance.
“Obviously, we are happy because we returned back here and we won the war. If you destroy all of our houses, we will stay here and we will resist because we are the [owners] of the land,” Bzeeh said.
Though many residents had come back home – with Israel still forbidding those living directly on the border from returning – the future of south Lebanon and the country was deeply uncertain. Hezbollah has claimed victory in its fight with Israel, proclaiming that Israel has failed to achieve any of its goals in Lebanon, including occupation of the south and destruction of the organisation.
However, it has acquiesced to demands that, prior to the offensive two months ago, it said were non-starters. It has not forced Israel to a ceasefire in Gaza, and it agreed to roll back its fighters north of the Litani river, about 20 miles from the border.
The fighting has left the organisation, which for years has dominated Lebanon’s domestic politics and served as a regional bogeyman for Israel and its allies, severely diminished. Its domestic opponents have called on the organisation to hand over its weapons to the state, insisting that it has passed its glory days.
On Saturday, the Christian Lebanese Forces, the largest anti-Hezbollah bloc in Lebanon’s parliament, held a session to discuss Lebanon’s post-ceasefire reality. The leader of the Lebanese Forces, Samir Geagea, said that Hezbollah’s weapons had become illegal after the approval of the ceasefire agreement and must be turned over to the army “just as the Lebanese Forces once did when they handed over their weapons.”
Under the terms of the ceasefire, the group’s fighters in the south will be replaced by 10,000 Lebanese troops. The Lebanese army, chronically under-equipped and dwarfed in strength by Hezbollah, will be tasked with reasserting the state’s power in south Lebanon and making sure that the militia does not rearm in the south.
As it stands, the Lebanese army is tasked with internal security, not defending the country against foreign powers. Soldiers act as national police guards, rather than as a national fighting force.
The ceasefire, however, has envisioned the army as capable of both ensuring that Hezbollah complies with the terms of the deal and protecting Lebanon from any encroachments by Israel on its sovereignty.
The force has been crippled by Lebanon’s five-year economic crisis, with soldiers earning just a few hundred dollars a month and lacking basic supplies. There is also a question of political will. Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance could be threatened if there was a confrontation between the army and Hezbollah.
Military experts have said that the army must be completely transformed and needs an infusion of international support if it hopes to protect Lebanese sovereignty.“If Israel attacks Lebanon, the Lebanese army will not be able to confront the Israeli tanks and missiles. The US wants the Lebanese army to be a police force, to maintain security,” said Mounir Shehadeh, a retired general who oversaw the Lebanese government’s coordination with UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon.
Shehadeh explained that the army would need a true commitment from the international community to become a real, competent army. As part of this, it must be allowed to purchase advanced weaponry from western states, particularly, the US.
In the first four days of the ceasefire, Israel has carried out multiple airstrikes in Lebanon on what it says were Hezbollah members violating the terms of the ceasefire. At least one of these airstrikes was in the Saida district of Lebanon, far north of where the ceasefire deal says Hezbollah must retreat. Hezbollah, though it had vowed to respond to ceasefire violations, has thus far not retaliated. The Lebanese army, for its part, said it would raise the issue with international mediators.
Despite the questions about Hezbollah’s grip on power in the country and its supposed replacement as the protector of the country by the Lebanese military, the group and its supporters have taken the end of fighting as a cause for celebration.
On Saturday, thousands of people gathered at the site of the Israeli airstrike which killed the three decades-long leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, holding Hezbollah flags and candles. The ceremony was meant to commemorate Nasrallah’s death and chart a path forward after a year filled with immeasurable loss.
In Zibqin, Bzeeh was also uncertain about his future. The 18-year-old, now that the war was over, had to contend with the more mundane, but equally serious, aspects of his life. He would return to his studies as a first-year university student, studying finance.
“It’s very confusing, the circumstances here in the country. I will work in banking, but not in Lebanon,” Bzeeh said.
