Uneasy Mideast Truce Holds

On both sides of a suddenly quiet Israeli-Lebanese border, displaced masses returned to their war-ravaged homes Monday as the Hezbollah militia and the Israeli army generally held to a brittle cease-fire accord.

Israel and Hezbollah each claimed a qualified victory after 34 days of fighting that killed at least 800 Lebanese and 155 Israelis.

Meeting face to face for the first time in six years, Israeli and Lebanese military commanders sorted through the details of a complicated truce agreement that envisions moving Lebanese and international forces into southern Lebanon. Several officials have said such movement could take weeks, and Israel says it will not withdraw until that happens.

Some Israeli reservists marched out of Lebanon ahead of the cease-fire, but a senior military official said most of a 30,000-member force remained in Lebanon, with new rules of engagement after having boxed in the remnants of the Hezbollah army.

It was not a perfect cessation of hostilities: Israelis skirmished with Hezbollah fighters, killing six, and the militia fired four mortar rounds early today that landed errantly in Lebanon, the Israeli military said.

In Israel, political fallout from what many Israelis see as a poorly executed military operation has begun to threaten the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who went before a special session of parliament Monday and accepted responsibility for “deficiencies.” Still, Olmert claimed that Israel had dealt a devastating blow to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah made a similarly triumphant claim, going on television to celebrate what he called a historic victory.

Civilians, politicians and fighters -- Lebanese and Israelis alike -- expressed hope tempered by considerable pessimism that the U.N.-brokered cease-fire might mark an end to violence that erupted when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers July 12 in a cross-border raid and Israel responded with thousands of aerial bombings and artillery assault.

“I wish this will be the end,” said a tearful Gabriel Lev, as he mourned his son Heran, one of the last Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon ahead of the cease-fire. “I wish he will be the last one. But if I am a realist, I must say it will never end.”

Tens of thousands of displaced Lebanese loaded up their cars and trucks and began returning to reclaim their villages and cities in south Lebanon, despite an Israeli travel ban.

Nearly a million Lebanese were displaced by bombings and fighting, according to the Lebanese government. About half a million Israelis had to flee their homes in the north because of rockets fired daily by Hezbollah guerrillas.

In a choking free-for-all of exhaust and dust, the Lebanese inched their way along roads littered with rubble, frequently funneling into a single lane in places where roads and bridges had been pocked with craters by Israeli airstrikes.

“For 25 years we have been forced to move with nothing but the clothes on our back, so it is nothing to have to go to Beirut for a few days and then go home,” said 60-year-old Bassima Kabeisy, straining for fresh air from the back of a minivan crammed with 11 family members.

“And this time we are going home happy,” she said, “because the Israelis are crying like we cried so many times before.” The travelers handed out espresso-flavored “victory candies” along with Hezbollah flags to drivers of cars that sagged under the weight of mattresses on the roof and gasoline in the trunk.

Hezbollah’s yellow and green machine-gun motif waved from hundreds of car antennas and windows. Car radios tuned to Hezbollah’s radio station played jaunty military anthems, and the militia’s supporters handed out leaflets that congratulated the returnees for “winning against invasion, destruction and racism.” Young men in Hezbollah Civil Defense T-shirts directed traffic at the hastily plowed earthen bridge that restored the crossing over the Litani River.

And everywhere, on sunscreens and children’s T-shirts, there was the image of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.

“Our home may be destroyed, but we want to see it,” said Rokiah Sheblei, 32, as she waited for traffic to move. “It was all worth it for the sake of Nasrallah.”

Israelis, too, were going home Monday afternoon. Main highways were bumper-to-bumper with cars all the way from Tel Aviv on the central coast to northern cities besieged by Hezbollah, such as Kiryat Shemona and Metulla.

“If it’s quiet for one week, the Israelis will come back,” predicted Eilana Rosenfeld, a Metulla resident who runs a bed-and-breakfast and who was driving home for the first time in weeks, her car filled to the windows with food and supplies.

In Kiryat Shemona, where 1,012 Katyusha rockets landed, residents who had languished in bomb shelters began to venture onto the streets.

Virtually a ghost town on Sunday, Kiryat Shemona by midday Monday was springing to life. Traffic lights were working for the first time in weeks, a barber shop and two hardware stores opened up, and the parking lot at the mall was full.

“Experience tells me you really can’t know how quickly [the city] will recover,” said Haim Cohen, 47, stepping gingerly through the shattered glass on a sidewalk, where a row of shops took a direct hit. “One little thing and it can all go to pot.”

Israeli military commanders said Monday their forces had surrounded Hezbollah fighters by taking control of Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. The proximity of the two forces makes confrontation likely, although the Israeli commanders said new rules of engagement included instructions that soldiers not fire on Hezbollah guerrillas unless they appeared to be a threat; they also were told not to fire on the militia’s weapons.

Israel’s rocket launchers and artillery batteries scattered in the fields of the Upper Galilee, which for periods over the last weeks had roared every few seconds, remained idle Monday. At the hour the cease-fire began, one soldier near the border kibbutz of Misgav Am donned a prayer shawl and swayed in prayer, propped against the barrel of his artillery piece.

In Metulla, the last Israeli town before entering Lebanon, scores of tanks, bulldozers, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces clogged the roads. Many had just pulled out of Lebanon. At one point, Israeli paramedic teams in military ambulances worked to pull the bodies of soldiers from a burning tank attacked by Hezbollah before the truce took effect.

Elsewhere, a company of Israeli infantrymen, smiling and exhausted, walked out of south Lebanon’s forested hills ahead of the cease-fire. They smoked cigarettes, flashed V-for-victory signs and embraced one another, happy they had made it out alive. Some held captured Hezbollah flags.

The soldiers were relieved but also chafing at what some saw as a premature end to their mission, which fell short of the annihilation of Hezbollah.

“Militarily we could have acted another month, and then we would be able to count on 10 years of peace,” said the head of an Israeli reservist reconnaissance unit working out of Metulla. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

Nasrallah, the officer said, “has been beaten up, but the desire and will are still there. In six months, he will be back in business.”

That sense of a mission unaccomplished is fueling public dissatisfaction in Israel over the way the conflict was conducted. In a new survey published by the website of the Yediot Aharanot newspaper, 52% of respondents said the Israeli army did not win the war; half believed the cease-fire would last more than a month, and 35% gave it a week.

That public perception will be the next battle for Olmert, who contended that Hezbollah had been greatly debilitated, and pledged to pursue “everywhere and at all times” the leaders of the Shiite Islamic group that also serves in the Lebanese government.

“Israel has made it clear to the world that it will not tolerate attacks from anywhere,” Olmert told the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. “I see and hear the voices expressing unrest and even disappointment, as if their expectations have not been met, yet I say to them: patience.”

Olmert also promised to work “tirelessly” to free the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah on July 12 as well as a third seized by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on June 25. The United Nations accord passed Friday calls for the “unconditional release” of the two, and encourages the release of Lebanese prisoners from Israeli jurisdiction.

Nasrallah, meanwhile, went on Hezbollah television in Beirut and praised Monday’s apparent end to fighting as “a great day.” He said Hezbollah would repair the thousands of houses destroyed by “the enemy” in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut.

“We are today before a strategic, historic victory, without exaggeration,” he said.

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Wilkinson reported from Metulla and Wallace from Tyre, Lebanon. Times staff writer Henry Chu in Jerusalem and special correspondent Haim Blozer in Kiryat Shemona contributed to this report.