Holding their breath

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 28th of November.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: rebuilding a warzone.

On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah made a deal for a 60-day ceasefire. Northern Israel and southern Lebanon have been blasted by missiles nearly every day since October 8th of last year. That meant evacuating people on either side of the border.

BROWN: Now with the ceasefire, long lines of cars are headed back into those areas as people are eager to learn whether their homes are still standing.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy talked to a few families there assessing the damage.

BACHIR AYOUB: Not my first war, unfortunately, but it was probably the most difficult one.

MARY MUNCY: Bachir Ayoub is the country director for the non-profit Oxfam in Lebanon. He lives in Beirut, a city in the middle of Lebanon that was a common Israeli target.

AYOUB: I'm a new father. So you know, I'm not the swashbuckling aid worker that I was in previous conflicts.

When Hezbollah started firing into Israel on October 8th, Ayoub knew it was only a matter of time until Israel responded. For the first several months, it was a few missiles here and there, but that wasn’t very uncommon.

Then, pagers started exploding.

AYOUB: If you were driving your car, you were worried that maybe the person beside you had a pager. Or if you're in a supermarket, it was the same.

After that, Israel started firing more heavily on southern Beirut. Ayoub lives about five minutes from where the worst of the damage was, and the sound of explosions and the dust from collapsing buildings became too much.

AYOUB: Actually where I am right now is about a 40 minute drive up in the mountains from Beirut, and that's where I have been for two months.

Ayoub is pretty sure his house is still standing, but he isn’t getting his hopes up about a prolonged cease-fire just in case peace doesn’t last.

And that’s something everyone is watching closely.

SHUKI FRIEDMAN: It's really dependent on to what extent Iran will push to rebuild Hezbollah power.

Shuki Friedman is the Director General of the Jewish People Policy Institute in Israel.

FRIEDMAN: Down the road we have also an agreement to negotiate on the border between Israel and Lebanon, then Hezbollah is claiming it in some points, and the border is going favor of Israel. So it will be another test for the agreement.

The agreement echoes United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. That resolution ended the 2006 Lebanon war and put the UN and Lebanon in charge of monitoring Hezbollah. Under the terms of the agreement, the Iran-backed terrorist group was not supposed to be able to amass weapons. But in practice, the UN had very little power to enforce the resolution.

FRIEDMAN: It's completely failed.

This time, the U.S., France, and the UN have the authority to decide whether either side has breached the agreement, and Israel has U.S. backing if Hezbollah breaches the agreement.

FRIEDMAN: It's also true that Israeli military and warehouses are become, you know, not empty, but close to the red line.

Friedman says at a certain point, Israel has to stop trying to track down Hezbollah terrorists. He says there’s a general understanding among Israeli civilians that there’s no way to completely destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. So, eventually, the military has to start weighing the costs and benefits of continuing to fight.

FRIEDMAN: So in some point we have to get to an agreement. And this point is not unreasonable to conclude war, or at least to hold it for some time, and to enable Israel to gain more capabilities to continue, if you want or decide to continue in the future.

The agreement requires the Israel Defense Forces to slowly withdraw from southern Lebanon and the Lebanese army to fill that gap.

FRIEDMAN: It's not clear that conditions agreement will enable Israelis to feel safe enough to go back to their homes. I assume that some of them remain in places where they've been evacuated to.

In Lebanon, Ayoub won’t try to take his son back home for another week. He’s waiting for the dust to clear from the last barrages.

He says it will take years to rebuild the physical structures—but it will take even longer to heal a scarred people, and he hopes his son never has to hear the sounds of war again.

AYOUB: So one of the first Arabic words that he learned was, it's the term kasr jidar sawt, which is breaking the sound barrier. So I was hoping he would learn another word early on, but that was the first thing he picked up on.

The cease-fire doesn’t really change how many people need help on both sides of the border. Tens of thousands of people were displaced in the conflict and many of them don’t have a home to return to. So for now, it’s business as usual for Ayoub.

AYOUB: This just felt like honestly, another crisis, as sad as that sounds, it's just something else and you dust yourself off and get ready for the next one.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.