Lebanese Surge Back to South
Residents Find Towns Devastated

By Edward Cody and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 15, 2006

SRIFA, Lebanon, Aug. 14 -- Hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese families streamed homeward toward their devastated villages as soon as the shooting stopped Monday, navigating around destroyed bridges, fording the Litani River and creating monster traffic jams on bomb-pocked roads leading south along the Mediterranean.

After 33 days of warfare between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, the trip home to southern Lebanon confronted many with a trail of destruction, village after village wrecked by Israeli warplanes hunting the Hezbollah fighters who had fired rockets into Israel until the last minute before a U.N. cease-fire took hold at 8 a.m.

In the northern towns and villages of Israel, residents emerged from bomb shelters and back into streets and shops, despite military warnings that they should "remain in shelters and protected spaces and await further instructions."

"It feels great to have a breather now, after suffocating for over a month in a shelter," said Ami Suissa, 40, a resident of the border town of Kiryat Shemona, where officials estimate 1,000 rockets landed during the month of war. "But I have the feeling it's not going to last long. It's only a matter of time -- we will be attacked again." Scars of the rocket attacks were visible throughout Kiryat Shemona. Officials said all but a few thousand of the town's 24,000 residents had left during the rain of rockets.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, under growing criticism for political and military setbacks in the war, pledged to organize extensive investigations into intelligence, military and home-front preparedness. Olmert told a special session of the Israeli parliament that there were "failings and shortcomings." He added, "We will need to examine ourselves in all aspects, in all areas."

In Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, in a televised speech, declared, "On this day, we find ourselves looking at a historic and strategic victory for Lebanon, the resistance and the nation, the entire nation." Celebratory gunfire broke out and fireworks rose into the sky over Beirut, where Hezbollah staged a noisy victory parade through the center of the city.

The displaced people of southern Lebanon returned despite an Israeli warning that vehicles would be shot at. Bearded men and women with scarves covering their hair in conservative Muslim fashion sweated while squeezed into crowded cars and buses, many flying yellow and green Hezbollah flags. The bumper-to-bumper mass movement lasted all day and into the night -- 750,000 Lebanese, mostly Shiite Muslims from the south, had fled the bombing.

Mattresses were stacked on cars with clothes and children piled high in the back seats. Drivers fumed and shouted as road after road was blocked because of bomb craters and collapsed bridges. Interminable lines of cars snaked up hillsides along dusty back roads and down again toward the Litani River, where volunteers up to their knees in water helped push cars across.

Residents returned as well to the southern suburbs of Beirut, Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods where Israeli warplanes bombed repeatedly during the conflict, and families fled to shelters in safer areas. Women pulled their scarves over their faces to protect themselves from the dust and stood stunned in front of the destroyed apartment buildings where they had once lived with their families.

Ali Hassan al-Khalil, a Shiite Muslim member of parliament, visited the southern suburbs along with the returning residents. "This savagery has changed the landmarks of this area," he said. "The only thing that has not changed is the will of the people to return in spite of all that has happened."

In Srifa, a hilltop town of 3,000 inhabitants three miles south of the Litani, more than a third of the buildings were rubble. Front-end loaders probed among the concrete chunks for the bodies of a dozen people still missing. Men returned to look at the debris scattered where their homes once stood. There were no women or children to be seen.

"What's here, that the Israelis should destroy it?" asked Haj Aly Dakroub, a building contractor whose home was flattened and whose pickup truck was turned into a tight bundle of tortured metal. "We don't deny that the resistance is here," he added, using the common description in Lebanon for Hezbollah's militia. "It was here, and it will be here. But in this house there were only civilians, women and children. Why did they bomb here?"

On a neighboring house, the reason was evident: An abandoned casing of a rocket dangled from a third-story window.

Squads of Hezbollah fighters, with the air of victorious warriors, moved easily around Srifa; many were in their home town. Their leaders, carrying walkie-talkies, took charge of rescue and cleanup operations.

"Greetings to the heroes," shouted the village mukhtar , or traditional leader, Hussein Kamel al-Din, when he saw a squad of Hezbollah militiamen approach, one with a fresh bandage over a wound on his left arm.

The Hezbollah fighters were assisted by local civil defense teams and Lebanese soldiers from an army position at the edge of town -- near the welcome sign with giant images of Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

Despite the devastation, which included several neighborhoods reduced to moonscapes, the men who returned to Srifa talked of victory. Israeli tanks had tried to approach only two days ago from Al Ghandouriyeh, across a flat valley about two miles to the southeast, they said, but were repulsed by Hezbollah fighters firing missiles.

Since then, they declared, the Israelis have left Al Ghandouriyeh, and so the firing has stopped. No sounds of war were heard during the afternoon, although Israeli drones buzzed overhead.

"The Israelis were able to defeat all the Arab countries in six days during the 1967 Middle East war," said Dakroub, 42. "But here, in more than a month, they could not defeat the resistance. The resistance would spring up out of the ground and shoot back. And they couldn't get rid of them."

In his broadcast, Nasrallah told the families returning to their homes and villages that they would get immediate financial assistance to rebuild. "You will not have to stay in line or wait," he said. "Our people will just show up as of tomorrow."

Seeking to counter the impression in Lebanon of a Hezbollah victory, Israeli planes dropped leaflets across Beirut just before the cease-fire went into effect. One showed Nasrallah building a sand castle and quoted the words from a favorite Arab song by the singer Majida al-Roumi: "He builds for me a castle of illusions that I only inhabit for moments, and I return to my table empty-handed . . . except for words."

A second leaflet read: "Hezbollah has brought upon you many accomplishments: Ruin, destruction, displacement and death. Are you capable of paying this price once again? Be Aware: The Israel Defense Forces will return and utilize the necessary force against every terrorist act launched from Lebanon which affects the state of Israel."

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, meanwhile, summoned ambassadors of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members to take up the continued sea, air and land blockade by Israeli forces that prevents the arrival of relief supplies and, in particular, desperately needed fuel.

In the cease-fire approved by the Security Council on Friday, Israel agreed to pull out of southern Lebanon in parallel with the arrival of 15,000 Lebanese army troops and a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, contingent increased from 2,000 to about 15,000. The Lebanese military, however, has balked at deploying in the war zone as long as Israeli soldiers and armed Hezbollah militiamen remain face-to-face in the rocky border hills, Lebanese political sources said.

Hezbollah fighters did not fire any rockets into Israel, officials said. But Israeli soldiers fired at suspected Hezbollah fighters in five incidents during the day, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman. In each case, she said, soldiers fired as small groups of armed men neared their positions. She said soldiers reported killing five of the men.

In an attempt to prevent such incidents from escalating into a collapse of the cease-fire, Lebanese, Israeli and U.N. military officers met near the border to begin planning the deployment and a matching Israeli withdrawal, U.N. and Israeli officials reported.

Friction over how to organize the pullout of Hezbollah fighters delayed a Lebanese cabinet meeting on the issue Sunday as Siniora and his ministers sought to work out an agreement among the various government factions, including Hezbollah. Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said in accepting the cease-fire that his militia reserved the right to keep attacking Israeli soldiers as long as they remain on Lebanon's soil.

But there was no sign of that Tuesday on the ground. Instead, Hezbollah activists handed out plastic flags to the flood of Lebanese heading south. "Hezbollah are the victorious ones," the flags said above the militant Shiite Muslim movement's symbol, combining an AK-47 assault rifle and the word "Allah."

The activists also handed out leaflets warning parents not to let their children play with pieces of bombs and rockets scattered around the countryside. Lebanese television newscasts said six people were injured in southern villages by stepping on unexploded munitions.

Moore reported from Jerusalem. Correspondent Nora Boustany in Beirut and special correspondent Tal Zipper in Kiryat Shemona contributed to this report.