Lebanon seeks to rebuild amid ruins of conflict and political deadlock

Hussein Awad made the three-hour drive south from Beirut to El Jiam on a day when his neighbors were returning home for the first time in over a year. The Lebanese army was moving into positions as Israeli forces pulled back, and people were beginning to see what remained of their lives. What remained of Awad's house was mostly a facade. An Israeli missile had torn through the roof where, just over a year ago, he had eaten dinner with his wife and children. Now there was only a gaping hole. "I am against war," the 45-year-old said, standing in the wreckage. "But we will not accept the Israelis keeping our homes. People are angry, and the Lebanese army has not made them leave."

El Jiam sits in the rubble of what was once a Hezbollah stronghold, close enough to the border that Israeli jets had pounded it relentlessly for thirteen months of war and then, inexplicably, during two months of ceasefire as well. Women in black dresses, their eyes raw from sleeplessness, knelt to pray over posters bearing the faces of husbands and sons, marking the spots where they had fallen. Some were burying a second child pulled from the debris. Israel claimed to have killed more than three thousand fighters in Lebanon. The residents of El Jiam said more than a hundred had died there as martyrs.

Hezbollah had begun as a resistance movement against an Israeli invasion in 1982. It had claimed victory when Israeli troops withdrew in 2000 and again in 2006. This war was the most destructive yet. Yellow flags and images of the dead now hung over mountains of concrete and twisted steel—a grim landscape that presented a difficult reckoning for the party. It had suffered a military defeat. And most Lebanese, exhausted and aware that Israel was better armed and backed by the Trump administration, wanted no part of another war.

On November 27th, pressure from Paris and Washington had forced a ceasefire agreement between Hezbollah and Israel. Now those same powers were pushing for a new Lebanese government that could implement UN Resolution 1701—which called for Hezbollah to disarm and for ten thousand Lebanese soldiers to deploy south of the Litani River, eventually establishing permanent borders with Israel. An interim government official in Beirut, speaking on condition of anonymity, laid out the stakes: "Lebanon has a unique opportunity to leave behind decades of war with Israel because Hezbollah's military capacity has been drastically reduced in the country and the region." But he added a crucial caveat: "Israel's refusal to withdraw from all occupied territory keeps alive the reason Hezbollah exists—the fight against Israeli occupation—while undermining the Lebanese army's credibility at the negotiating table."

Israel had postponed its withdrawal from a dozen border towns until February 18th, claiming Hezbollah still maintained weapons caches in the south. Hezbollah countered that Israeli forces had violated the ceasefire hundreds of times. On January 26th, the day Israel was supposed to pull back, the violence erupted again. Twenty-four Lebanese died—a soldier, a paramedic, and civilians—with more than one hundred thirty wounded in towns still under Israeli control. Tanks from the Lebanese army now sat between Israeli troops and residents desperate to return home. Bullets whistled across the border. Ambulance sirens wailed. The political class watched in fear that the war would restart, this time sparked by clashes between civilians and Israeli forces, dragging the Lebanese military into the fray.

The Lebanese armed forces held a unique place in the fractured country. They were respected, seen as a symbol of national unity in a nation divided by religion. Their commander, Joseph Aoun, had just been elected president in January, ending a two-year vacancy. With Hezbollah weakened and a new military-backed leader in place, delegations from Europe, the Gulf states, and the United States had begun flowing through Beirut airport, pressing for a rapid government formation and offering financial support for reconstruction and the army. But the country's major political factions had been locked in negotiations for weeks, constrained by Lebanon's byzantine system of dividing power along religious lines. The two Shiite parties, Amal and Hezbollah, were demanding the Finance Ministry—the position that controls state budgets and can block or approve spending. Citizens followed the news with alternating hope and chronic disappointment in a political elite they blamed for corruption and the financial collapse of 2019.

Maha Yahia, director of the Carnegie analysis center in Beirut, was blunt: "War is no longer an option for Hezbollah. It has been militarily weakened." The Shiite community had borne the heaviest cost. Israeli jets had bombed indiscriminately in Shiite areas while showing surgical precision in Christian and Sunni neighborhoods. The Shiite population made up the bulk of the 1.2 million displaced and the more than four thousand dead and seventeen thousand wounded. Hezbollah wanted a seat in the new government to maintain its grip on Shiite representation alongside Amal, and to access state resources and funds for reconstruction before parliamentary elections. Its charitable associations were the only organizations providing compensation to those whose homes had been destroyed.

In Dahiye, the crowded Shiite neighborhood south of Beirut where Hezbollah's headquarters once stood before an Israeli airstrike killed leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, a fighter sat drinking tea amid the sound of cranes removing rubble from the streets. "We have taken a very hard blow," he said. "But not being visible now does not mean we will disappear." He spoke of the sabotage of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had exploded in September after Israeli intelligence intercepted them, leaving three of his friends blind among three thousand wounded. He spoke of the void left by Nasrallah's death, the enormous crater a few blocks away, and his theory that a traitor in the building's ventilation system had given away the location. Nasrallah had led the movement for more than three decades, shaping its domestic politics in Lebanon and directing its armed expansion across Syria, Yemen, and Iraq with Iranian funding. An anonymous former Lebanese deputy warned that Nasrallah's assassination was bad news for Lebanon precisely because he had been more than just an Iranian soldier—he had been a political advisor with deep influence over decisions in the country and the region. The new leadership, the deputy predicted, would be increasingly dependent on Tehran.

Hezbollah's affiliated charities functioned as a state within the state, filling the void left by absent government services in the south. Even Shiites who disagreed with the party turned to it for lack of alternatives. In the southern town of Nabatiye, people lined up outside an office set up in the gap between a collapsed house and a clothing store. A man with a Nasrallah pin on his lapel sat at a plastic table, explaining the compensation: three hundred dollars per square meter for total loss, plus eight thousand dollars in the first year for furniture and four thousand for rent. Unlike 2006, the money came as checks, not briefcases of cash. With no foreign investment and all savings lost in the 2019 financial collapse, remittances from the Lebanese diaspora kept ordinary people afloat. In Beirut, there were now more currency exchange offices than shawarma stands.