Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire appears to hold and Lebanese begin streaming south to their homes

BEIRUT (AP)Despite warnings from the Israeli and Lebanese military to avoid specific areas, residents in automobiles loaded with belongings continued to flow back toward southern Lebanon on Wednesday, suggesting that a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbolla was still in effect.

The ceasefire, if it holds, would end the almost 14-month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which escalated into full-scale warfare in mid-September and threatened to drag Israel and Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, into a wider conflict. Both the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along the border with Lebanon and the 1.2 million Lebanese who were displaced by the conflict might find some respite from it.

Israel ratified the U.S.-France-brokered agreement late Tuesday, which stipulates that Hezbollah must withdraw its armed presence in southern Lebanon and that Israeli troops must return to their side of the border. It also calls for an initial two-month stop to conflict.

An international commission led by the United States would oversee compliance as thousands more Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers would deploy in the south.

Israel claims it has the authority to attack Hezbollah if it breaks the agreement.

Israel is still battling Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip after the group launched a cross-border invasion into southern Israel in October 2023, and the agreement would not address this issue. However, President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that his government would try to continue negotiations for a settlement there in the next few days.

Despite warnings, Lebanese are migrating south.

Israel launched wide-ranging attacks that rocked Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, only hours before the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went into force. Hezbollah’s missile barrage also triggered air raid sirens throughout a sizable portion of northern Israel.

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However, silence seemed to settle in when the ceasefire went into force early on Wednesday, leading waves of Lebanese to return home.

Avichay Adraee, the Arabic military spokesperson for Israel, cautioned the displaced Lebanese from going back to their southern Lebanon villages. When displaced people return to southern Lebanon, the Lebanese military advised them to stay away from border towns and frontline villages where Israeli troops are still stationed until they leave.

However, several social media videos depict displaced Lebanese disregarding these requests and going back to southern areas close to Tyre. After Israel began a ground invasion in October, Israeli troops remained in several areas of southern Lebanon.

Thousands of people fastened mattresses and other possessions to their automobiles and traveled south on the highway that connected Beirut with south Lebanon. At the port city of Sidon’s northern entrance, traffic was backed up.

Residents will return tovast destructionwrought by the Israeli military during its campaign, which flattened villages where the military said it found vast weapons caches and infrastructure it says was meant to launch an Oct. 7-style attack on northern Israel.

According to Lebanese health officials, Israeli fire has killed over 3,760 individuals in Lebanon over the last 13 months, many of them civilians.

Hezbollah emerges from the war battered and bloodied, with the reputation it built by fighting Israel to a stalemate in the 2006 war tarnished. Yet its fighters still managed to put up heavy resistance on the ground, slowing Israel s advance while continuing to fire scores of rockets, missiles and drones across the border each day.

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This is a moment of victory, pride and honor for us, the Shia sect, and for all of Lebanon, said Hussein Sweidan, a resident returning to Tyre in southern Lebanon, who said he saw the ceasefire as a victory for Hezbollah.

Sporadic celebratory gunfire was heard at a main roundabout in the city, as people returning honked the horns of cars and residents cheered.

Some Israelis are concerned the deal doesn t go far enough

In Israel, the mood was far more subdued, with displaced Israelis concerned that the deal did not go far enough to rein in Hezbollah and that it did not address Gaza and the hostages still held there.

I think it is still not safe to return to our homes because Hezbollah is still close to us, said Eliyahu Maman, an Israeli displaced from the northern Israeli city of Kyriat Shmona, which is not far from the border with Lebanon and was hit hard by the months of fighting.

The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel, more than half civilians, as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.

A significant return of the displaced to their communities, many of which have suffered extensive damage from rocket fire, could take months.

But Israel can claim major victories in the war, includingthe killing of Hezbollah s top leaderHassan Nasrallah and most of its senior commanders, as well as the destruction of extensive militant infrastructure. A complex attack involvingexploding pagers and walkie-talkies, widely attributed to Israel, appeared to show a remarkable degree of penetration of the secretive militant group.

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The kinds of massive, long-range rocket barrages that many Israelis had feared before the war never fully materialized, either because they were destroyed by Israeli strikes or Hezbollah held them in reserve. Hezbollah also failed to launch any ground attacks across the border, despite evidence presented by the Israeli military that it had invested heavily in preparing for such operations.

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Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.

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Find more of AP s war coverage athttps://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

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