From the Sultanieh-Tebnine road, I would often catch sight of our house from afar. I could always pick it out among the other homes, and with it came the comforting feeling of arrival: we’re home.
This time, I could barely tell where the house had stood. Geography changes when our homes are destroyed. The landmarks we once knew dissolve, and we find ourselves searching for new reference points to navigate the roads of our towns and the places we once knew so well.
The drive from Beirut to Tebnine, a journey of nearly two hours, was enough to prepare me for a scene that felt apocalyptic. The destruction was vast. Only a handful of residents had begun to return, or perhaps, like me, had come to see what remained before turning back.
In Deir Qanoun al-Nahr and Srifa, devastation had struck at the heart of both towns, making passage through the dust and rubble difficult. The sight of returnees standing silently before their homes and villages added another layer of weight to a long road lined with debris, dust, and unanswered questions.
The closer I got to our villages along the border, the fewer people I saw returning. At times, I felt as though I was alone on the road, and I found myself blaming my own rush in deciding to come.
At the junction leading to the entrance of Tebnine, I was met by a modest Lebanese Army checkpoint, and for the first time, I felt a measure of reassurance. One of the soldiers motioned for me to continue. I drove on for a few more meters, and then, right by the spring, I found three horses and a donkey standing in the middle of the road.
The animals did not move aside, and I, in turn, had no idea what I was supposed to do. It was dawn, and the area still hung in the uneasy space between a ceasefire and the possibility that it might collapse at any moment.
An Israeli drone circled overhead, while the distant sound of shelling echoed from afar, enough to deepen the sense of dread surrounding a village that, only two days earlier, had been subjected to relentless bombardment.
I looked into the eyes of one of the horses standing in the middle of the road. It stared back at me in astonishment, or at least that was how I interpreted its gaze. I drove past them slowly. They made no sound. Instead, they stepped aside quietly, enveloped in a strange stillness, as though they were still reeling from shock.
I found myself wishing these gentle animals could speak, so I could ask where they had fled from and what they had witnessed over the past few days.
I continued on my way, still thinking about them, before the scene around me stole my attention. I had to make an effort to recognize the landmarks that had once been fixed in my memory as I entered the village. The area around the hospital lay in ruins, and the road stretching from it to our home had suffered its share of the immense destruction.
I drove past the devastation surrounding the hospital and followed the same road that led to our house until I reached the small junction where, on every visit, I would crane my neck to see who was standing on the balcony waiting for me: my father or my mother?
This time, no one was there. Only the rubble was waiting for me.
To some extent, I had prepared myself through the images that reached us on the day Israel destroyed our home, on April 28. But I felt an urgent need to see it with my own eyes, to understand, beyond the confines of a phone screen, what it means for a missile to uproot an entire life from its place.
There is little about rubble that surprises. Here were fragments of mattresses and shattered furniture. There was the carpet my mother and brother had carefully rolled up, still wrapped in its plastic cover. Stones, dust, and objects that had lost both their names and their purpose.
Yet what had always struck me in scenes of destroyed homes was the ability of photographs to survive. Time and again, I had watched the joy of those who found a photograph or a document among the debris, as though recovering it meant reclaiming a piece of a life that the bombardment had tried to erase.
And there it was: a photograph of my brother Rabih and his wife, Fida, emerging from between the stones and rubble. Nearby lay an album with some of its pages spread open, and from a distance I could make out photographs of us as children.
How do these photographs survive? How can a missile tear a building from its foundations, yet fail to crush a photograph?
Perhaps I am rambling. Perhaps the survival of photographs can be explained by physics or sheer chance. But in that moment, their symbolic meaning felt stronger than any rational explanation. Photographs, whose loss so often pains us, seemed to be resisting in their own way. As if they were saying: You may destroy the house and reduce it to rubble, but you will never erase the past, nor the story of this home and the people who lived in it.
Homes and the people who inhabit them are the story of southern Lebanon today. People move from one place to another, checking who remains and what remains, asking uncertainly: Are we living through a brief respite before the war resumes? And what lies ahead for us under a fragile ceasefire agreement whose terms, limits, and ultimate outcome remain unclear?
The questions are many, and the answers are few. What is certain is that everyone is trying to catch their breath. The debates over “victory” and defeat are nowhere to be seen on the faces of those searching through the rubble for what remains of their lives.
It is still too early to know what the broader deal between Washington and Tehran will ultimately produce, or what place Lebanon will occupy within it. But ideology and a deep lack of trust continue to fuel an enduring sense of uncertainty about the future.
Yes, people have begun returning to check on their homes, their land, and whatever remains of them. But the signs of pain and brokenness are unmistakable. The Israeli occupation remains in the south, and the scale of the destruction is far too great to be obscured by narratives of victory.
No one has a definitive answer about what a lasting resolution might look like. A thousand question marks still surround the 60-day ceasefire, as the occupation persists and the future beyond it remains uncertain.
Lebanon has little real agency over its own fate. It is constrained by pressures from within as much as by pressures from without. The state lacks sufficient leverage, while Hezbollah, whose decisions are entirely tied to Iran, is itself unable to freely determine its own future or that of the people it has drawn into this war.
Rather than confronting the scale of the catastrophe, it continues to deny it, seeking to persuade people that the destruction of the south constitutes a victory. Some Hezbollah-affiliated writers have gone so far as to argue that the role of the “resistance” is not to protect a village here or a hilltop there, but to eliminate Israel altogether.
But what does any of this mean to people standing before homes that have literally been erased? And what does “victory” mean to someone searching for a family photograph among the rubble, or waiting for answers about compensation for a house that has vanished without a trace?
Is this return permanent, or is the ceasefire merely a pause between two wars?
No one can ease people’s fears or reassure them about what lies ahead. The state lacks the leverage it needs, while Hezbollah remains unable to step outside its own narrative and acknowledge the catastrophe that has befallen the south, and the Shiite community in particular. Grief and anxiety are overwhelming, and no one has the answers.
I left my village and headed back to Beirut, carrying with me the question of return. When does a return become a real return, rather than a brief visit in the lull between two rounds of bombardment? I had made this same journey after the previous war, but this time the loss was immeasurably greater.
When I passed once again by the spot where I had encountered the horses, they were gone. Perhaps they had found their owners. Perhaps they had found a safer place, or a living being to ease their loneliness after those harsh days of war. As for us, we are still searching for someone to ease our own loneliness, and for a country we can return to without fearing that we will be forced to leave it once again.
