Soldiers from the Lebanese army patrol the roads around Beirut’s southern suburbs on Nov. 11. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post)
As quickly as they fled, people across Lebanon on Wednesday strapped belongings atop cars and headed home, uncertain what awaited them in their cities, towns or villages - or, for their ravaged country, what came next.
Lebanon was ailing before the war started more than a year ago. As the cease-fire took effect early Wednesday, it is bereft. More than 3,700 people have been killed since clashes between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah started in early October last year, including hundreds of children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Upward of 1 million people have been displaced.
Neighborhoods have crumbled under thousands of air raids, and along the border, villages have been all but erased by Israeli explosives.
The war has also produced a vacuum of authority, with the country’s future hinging on how it would be filled, Lebanese officials and analysts said. Stepping into the void could be Hezbollah, bloodied but - according to some experts - unbowed; the Lebanese army, a weak force betting on a surge of international support; or some configuration of regional and Western states, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, eager to project their desires and interests on Lebanon in its hour of need.
“You know we were so busy, all of us, with the cease-fire,” Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday, hours before the truce between Israel and Hezbollah was announced.
“Did we think very much about the day after? No,” he said.
Short-term challenges were swiftly apparent Wednesday, amid reports that returning civilians were fired upon in towns Israeli troops had not yet retreated from and that fighting continued in flash point areas in southern Lebanon. The cease-fire agreement calls for Israeli troops to withdraw over a 60-day period and for Lebanese army forces, along with U.N. peacekeepers, to assume authority in southern Lebanon as Hezbollah fighters withdraw.
The army’s role is seen as a key to the cease-fire. Bou Habib said the force of some 5,000 soldiers already in the south would be doubled, thrusting the military into the unfamiliar role of peacekeeper between Israel and Hezbollah, two of the region’s most potent and committed foes.
Even as the fighting intensified in recent months, the Lebanese army - which has received support from the United States and others to perform functions such as border patrols and counterterrorism, and sees its primary function as preserving domestic peace in Lebanon - was ill-equipped or disinclined to face either of the combatants, analysts said.
Few people in the country believed the army would be asked to confront Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed force that is supported by millions of people in Lebanon. And few expected it would challenge Israel, a far superior force that is also nuclear-armed.
If peace prevailed, it would only be because Israel and Hezbollah, for the moment, had decided to take a break from war.
More daunting tests for Lebanon loom beyond the question of whether the cease-fire will hold. The government - a caretaker entity already destitute because of a long financial crisis and has functioned without an elected president for more than two years - faced losses from the war that are hard to grasp: physical damages and economic costs amounting to some $8.5 billion, according to the World Bank, and a contraction of gross domestic product of around 6.5 percent.
Half of the country is subsisting below the poverty line, according to Mercy Corps, an aid group. “Our concern is that now that the conflict is over, or at least there is a cease-fire, the attention will not be on Lebanon, while the challenges are huge,” said Laila Al Amine, director for Mercy Corps in the country.
“So many people have lost their means of income,” she said, especially in the south, where olive farmers had lost two harvest seasons because of the war. Because of continued instability, “we cannot expect investment, and tourism, to continue as before,”
Al Amine said. On top of this, waiting, like traps, for children and others in abandoned parts of Lebanon, are unexploded bombs.
“We cannot leave people alone,” she said, warning of the political vacuum everyone in Lebanon was so worried about. Hezbollah, which held sway in many parts of southern Lebanon, has been “set back decades,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday. Its top leaders and weapons were destroyed, he said, in a victory speech aimed at selling the cease-fire to the Israeli public and domestic skeptics.
There was little doubt that “Hezbollah is going to come out of this very different than it came out of 2006,” said Amal Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, referring to the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, when the militant group claimed success after fighting Israel to a standstill.
Hezbollah has taken a “severe beating,” she said, losing its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, in an Israeli attack, along with the top rung of its political echelon. The group suffered devastating infiltrations of its vaunted security network, including an Israeli attack on pagers used by the group.
“I don’t think anyone is hailing this as a divine victory,” as the group had in 2006, Saad said.
But in the face of some of Israel’s stated war aims - to destroy the group and to create a new Middle East free of challenge from Iranian-allied forces - Hezbollah had prevailed, she said. As it crafted the narrative of the war, she asked whether it was “more powerful that it withstood this brutal onslaught” adding that Hezbollah is likely to retain its role as “kingmaker” in Lebanon’s political firmament while zealously guarding its ability to retain its weapons.
To Saad, the cease-fire seems like a “hiatus.” “This is by no means the end of the war,” she said.
Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Hezbollah would try to claim victory after the war, based on the notion that Israel had not been able to achieve its war goals. But the claim would be less convincing than it had been in the past, in part because of the messenger.
Nasrallah, a charismatic figure, had previously delivered such messages. But now it fell to his successor, Naim Qassem - described by Hage Ali as a “lackluster leader” - to convince Hezbollah’s supporters and rivals alike that the war had been worth the cost.
It was possible that Lebanon’s political establishment, which had supported Hezbollah during the war, would “rethink its position, given how weakened” the organization was, Hage Ali said. At the same time, Lebanon’s future was becoming much more dependent on the regional context and less so on local politics.
“What will the Trump administration policy look like? What is the Saudi role?” he said. “The resumption of the war is a real threat and will impact how each side calibrates its next move.”
