With Joy and Tears, Lebanese Return Home: Look at All the Destruction

As day broke on the newly established cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel on Wednesday, Hussein Nassour returned to his Beirut neighborhood to inspect the ruins of his former life.

Israeli airstrikes had blown out the doors and windows of his apartment, ruining his furniture. His family’s market was destroyed, along with the nearby buildings where his customers used to live.

He failed to see how the war had done anyone any good.

“We did not win. We lost,” he said. “No one gained anything from any of this.”

Across Lebanon, people greeted the cease-fire that ended the country’s deadliest war in three decades with profound relief, hoping that both sides would stick to it and allow some sense of normalcy to return.

For many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who had fled Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion, it provided a chance to return home and take stock of what they had lost.

Many found homes that would require forbiddingly costly repairs to make them livable again. Some found no homes at all, just piles of concrete and twisted metal with their possessions somewhere beneath.

In one hard-hit neighborhood in the capital, Beirut, Zubaida Amru, 37, stood atop such a pile, looking for her belongings. She spotted her family’s oven, destroyed, and furniture from her late father’s bedroom.

“My whole life was here,” she said. But now, that life was gone. “It is not just your possessions. It’s the way that you felt walking through your own home.”

Throughout the war, Israel focused its attacks on predominantly Shiite Muslim communities near Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley. These were places where Hezbollah operated freely, providing social services and enjoying significant support for what it called its armed “resistance” against Israel.

Hezbollah started the conflict by firing on Israeli troops in support of Hamas in Gaza after that group’s deadly assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Even though the war killed more than 3,800 people in Lebanon, displaced more than a million others and caused billions of dollars in economic losses, Hezbollah and its supporters on Wednesday portrayed it as a win.

“The cease-fire, of course, is a victory for the blood of the martyrs,” said Manal Hamadeh, 49, referring to Hezbollah militants who died fighting Israel.

Her beauty shop supply business in Beirut was destroyed in an airstrike. But she said the most painful loss was Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for 32 years before Israel assassinated him in September.

Many of the displaced came from southern Lebanon and loaded up their cars on Wednesday to head back that way. Heavy traffic clogged the highway south. Cars were loaded with the suitcases, mattresses and blankets that people had grabbed when they fled or received in the shelters where they had spent the war.

A bakery along the road blared songs by the Lebanese diva Fairouz, a familiar and comforting soundtrack in the country, and gave out cookies with tiny banners that read, “Smile, better days are coming.”

But the sense of jubilation for returning home faded as people drove further south, passing piles of wreckage where buildings once stood and storefronts shattered by blasts.

At a Lebanese Army checkpoint at the entrance to the southern city of Sidon, soldiers distributed fliers warning not to touch any unexploded bombs people might find near their homes.

“We are happy now, but I know it won’t last,” said Maryam Shoaib, 42, who had stopped for lunch with her relatives in Sidon before heading to their home further south.

“Heartbreak awaits us in the village,” she said.

Samia el Zein, 53, said that she, too, had hit the road in the morning in a good mood, thrilled at the thought of returning to her own bed. But as soon as she arrived in her neighborhood in Tyre, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast, her chest tightened and tears rolled down her face.

“I’m sad. I’m happy. I don’t know,” she said. “Look at all the destruction.”

As she carried her bags into the entry hall of her apartment, glass from the broken front door crunched under her feet. Inside, the sliding glass doors that once opened onto a large balcony were shattered and curtain rods from the windows were flung across the floor.

Her brother, Mohammad el Zein, 55, had arrived earlier and swept the shards of glass into neat piles. On the dining room table, he had organized the remains of everything he found: plates, teapots, pans, cups and lamps, some of which he hoped to salvage.

His father’s collection of antique ceramic pots was intact — a tiny miracle, he said.

Still, he and his sister felt uneasy, worried that the bombardment could resume at any time.

“We’re not feeling the victory,” Mr. Zein said. “I don’t think it’s over yet.”

Elsewhere in Tyre, some families waved yellow Hezbollah flags from their car windows and young men who appeared to be from the group’s civil defense force flashed peace signs and cheered at the passing cars.

That was too much for Ousama Aoudeh, 60.

“What victory? Look at the destruction. Look at all the death,” she said. “How can anyone say this is a victory? We were defeated.”

She was the first member of her family to return to Tyre and was pleased to find her apartment still standing, she said.

But her daughter’s building had been cleaved in half and a blast had thrown two cars on top of the building’s remains, with windshields shattered and doors hanging from their hinges. Mattresses still wrapped in purple and green bedsheets stuck out of the rubble.

“I was watching the news from Tyre on TV this whole time. But seeing it for myself, I can’t believe it,” she said, taking in the crushed cars and tangled piles of electric wires as men elsewhere in the neighborhood fired celebratory gunshots.

“There’s no electricity. These buildings are all gone,” she said. “Why are they shooting? What do they have to celebrate?”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Tyre and Dayana Iwaza from Beirut.