For two months, the only sounds in Nabatieh were the buzzing of an Israeli drone overhead and the dull thump of distant airstrikes. The day after a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect, the drone was gone and southern Lebanon’s second largest city was filled with the sound of hammering and the clang of excavator buckets lifting rubble from blocked streets.
“We started repairs this morning, why would we wait? We have to stand on our own two feet,” said Wafiq Jaber, the owner of al-Sharq sweet shop in Nabatieh, on Thursday. He had watched six weeks earlier on his wifi-enabled cameras as Israeli bombs fell on one building after another until suddenly the footage cut and he knew his shop had been hit.
Jaber directed workers as he spoke, pointing to growing piles of glass and twisted metal, the remains of his shop. Four of the six branches of his business in Lebanon had been damaged by Israeli strikes. He estimated he had lost about £1.5m in the last two months alone.
He did not expect help in rebuilding from the Lebanese government, which even before the war had been on the brink of bankruptcy and unable to provide basic services.
“We have got used to the fact that the state doesn’t have the capacities to help us. We already have private generators, someone is on the way to bring us water. We don’t need anything from the state, just stability,” Jaber said.
Nabatieh was the hardest-hit major city in southern Lebanon in Israel’s aerial campaign, which intensified on 23 September following nearly a year of clashes across the border beginning on 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on southern Israel, with the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah firing on Israeli positions.
The city’s main commercial thoroughfare bears the scars of war. Every storefront is ruined and the recently cleared street was sandwiched between 5 metre-tall walls of rubble that used to be shopping centres.
The scene was similar in other major cities and towns in southern Lebanon. In total, the past 13 months of fighting has cost Lebanon £6.7bn, the World Bank estimates. Months of Israeli bombing has destroyed key infrastructure in southern Lebanon, leaving much of the region without electricity, water and mobile phone service.
Hezbollah officials have said they will compensate everyone whose property was damaged in the fighting, in cooperation with the state, but a concrete reconstruction plan has yet to surface.
In Nabatieh, the government is in the beginning stages of a repair plan but officials say it will be a slow process.
“We will need some time – days – before we can clear the streets. It’s dangerous work because there could be unexploded bombs in the rubble,” said Ali Fkeeh, an official from the ministry of public works who was overseeing the work of the excavators.
A member of the municipal government said they were not sure how long repairs would take as the scale of the destruction was overwhelming and they had not yet been able to assess damages. The municipal building itself was struck multiple times over the last two months, killing the mayor and 10 other members of the administration and decimating its resources.
Hussein Jaber, an engineer working with the local government, said: “Everyone in the municipality is gone and it is slowing us down considerably in the assessment process. The municipality can’t fund anything. We don’t even have a building left – our vaults have been burned. We can’t help anyone in this situation.”
Shop owners in Nabatieh said they had not been offered assistance by the state or local government, and the cost of rebuilding their homes and businesses would be too great to bear alone.
“No one has come and spoken with us, all that we’re doing is personal efforts,” said Hassan Baalbeki, the owner of a pharmacy, gesturing to his shop that had been destroyed six weeks earlier when an Israeli strike hit a restaurant across the street. Baalbeki estimated he lost about £400,000 worth of products in the strike, not accounting for structural damage.
“I can’t handle this financial burden. I will fix the store and see what we will do. Hopefully we can reopen next month,” Baalbeki said.
The durability of the recently signed ceasefire deal is tenuous: Israel carried out an airstrike north of the Litani River on what it said was a Hezbollah missile facility on Thursday, in an area where the group is allowed to operate under the terms of the truce. The Lebanese army, which the ceasefire agreement envisages supplying 10,000 troops to police the truce, said this was a violation of the deal and said it would raise the matter with interlocutors.
Despite the looming risk of the conflict reopening, the residents of Nabatieh are rebuilding – a process they are grimly familiar with.
Jaber said he had factored the possibility of a further war involving Israel into his financial planning after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. “I opened two branches in two safer areas so that there would be something to keep me going if a war happened again,” he said.
