Lebanese Refugees Return to Devastation

Riding in jampacked cars and buses piled high with foam mattresses, hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed homeward to southern Lebanon on Saturday on the first day of a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

For many, it was a bitter homecoming. Lebanon suffered the brunt of the 16-day offensive--dubbed “Operation Grapes of Wrath”--mounted by the Israeli military in retaliation against Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel. It left more than 150 Lebanese dead, more than 200 wounded, and power and telephone lines and roads destroyed across the south of the country and in the eastern Bekaa Valley.

On a smaller scale, a similar return was taking place in northern Israel on Saturday. Israelis emerged from bomb shelters and began assessing the damage caused by the estimated 1,000 Katyusha rockets that were fired into Israel by the Shiite Muslim guerrillas since April 11, wounding about 50 civilians.

The truce that began at 4 a.m. Saturday as the result of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire appeared to be holding, with no confirmed cases of shooting by either side. But analysts and many ordinary people wondered whether the written understanding reached by Israel, Lebanon and Syria to refrain from firing at civilians would stand the test of time.

Both Israel and Hezbollah were claiming victory in the worst outbreak of Arab-Israeli fighting since Israel’s 1982-83 invasion of Lebanon.

Israel said it achieved its goal of ending Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel, while the Iranian-backed Hezbollah said it stood up to Israel’s military might and emerged virtually unscathed.

Hezbollah statements made clear, however, that the guerrilla group intends to keep attacking Israeli soldiers in the 9-mile-wide “security zone” Israel occupies in southern Lebanon, raising the possibility that the conflict could again spill over into civilian areas.

Within hours of the cease-fire, most of the 500,000 Lebanese who had fled to Beirut and Sidon to avoid Israeli shells appeared to be on their way back home.

For those returning to ruined homes and businesses, or facing the task of burying relatives and loved ones, the prospect of starting their lives over again was difficult. Many raged against Israel, the United States and politicians in general.

One of the returnees, Arfi Khalil, sat in the rubble in this village south of the port city of Tyre, callused hands pressed against her ruddy cheeks. Behind her were the demolished remains of her house and the house of her sister, their thick concrete roofs and walls broken like pieces of pottery.

“What did we do to deserve this?” the 50-year-old woman complained to no one in particular. “There are 15 of us. Are we supposed to sleep in the street?”

Khalil had already known what she would find when she got home. The structure was bombed on the second day of the Israeli offensive; she had recognized her devastated dwelling in television news footage.

She does not know where she will live. “I am going to stay here in the street until God finds a place for me,” she said as her grown son looked on helplessly.

About 10 miles away, outside the market town of Nabatiyeh, 43-year-old Farida Daher stared vacantly at the destruction wrought on her $1-million villa, the fruit of a lifetime of work by her and her husband, the two of whom spent more than 20 years as merchants in West Africa.

“This was my dream house,” she said as she walked through debris-strewn rooms, stepping over broken glass, smashed walls, smoke-blackened chandeliers, torn carpets and splintered furniture--destroyed in an Israeli shelling just hours before the cease-fire took effect. The fire in the second-floor den was still smoldering.

The family returned at 7 a.m. Saturday to discover the ruins. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was flabbergasted, and the more I go through the house, the more things I discover I have lost--little things that mean a lot to me, like the videos of my daughters’ weddings.”

Her husband, Hassan, was furious. “I hope you will ask President Clinton what’s happened to human rights,” he said.

He said there was no reason his home, on the crest of a hill overlooking the town, should have been targeted. “The Israelis were shooting because they don’t want anyone to ask for their land back,” he said. “Just because we live here, they think that we’re resisting.”

Farida Daher said the family had been checking by telephone with neighbors and had been relieved up to the last day to hear that their house was unscathed.

“This happened in the last few hours after the cease-fire was announced. What did the Israelis gain by doing it at such a late stage?” she asked.

Lebanon, using experience gained after its 15-year civil war ended in 1990, appeared to be wasting no time starting reconstruction.

Outside El Qlaile, a yellow bulldozer bearing a Hezbollah flag and a sticker of Hezbollah’s Jihad Construction Co. was starting to fill in a 15-foot-deep crater next to the road. Electricity and telephone workers were restringing lines cut down by shell explosions. And everywhere homeowners with brooms were sweeping up the glass from shattered windows and salvaging what they could from bombed dwellings.

“Given that Lebanon was doing very well to come back to normal after its civil war and establish itself as an up-and-coming center of the Middle East, for Israel to come in and deliver such a staggering blow set us back several years,” said Paul Salem of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut.