From their hilltop village in southern Lebanon, gravediggers watched black smoke curl up from the opposing ridgeline. Just a mile away, Israeli forces were blowing up buildings on Lebanese land, under a newly planted Israeli flag.
Days into Lebanon’s fragile cease-fire, its collapse already seemed inevitable. Israeli forces were entrenching their positions in the occupied south while Hezbollah members prepared for the next round of fighting in areas still under their control. In the cemetery in their village of Majdal Zoun, the men were digging 20 graves — nine for Hezbollah fighters already killed, the rest for those expected to die in the battles ahead.
“Just listen to the sky above us,” said one of the men, Muhammad Ali, 50, as the thrum of an Israeli drone buzzed overhead. “This war is not over.”
When the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel was struck on April 16, an uneasy calm settled over southern Lebanon, a region that has been battered in the latest war.
Thousands of people displaced from the south flooded the highways to return home. But unlike the last wars between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and 2024, this was no jubilant homecoming or celebration of a self-proclaimed victory for Hezbollah. The pause offered people only a moment to take stock of the destruction and search for summer clothes they had left behind.
With the booms of Israeli demolitions echoing across the hillsides, the highway was soon again filled with cars — this time driving north.
Now, the initial pause in fighting has given way to a simmering conflict in southern Lebanon, leaving the country at the risk of all-out war once more.
My colleagues and I traveled across southern Lebanon over the first 10 days of the truce, including to the northern edge of the so-called “yellow line,” a new Israeli-declared boundary separating the Lebanese territory now under Israeli occupation from the rest of the country. We spoke to rescue workers, municipal workers, residents who returned and the few who had remained behind during the war that broke out after Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, fired at Israel in solidarity with Tehran.
This was Hezbollah’s second major war with Israel in two years, and among Lebanese returning south, there was some disenchantment with the group’s leadership. A consensus appeared to be emerging among the Shiite Muslims who make up Hezbollah’s support base that they need a new political vanguard in Lebanon, a country with a fractious political and social mix of sects..
But their frustration stopped far short of any abandonment of Hezbollah. With Israel declaring plans to occupy the south and Lebanese government forces making no move to counter Israeli troops, people saw Hezbollah fighters as their only hope of keeping their homes and land.
“What is this life?” Zeinab Baz, 53, cried as she stumbled across a jumble of wires and twisted sheet metal, all that remained of her home. “Everything beautiful is gone.”
The Homecoming
The homecoming after weeks of war had become an unwelcome ritual for those returning south. Most had been displaced before, when hostilities with Israel last escalated in 2024, then returned as that conflict ended and rebuilt their damaged homes.
When Hezbollah fired on Israel in March, many among its support base questioned whether the latest outbreak of war was worth the cost. And in the south, those costs came into plain view.
Scattered across the orange orchards and olive groves were villages that had been completely pulverized. Entire floors of buildings, their walls blown out, had keeled over onto their sides next to waist-deep mounds of cinder blocks and dangling wires. Outside one strip of shuttered stores, two abandoned brown horses stood awkwardly in the parking lot.
At a cemetery in the coastal city of Tyre, one woman, Suheila, 54, searched for the temporary grave of her son, Hussein, a Hezbollah fighter who was killed in the war. When she found it — marked by a photo of him propped up against a cinder block — she collapsed on her knees and began slapping the hardened earth with both hands. For her, there was no illusion that the cease-fire was a victory for Lebanese Shiites, secured by Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.
“What is this victory?” cried Suheila, who provided only her first name, citing security reasons. “What is this victory, Hussein?”
A few miles away in Qasmiyeh, Farida Ali Awila glowered as she sat on the curb of a gas station and waited to check on her home in the Shiite village of Touline.
Beside her, a Hezbollah member handed out fliers to cars passing by showing Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, that drivers could triumphantly display on their windshields.
Ms. Awila watched silently for a few minutes. Then her anger boiled over.
“We lost many men, they’re dying for what? For who? Iran?” she yelled. “Iran is doing deals behind our back and our men are dying for them?”
The posters were part of the group’s effort to give credit for the truce to Iran. But they were also among the most explicit acknowledgments of the group’s fealty to Tehran, which has wielded an even heavier hand with Hezbollah’s operations since its former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed by Israel in 2024.
His successor, Naim Qassem, does not inspire the same fervent loyalty among Lebanese Shiites as Mr. Nasrallah once did. The other main Shiite political party, the Amal Movement, commands less popular support and influence. Many Shiites longed for a strong political leader to advocate for them amid a war that few think will be won solely on the battlefield.
Under Mr. Nasrallah, “it was as if we were sleeping, but we knew there was someone guarding us,” said Khadija Ramez Ghozyel, 60, in Qlaileh, a village near the country’s Mediterranean coastline.
Now the Hezbollah fighters, she said, “are the only ones we have” to protect Shiites in the south.
Hezbollah’s Heartland
That sentiment was widespread across the southern hinterland, which is largely Shiite Muslim and delivers Hezbollah much of its support. Signs of the group’s reach abound. Billboards of slain fighters line the roads, with the men’s uniformed portraits placed in the center of the bright-yellow Hezbollah flags. After the truce went into effect, hundreds gathered each day in villages to mourn Hezbollah fighters killed in battle.
Ambulances arrived in towns with the bodies of dead fighters and civilians, which had been kept in morgues or temporary cemeteries. As emergency workers opened their back doors, giving mourners a final glimpse of their loved ones, women lunged into the vehicles and threw themselves on the bodies.
“They were heroes, they were protecting us,” said Rehab Tamara, 43, in Hallousiyeh, five miles inland, where she and hundreds of other residents gathered on Saturday for the funeral of three Hezbollah fighters.
For years, Hezbollah cast itself as the protector of Lebanon’s Shiite community, providing social services in peacetime and advancing the political and economic gains of one of the country’s most marginalized groups. But as the stakes of the latest war ratcheted up, Shiite reliance on Hezbollah for physical protection has come to the forefront.
Israeli forces have entrenched themselves in a newly occupied belt running six miles across southern Lebanon. Lebanese government forces withdrew from much of the south after the war broke out, and while the government has pursued a political resolution, it has little leverage over Israel.
“We are with the government but we want the government to protect us, and not just let Israel do anything it wants,” said Fatima Mowamis, 70, standing near her home in Hallousiyeh.
Israel has continued to launch strikes on what it describes as Hezbollah targets, citing the terms of the truce that allow Israel to act in self-defense. Hezbollah has responded in turn, sporadically launching rockets toward Israel and at Israeli forces on Lebanese territory, while reiterating that it will not lay down its weapons.
“I don’t feel safe at all,” said Hanan Hamze, 46, at she stood on a hillside in Majdal Zoun.
A week after the gravediggers had prepared the cemetery, hundreds in the village flocked to the hilltop to lay their loved ones to rest. Many looked in disbelief at the Israeli flag on the opposite ridgeline.
“It feels like the war will start up again,” Ms. Hamze said, “and when it does, it will be even worse than before.”
Hwaida Saad and Sarah Chaayto contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/world/middleeast/lebanon-hezbollah-ceasefire-israel.html
