Lebanese from devastated Naqoura return home, only to find ruins
Residents returned Thursday to the town of Naqoura near the Lebanon-Israel border, which hosts the headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping force, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area.
Long lines of cars, some waving Hezbollah flags, inched along the coastal road. The Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers had reopened roads, cleared mines and removed unexploded ordnance from residential neighborhoods.
Residents of the southern town were among over 1.2 million Lebanese displaced during the Israel-Hezbollah war.
Returning residents found their homes and businesses along the main road completely destroyed, some looted. Water and electricity networks lay in ruins. Mosques, health centers and the municipality building were damaged.
Rabab Yazbeck, surveyed the collapsed remains of her home. “Thank God — the most important thing is that we’re back to our land.”
The Israeli military was still deployed in parts of Lebanon's south, days ahead of a January 26 deadline to fully implement the terms of the truce.
The deal gave the parties 60 days to withdraw -- Israel back across the border, and Hezbollah farther north -- as the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers redeployed to the south.
The Lebanese military had asked residents of Naqoura not to go back home for their own safety after Israel's army issued similar orders, but in spite of the danger, Mayor Abbas Awada returned to inspect the destruction.
"Naqoura has become a disaster zone of a town... the bare necessities of life are absent here," he said in front of the damaged town hall, adding he was worried a lack of funds after years of economic crisis would hamper reconstruction.
"We need at least three years to rebuild," he continued, as a small bulldozer worked to remove rubble near the municipal offices.
Lebanese soldiers deployed in coastal Naqoura after Israeli troops pulled out of the country's southwest on January 6, though they remain in the southeast.
The Israelis' withdrawal from Naqoura left behind a sea of wreckage.
Opposite the town hall, an old tree has been uprooted. Empty, damaged houses line streets filled with rubble.
Most of the widespread destruction occurred after the truce took hold, Awada said.
"The Israeli army entered the town after the ceasefire" and "destroyed the houses", he said.
"Before the ceasefire, 35 percent of the town was destroyed, but after the truce, 90 percent of it" was demolished, he added, mostly with controlled explosions and bulldozers.
- Smell of death -
Under the November 27 ceasefire deal, which ended more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese army has 60 days to deploy alongside UNIFIL peacekeepers in south Lebanon as Israel withdraws.
At the same time, Hezbollah is required to pull its forces north of the Litani River, around 30 kilometers from the border, and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure it has in the south.
Both sides have accused each other of violations since the truce began.
Around the nearby UNIFIL headquarters, houses are still intact, but almost everywhere else in Naqoura lies destruction.
Facades are shorn from bombed-out houses, while others are reduced to crumpled heaps, abandoned by residents who had fled for their lives, leaving behind furniture, clothes and books.
AFP saw a completely destroyed school, banana plantations that had withered away and unharvested oranges on trees, their blossoming flowers barely covering the smell of rotting bodies.
On Tuesday, the civil defense agency said it had recovered two bodies from the rubble in Naqoura.
Lebanese soldiers who patrolled the town found an unexploded rocket between two buildings, AFP saw.
In October 2023, Hezbollah began firing across the border into Israel in support of its ally Hamas, a day after the Palestinian group launched its attack on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
An Israeli army spokesperson told AFP that its forces were committed to the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon.
They said the army was working "to remove threats to the State of Israel and its citizens, in full accordance with international law".
- 'We want the wars to end' -
On the coastal road to Naqoura UNIFIL and the Lebanese army have set up checkpoints.
Hezbollah's yellow flags fluttered in the wind, but no fighters could be seen.
Twenty kilometers to the north, in Tyre, Fatima Yazbeck waits impatiently in a reception center for the displaced for her chance to return home.
She fled Naqoura 15 months ago, and since then, "I haven't been back", she said, recounting her sadness at learning her house had been destroyed.
Ali Mehdi, a volunteer at the reception center, said his home was destroyed as well.
"My house was only damaged at first," he said. "But after the truce, the Israelis entered Naqoura and destroyed the houses, the orchards and the roads."
In the next room, Mustafa Al-Sayed has been waiting with his large family for more than a year to return to his southern village of Beit Leef.
He had been forced to leave once before, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
"Do we have to take our families and flee every 20 years?" he asked. "We want a definitive solution, we want the wars to end."
Source: Agence France Presse, Associated Press
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