TYRE, Lebanon — A ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah that began Wednesday appeared to be holding, as residents in cars heaped with belongings streamed back toward southern Lebanon despite warnings from the Israeli and Lebanese militaries that they stay away from certain areas.
If it can be sustained, the ceasefire would bring an end to nearly 14 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which escalated in mid-September into all-out war and threatened to pull Hezbollah’s patron Iran and Israel into a broader conflagration. The deal does not address the war in Gaza, although Palestinian Hamas militants said Wednesday they would be open to a similar deal to halt the fighting first sparked by their October 7 rampage through southern Israel.
The Lebanese accord could give some reprieve to the 1.2 million residents displaced by the fighting and the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along the border with Lebanon.
“They were a nasty and ugly 60 days,” said Mohammed Kaafarani, 59, who was displaced from the Lebanese village of Bidias. “We reached a point where there was no place to hide.”
The U.S.- and France-brokered deal, approved by Israel late Tuesday, calls for an initial two-month halt to fighting and requires Hezbollah to end its armed presence in southern Lebanon, while Israeli troops are to return to their side of the border.
Thousands of additional Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers would deploy in the south, and an international panel headed by the United States would monitor compliance.
Israel says it reserves the right to renew its deadly strikes against Hezbollah should it violate the terms of the deal.
Despite the caution shown on all sides, the deal represented a breakthrough after months of military escalation and diplomatic futility in the region.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the ceasefire the “first ray of hope” in the regional conflict after the “darkness of the past months,” adding, “It is essential that those who signed the ceasefire commitment respect it in full.”
President Biden on Tuesday said his administration would make another push in the short period it has left in office to try to renew efforts for a deal in the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave.
On the highway linking Beirut with south Lebanon, hours after the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire took hold, thousands of people drove south with their belongings and mattresses tied on top of their cars. Traffic was gridlocked at the northern entrance of the port city of Sidon.
“This is a moment of victory, pride and honor for us, the Shiite sect, and for all of Lebanon,” said Hussein Sweidan, a resident returning to the port city of Tyre. He said he saw the ceasefire as a victory for Hezbollah, despite the heavy losses to both its fighters and its top leadership core.
Israel’s Arabic military spokesperson Avichay Adraee warned displaced Lebanese not to return to evacuated villages in southern Lebanon. Israeli troops were still present in parts of southern Lebanon after Israel launched a ground invasion in October. The Israeli military said forces opened fire to push back a number of vehicles that were entering a restricted area in southern Lebanon.
An Israeli security official said the pace of the withdrawal and the scheduled return of Lebanese civilians to their homes would depend on whether the deal is implemented and enforced by all sides.
Residents will return to vast destruction wrought by the Israeli military during its campaign, which flattened villages where the military said it found vast weapons caches and infrastructure it says was meant for Hezbollah to launch its own Oct. 7-style attack on northern Israel.
More than 3,760 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon the past 13 months, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials.
Hezbollah emerges from the war battered and bloodied, with the reputation it built by fighting Israel to a stalemate in the 2006 war tarnished. Yet its fighters still managed to put up heavy resistance on the ground, slowing Israel’s advance while continuing to fire scores of rockets, missiles and drones across the border each day.
In Israel, the mood was far more subdued, with displaced Israelis concerned that the deal did not go far enough to rein in Hezbollah permanently and that it did not address Gaza and the hostages still held there.
“I think it is still not safe to return to our homes because Hezbollah is still close to us,” said Eliyahu Maman, an Israeli displaced from the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, which is not far from the border with Lebanon and was hit hard by the months of fighting.
The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel, more than half civilians, as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
A significant return of the displaced to their communities, many of which have suffered extensive damage from rocket fire, could take months.
But Israel can claim major victories in the war, including the killing of Hezbollah’s top leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of its senior commanders, as well as the destruction of extensive militant infrastructure. A complex attack involving exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, widely attributed to Israel, appeared to show a remarkable degree of penetration of the secretive militant group.
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