Thousands of people displaced by more than six weeks of fighting in Lebanon began streaming home on Friday, defying warnings from officials concerned the 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah was still too fragile.
Many began driving in the early hours of Friday morning following the midnight truce — a now-familiar ritual for generations of Lebanese displaced by consecutive wars and Israeli occupation — desperate to see if their homes still stood.
Those who arrived were wading through the piles of rubble across cities, towns and villages in the Bekaa Valley and swaths of southern Lebanon, as well as in the capital’s southern suburbs — areas battered by Israeli air strikes in the war that spiralled out of the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran.
“The scale of the devastation is enormous, it breaks my heart,” said Ali, a 46-year-old butcher who went back to his southern Beirut neighbourhood of Dahiyeh — an area long dominated by Hizbollah that has taken the brunt of the bombardment in the capital — to inspect the damage.
The latest war between Israel and Hizbollah, Tehran’s most important proxy, erupted after the Lebanese militant group began firing across the Israel-Lebanon border shortly after the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran.
Israeli forces soon invaded southern Lebanon, vowing to control territory extending all the way to the Litani River, which meets the Mediterranean some 30km (20 miles) north of Israel’s border, and ordered residents out of the area.
More than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon in the fighting, including hundreds of women, children, the elderly and medical workers, according to the country’s health ministry. Hizbollah has killed 13 Israeli soldiers and two civilians in northern Israel, Israeli authorities say.
Ali lost his home in the last war between Israel and Hizbollah in 2024. “Thank God this time my home and my business were only lightly damaged,” he said, of the flat he has rented for the past year. “I cannot say the same for most people I know.”
Israel agreed to halt the war in Lebanon after pressure from Donald Trump, in a move that could bolster diplomatic efforts to secure a deal to end the war with Iran.
The US president announced the 10-day ceasefire on Thursday, which came into effect at midnight local time, and said he would invite Israeli and Lebanese leaders to the White House for what would be the first-ever talks between heads of the two countries, enemy states that do not have formal diplomatic relations.
But thousands of Israeli troops remain in southern Lebanon and there are no signs they are about to withdraw.
Trump’s push for a ceasefire came as mediators stepped up efforts to organise a second round of talks between Iran and the US. Trump said these talks could take place at the weekend.
The conflict in Lebanon has been a key sticking point between the warring parties. Iran and Pakistan, the main mediator, have insisted that Lebanon was included in the truce, but the US and Israel said it was not.
Despite all parties agreeing to halt fire, there were clear points of difference that quickly emerged. The text of the deal, agreed to by Lebanon and Israel and released by the US State Department, said Israel would retain leeway to continue attacking Hizbollah in Lebanon “in self-defense” — terms not extended to the Lebanese state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also insisted Israeli forces would remain in what he called a “security zone” stretching 10km into Lebanese territory for the duration of the truce. Israeli troops have destroyed dozens of villages and demolished countless homes in the area.
Netanyahu added that Israel would demand Hizbollah’s disarmament as part of future talks with Lebanon, and Trump said Lebanon had agreed to “take care of Hizbollah”.
But upcoming talks will put Lebanon’s government in a bind. While Beirut has over the past year pushed to peacefully disarm Hizbollah, it has no sway over the group, which has rejected the calls. The government has also resisted international pressure to use force to disarm the militants, a move that would risk civil strife.
Hizbollah said that “any ceasefire must be comprehensive across all Lebanese territory and must not allow the Israeli enemy any freedom of movement”, adding that the Lebanese people had a “right to resist” otherwise.
On Friday morning, the group reaffirmed that its fighters’ “hands will remain on the trigger”, in a statement in which it said it has conducted more than 2,000 operations against Israel since March 2.
Israeli defence minister Israel Katz said on Friday that any residents returning south of the Litani River would be “required to evacuate” once more if the ceasefire collapses.
Lebanon’s army reported early violations of the ceasefire by Israel that began in the first hour after the truce came into effect, with intermittent shelling reported in several southern towns close to Israeli positions.
That left many Lebanese doubtful about an imminent full-scale return.
Despite this, traffic was at a standstill on the main coastal highway leading south by midday on Friday.
It underscored the urgency for the more than 1.2mn Lebanese displaced by the conflict. The bulk of them were members of the Shia Muslim community, from which Hizbollah draws its support and which also bore the brunt of the 2024 war, which raised social tensions in Lebanon.
Their journey was complicated by the systematic destruction by Israel of all 10 main bridges that connect northern to southern Lebanon: hours before the truce was announced on Thursday, Israel shattered the last remaining bridge in powerful air strikes.
Cars were crawling one by one across a makeshift crossing on Friday — a giant sand berm that stretches over the shallow water, hastily erected overnight. An army engineering unit was working to bolster it, as scores of cars waited their turn to cross.
“Even if we couldn’t drive, I would have swum back home,” said Fatme Nazar, a resident of the heavily damaged city of Nabatiyeh, who was stuck in hours of traffic with her family on her way back.
Nazar was not sure in what condition she would find her home. A series of air strikes had battered her neighbourhood recently and she did not know if the building still stood. “It doesn’t matter. We will stay and rebuild,” she said.
A Hizbollah supporter, she said she was proud of the group, claiming that its weapons had forced Israel into a ceasefire. “We will push them off our land soon.”
Others who had gone to inspect their homes were more reluctant to stay. Much of the south had no power and water and unexploded ordnance remained littered across residential areas. At least one person was killed and another wounded by unexploded munitions upon returning home to southern Lebanon on Friday.
In the moments before the ceasefire took hold, Israel battered the southern coastal city of Tyre, destroying several residential buildings on the waterfront corniche and killing at least three people. Efforts were under way to recover the remaining dead. Hizbollah also fired several concluding barrages of rockets at northern Israel, seriously injuring two people.
“I hope those are the last civilians to die,” Ali, the butcher, said of the deaths in Tyre, adding that he thought the truce would not lead to lasting peace with Israel. “Here, in Lebanon, there is always another war.”
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv
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