Nawaf Salam, Lebanon's new prime minister, is a leading international judge who won support for staying out of the political infighting that has paralysed the crisis-hit country in recent years.

The 71-year-old, who until now was presiding judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, hails from a prominent Beirut political family.

Six weeks into a ceasefire that halted the war between Israel and Hezbollah, many displaced Lebanese whose homes were destroyed in the fighting want to rebuild — but reconstruction and compensation are slow in coming.

Large swathes of southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as Beirut's southern suburbs, lie in ruins, tens of thousands of houses reduced to rubble in Israeli airstrikes. The World Bank estimated in a report in November — before the ceasefire later that month — that losses to Lebanon's infrastructure amount to some $3.4 billion.

Lebanon's new president and former army commander Joseph Aoun has maintained a low profile. Those who know him say he is no-nonsense, kind and averse to affiliating himself with any party or even expressing a political opinion — a rarity for someone in Lebanon's fractured, transactional political system.

Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is now senior managing director of the TRENDS US consulting firm, often met Aoun while overseeing Washington's security cooperation in the Middle East. He called Aoun a "very sweet man, very compassionate, very warm" who avoided political discussions "like the plague."

The weakening of Hezbollah in last year's war with Israel allowed Lebanon's long deadlocked parliament to reach consensus around a president who has the confidence of the international community.

Lebanese Army chief Joseph Aoun, the frontrunner in Thursday's vote for president, is a political neophyte but is expected to benefit from his position as head of one of the country's most respected institutions.

Widely seen as the preferred pick of army backer the United States, as well as regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia, he is perceived as being best placed to maintain a fragile ceasefire and pull the country out of financial collapse.

Lebanese political heavyweights held talks Wednesday a day ahead of a parliamentary session to elect a president, but even with key player Hezbollah weakened by war, there is no guarantee of consensus.

The tiny Mediterranean country, already deep in economic and political crisis, has been without a president for more than two years amid bitter divisions between Hezbollah and its opponents.

A main road in the provincial capital of Quneitra in southern Syria was blocked with mounds of dirt, fallen palm trees and a metal pole that appeared to have once been a traffic light. On the other side of the barriers, an Israeli tank could be seen maneuvering in the middle of the street.

Israeli forces entered the area — which lies in a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in the Golan Heights that was established by a 1974 ceasefire agreement between Syria and Israel — soon after the fall of President Bashar Assad last month in the country's 13-year civil war.

A fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has held up for over a month, even as its terms seem unlikely to be met by the agreed-upon deadline.

The deal struck on Nov. 27 to halt the war required Hezbollah to immediately lay down its arms in southern Lebanon and gave Israel 60 days to withdraw its forces there and hand over control to the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers.

As president, Jimmy Carter brokered the watershed peace agreement that removed Israel's most powerful enemy from the battlefield. But he incurred the Israeli government's wrath decades later when he said its military rule over the Palestinians amounted to apartheid.

The Camp David peace accords, signed by Israel and Egypt in 1978, remain the biggest achievement from decades of mostly failed U.S. peacemaking in the Middle East.

In the towns and villages of southern Syria that Israel has occupied since the overthrow of longtime strongman Bashar al-Assad, soldiers and residents size each other up from a distance.

The main street of the village of Jabata al-Khashab is largely deserted as a foot patrol of Israeli troops passes through it.