Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire holds as Lebanese residents return to homes

A ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah appeared to be holding Wednesday, as residents in cars heaped with belongings streamed back toward southern Lebanon despite warnings from the Israeli and Lebanese military that they stay away from certain areas.

If it holds, 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. It could give some reprieve to the 1.2 million Lebanese displaced by the fighting and the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along the border with Lebanon.

The US- 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 UN 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 strike Hezbollah should it violate the terms of the deal.

The deal would not address the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, where Israel is still fighting Hamas militants in response to the group's cross-border raid into southern Israel in Oct 2023. But President Joe Biden on Tuesday said his administration would make another push in the coming days to try to renew efforts for a deal there.

Lebanese are streaming south despite warnings  Hours before the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect, Israel launched broad strikes that shook the Lebanese capital Beirut and a volley of rockets from Hezbollah set off air raid sirens across a large swath of northern Israel.

But after the ceasefire took effect early Wednesday, quiet appeared to take hold, prompting waves of Lebanese to head home.

Israel's Arabic military spokesperson Avichay Adraee warned displaced Lebanese not to return to their villages in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese military asked displaced returning to southern Lebanon to avoid frontline villages and towns near the border where Israeli troops are still present until they withdraw.

But some videos circulating on social media show displaced Lebanese defying these calls and returning to villages in the south near the coastal city of Tyre. Israeli troops were still present in parts of southern Lebanon after Israel launched a ground invasion in October.

On the highway linking Beirut with south Lebanon, 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.

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 to launch an 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.

This is a moment of victory, pride and honor for us, the Shia sect, and for all of Lebanon, said Hussein Sweidan, a resident returning to Tyre in southern Lebanon, who said he saw the ceasefire as a victory for Hezbollah.

Sporadic celebratory gunfire was heard at a main roundabout in the city, as people returning honked the horns of cars and residents cheered.

Some Israelis are concerned the deal doesn't go far enough  In Israel, the mood was far more subdued, with displaced Israelis concerned that the deal did not go far enough to rein in Hezbollah 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 Kyriat 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.

The kinds of massive, long-range rocket barrages that many Israelis had feared before the war never fully materialised, either because they were destroyed by Israeli strikes or Hezbollah held them in reserve. Hezbollah also failed to launch any ground attacks across the border, despite evidence presented by the Israeli military that it had invested heavily in preparing for such operations.