War’s ebb in Lebanon leaves devastation and an uncertain future

As quickly as they had 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.

A furious Israeli military offensive against the militant group Hezbollah over the last year dealt Lebanon death and destruction, and after a cease-fire early Wednesday, left something else: a vacuum of authority, with the country’s future hanging on how it would be filled, officials and analysts said.

Stepping into the void could be Hezbollah, bloodied but - according to some experts - unbowed; the Lebanese military, 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 interests on Lebanon in its hour of need.

A competition for influence could involve the process of rebuilding the country, the election of a president and the provision of security in Lebanon, especially in the south, at a time when many in the country are preoccupied with recovering from the war.

“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.

Tuesday’s cease-fire agreement, brokered by the United States, was an attempt both to end the war and to upend the status quo in Lebanon, including by forcing Hezbollah’s fighters away from the Israeli border. It calls for Israeli troops that invaded Lebanon in October to withdraw over a 60-day period and for Lebanese military forces, along with U.N. peacekeepers, to assume authority in the south as Hezbollah fighters withdraw.

Another major source of friction between Lebanon and Israel - the permanent delineation of their border - is briefly addressed by the agreement but put off for resolution at some later date.

[What to know about the ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah]

The Lebanese military’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 military - 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 military would be asked to confront Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed force that is supported by millions of people in Lebanon. And no one expected it would challenge Israel, a nuclear power and far superior conventional force.

If peace prevailed, it would only be because Israel and Hezbollah, for the moment, had decided to take a break from war.

Hezbollah, which held sway in many parts of southern Lebanon, has been “set back decades,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday. Its leadership 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. In agreeing to a cease-fire, the group abandoned its long-held position that it would halt fire only after Israel ended its military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

“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. Analyzing efforts to craft the narrative of the war, she asked whether Hezbollah is “more powerful that it withstood this brutal onslaught,” adding that the group 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 will 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 will be less convincing than it had been in the past, he said, in part because of the messenger.

Nasrallah, a charismatic figure, had previously delivered such messages. But now it has fallen to his successor, Naim Qassem - described by Hage Ali as a “lackluster leader” - to convince Hezbollah’s supporters and rivals alike that the war was worth the cost.

It is possible that Lebanon’s political establishment, which had supported Hezbollah during the war, will “rethink its position, given how weakened” the organization is, Hage Ali said. At the same time, Lebanon’s future is becoming much more dependent on the regional context - including the role of Saudi Arabia and other regional states - and less so on local politics.

“The resumption of the war is a real threat and will impact how each side calibrates its next move.”

As the cease-fire took effect early Wednesday, Lebanon was still tallying the cost of more than a year of conflict. More than 3,700 people were killed, including hundreds of children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Upward of 1 million people have been displaced.

Neighborhoods crumbled under thousands of air raids, and along the border, villages were all but erased by Israeli explosives.

Daunting tests loom for Lebanon. The government - a caretaker entity that has functioned without an elected president for more than two years and is already destitute because of a long financial crisis - faces losses from the war that are hard to grasp: physical damage and economic costs amounting to some $8.5 billion, according to the World Bank, and a contraction of gross domestic product of about 6.5%.

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 conflict. Continued instability meant “we cannot expect investment, and tourism, to continue as before,” Al Amine said. On top of this, unexploded bombs are waiting, like traps, for children and others in abandoned parts of Lebanon.

“We cannot leave people alone,” she said, in another warning about the vacuum.

Short-term challenges amid the cease-fire were swiftly apparent Wednesday, amid reports that returning civilians were fired upon in towns Israeli troops had not yet retreated from, including journalists who were wounded by Israeli fire in the town of Khiam. But displaced people were undeterred, with thousands clogging the roads from Beirut on Wednesday as they headed south.

Jawad Choueib, 31, said his family was planning to return to their village near Nabatieh in the next day or two. His mother was elated. “But if we go back to the village, there are going to be at least 15 people you won’t find,” he said. “This one who used to say hi to you; this one you know from university.”

He expects Lebanon to revert to the way it was before the war. He wants to leave the country. “It won’t take long for another war,” Choueib said. “Maybe in a few years.”

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Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut contributed to this report.