ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The United Nations estimates that a quarter of Lebanon's population has been displaced by more than a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah. In the early hours of this morning, a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect, and so far it appears to be holding, and some of those people are going home. NPR's Lauren Frayer joined some of them on their journey south, into what had been until yesterday a battle zone.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAFFIC NOISE)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Car after car is loaded with belongings tied on top of the roof. It's bumper-to-bumper traffic on the coastal highway going south.
ZEINAB SOUEIF: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: Zeinab Soueif says she ran from her border village when Israeli airstrikes began in September, hitched a ride to the capital, Beirut, and had been sleeping on the floor of a school there ever since.
SOUEIF: (Speaking Arabic, laughter).
FRAYER: "But we're going home now victorious," she says.
What began in the dark with celebratory gunfire when the clock struck 4 a.m. turned into a massive parade of evacuees heading home.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #1: (Singing in non-English language).
FRAYER: Cars blast music. People roll down their windows and high-five one another. There are yellow Hezbollah flags everywhere - evidence that the group has not been eliminated, despite Israel killing nearly all of its leaders. Twice, different passers-by slipped into my car window different posters of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in September.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: (Singing in non-English language).
FRAYER: Defiance and celebrations mask the cost to Lebanon of this war though - more than 3,800 deaths and damage the World Bank put at least $8.5 billion, a staggering sum for a country that's had so much economic turmoil and is still trying to overcome damage from the last war with Israel 18 years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FRAYER: And as you drive this coastal highway down into south Lebanon, you begin to see - sort of every few hundred meters there's something destroyed. There's a restaurant here. It looks like a tornado came through here.
(SOUNDBITE OF KICKING DEBRIS)
FRAYER: And it's all just debris - some burned and gnarled rebar. Oh, it's, like, a little toy train for kids, and the front of it is all blackened. Oh, my God, look at the crater. Looks like the size of a swimming pool, but deeper. I think it looks like there was mini golf here.
(SOUNDBITE OF KICKING DEBRIS)
FRAYER: The damage generally gets worse as you drive farther south, closer to the Litani River, the boundary north of which Hezbollah is supposed to relocate its fighters. At one point, a man at a gas station told us to take a right, not a left, because Hezbollah was moving a cache of weapons around the corner.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAFFIC NOISE)
FRAYER: The celebratory mood from the highways around Beirut is gone well before you reach the city of Nabatieh, where people are jumpy. Just south of here, the Israeli military has told people not to go home because Israeli soldiers are still present in their villages. They have 60 days to withdraw. At one point today, they did open fire on what Israel says were Hezbollah operatives in a restricted zone. That doesn't appear to have affected the ceasefire, though. In Nabatieh, a funeral is underway - presumably for one of the last people killed in this conflict - and a century-old market complex that draws people from all over the region is in rubble.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
RAFEEF HAYEK: It's sad. Boutique, the house...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Gone.
FRAYER: Rafeef Hayek's son sits on her lap in their car and finishes her sentences. Their family's boutique is gone. They're not sure about their house. They're going there next. I ask how she explains this to her children.
HAYEK: My children - not explain. My children look this directly.
FRAYER: They see it with their own eyes, she says.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORN HONKING)
FRAYER: At a main intersection in Nabatieh, a coffee vendor sits on a crate in the street, pouring tiny cups of cardamom-scented brew from a brass pot and hands them out through car windows. Wajih al-Amar never left, even when his house was destroyed. He happened to be crossing the street outside when it was hit.
WAJIH AL-AMAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: Now his neighbors are coming back, and he's welcoming that.
AL-AMAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: He says he knows who to charge for the coffee and who to give it away to for free, depending on whose house is still standing and who lost people.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Nabatieh, southern Lebanon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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