With Joy and Tears, Lebanese Return Home: ‘Look at All the Destruction’

As day broke on the newly established cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel on Wednesday, Hussein Nassour returned to his Beirut neighborhood to inspect the ruins of his former life.

Israeli airstrikes had blown out the doors and windows of his apartment, ruining his furniture. His family’s market was destroyed, along with the nearby buildings where his customers used to live.

He failed to see how the war had done anyone any good.

“We did not win. We lost,” he said. “No one gained anything from any of this.”

Across Lebanon, people greeted the cease-fire that ended the country’s deadliest war in three decades with profound relief, hoping that both sides would stick to it and allow some sense of normalcy to return.

For many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who had fled Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion, it provided a chance to return home and take stock of what they had lost.