Return to ruins and uncertainty, despite ceasefire

Mohammed Bzeeh spent the first hours of the ceasefire cleaning. After the Hezbollah-Israel agreement last Wednesday appeared to have brought 13 months of fighting to a close, Bzeeh and his family found their home in the village of ZibqeenZibqin ruined by an Israeli airstrike.

- William Christou

Bzeeh set to work, the wiry 18-year-old hefting concrete and metal scrap off his driveway using a rusty shovel. His family watched on, overlooking the street 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 followed, hundreds of thousands of residents of south Lebanon joined 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 day of the ceasefire, 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.