Strife Amid the Ruins
Hezbollah, for now, lays down its weapons and tries to placate the neighbors
BEIRUT-They waited a few hours to see if the cease-fire would hold. When it did, thousands of refugees from the fighting in south Lebanon came pouring down the bombed-out coastal highway looking for their homes. Many found rubble instead. Thirty-four days of airstrikes, artillery barrages, and brutal house-to-house fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli military left much of the south in ruins. In rural farming villages, livestock lay dead and rotting in streets cratered by precision-guided bombs. Many homes and shops are now mounds of broken concrete and twisted rebar.
The residents of south Lebanon-mostly poor Shiite Muslims-defied the Israeli military's orders not to drive south of the strategic Litani River to return to their homes. They arrived to greetings from polite young men with hand-held radios, neatly trimmed beards, and clipboards inquiring about what they needed to survive during the rebuilding. Hezbollah's fighters relaxed only a few minutes to congratulate each other on what they call "the Divine Victory" and to use cellphones to check on family and comrades before completely switching gears to run a massive humanitarian operation designed to assist their constituency and head off the inevitable complaints that they had brought this destruction down upon their own people.
Less than 12 hours after the cease-fire silenced the guns, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah took to the airwaves both as the most successful Arab military hero of the modern era and as an old-style political ward boss bearing pork-barrel projects. He promised to pay the rent of all the displaced and offered to rebuild and furnish any destroyed homes-and, by the next day, he had deployed more than 1,000 civil engineers and experts around the country to start cataloging the damage.
Hezbollah has long provided social services, including operating schools and hospitals, for Lebanon's poor Shiites. The reconstruction effort had been planned from the onset of fighting, says one Hezbollah official working in Beirut. Unwilling to speak for attribution, he was coordinating the massive effort to care for the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons in Beirut alone and preparing for the aftermath even before the cease-fire took hold. "Many of these people are mad they lost their homes," he acknowledges. "We have been told by the highest authorities in the organization: 'People are going to be mad at us; do whatever it takes to help them.'" So we take their abuse and complaints and do whatever we can to assist them."
"Celebration." These concerns were justified. Hezbollah might be the most popular movement among Lebanon's Shiite Muslim community, but people also know that it was Nasrallah's "Party of God" that started the war by crossing the border into Israel, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing three others. For every Hezbollah commander like Hussein Rumati-who claimed, "It is a celebration; even with the destruction of all of the villages in the south, it was worth it"-there is someone returning to a destroyed home or business.
"Damn Hezbollah, damn Nasrallah," yelled one older Shiite woman in a head scarf as she surveyed the destruction of her family's grocery store in Saddiqine, just 3 miles from the Israeli border. Her neighbors and family quickly quieted her by pointing out the presence of a western journalist, but none disagreed. In the tiny hamlet, a few hundred yards from the remains of her store, Hezbollah volunteers were operating heavy machinery to locate bodies trapped under a collapsed house. A Hezbollah escort barred a journalist from conducting interviews in English, apparently concerned people might express criticism of Hezbollah if he couldn't understand the conversation.
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