Lebanon’s displaced wrestle with grief and despair as they return home

Beirut, Lebanon – When Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire on Wednesday, Adnan Zaid breathed a sigh of relief.

He and his family had been up all night because of Israel’s thunderous air strikes on Lebanon’s capital.

The fear subsided after the anticipated ceasefire took effect at 4am, yet uneasiness about the future arose.

“Honestly, I’m still worried that something will happen,” Zaid told Al Jazeera. “I have doubts the ceasefire will hold.”

Zaid is one of about 650 people who fled their homes to a guesthouse run by a local relief group in Karantina, a predominantly low-income district in Beirut.

He is not the only one with mixed feelings about the ceasefire now in place and doubts about whether it will be safe to go home.

Many are eager to rebuild their lives, but some are reluctant to return to war-torn neighbourhoods where homes and livelihoods have been destroyed and all sense of security has vanished.

“All the doors and windows are broken in my home. The roof has caved in, and shrapnel from all the explosions has covered the interior,” Zaid said.

“We can’t go back right now. We need time to fix the place up. It’ll take five or six days for us to figure out if our home can be made liveable.”

Reluctant to leave

Israel and Hezbollah first began fighting on October 8, 2023, when the Lebanese group initiated a low-simmering exchange of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border in solidarity with the people of Gaza, who were enduring Israeli bombardments.

Hezbollah promised to stop if Israel ended its war on the besieged enclave, which started after a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Instead, Israel escalated its disproportionate attacks against Hezbollah and announced an invasion of southern Lebanon in late September.

Mohamad Kenj, 22, doesn’t want to return to his home, which is damaged but still liveable

Israel’s campaign, he said, destroyed all forms of social and commercial life in his neighbourhood in Dahiyeh, a bustling district in Beirut’s southern suburbs associated with Hezbollah.

“Even if I manage to arrange my room and fix my home up, no life exists around there,” Kenj told Al Jazeera from the modest room in Karantina where he was sitting with his father.

But Kenj knows he will have to return at some point because he has nowhere else to go.

Volunteers in Karantina expect the shelter to stay open for several weeks. It depends on how many displaced families return to their homes in the coming days and if the ceasefire holds.

They said the local municipality will make the final decision, and there have been no official announcements so far.

Going home

As soon as Israeli warplanes and drones left Beirut’s skies, dozens of families in Karantina began packing up their belongings.

By midday on Wednesday, about half the shelter was empty, and many more people were getting ready to leave.

Fatima Haidar, 38, was in her room stuffing clothes, pots, pans and blankets into suitcases.

The divorced mother of five said she first came to Karantina with her mother and relatives a few days after Israel dropped 80 bombs on Dahiyeh on September 27 to kill Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel’s attack led to a mass exodus from Dahiyeh and pushed Haidar and her family to sleep initially on the streets because most government shelters were full. They eventually heard there was space for them in Karantina.

For weeks, they took turns going to Dahiyeh to check on their apartment and were looking forward to returning.

But it was damaged by Israeli air strikes just a day before the ceasefire. The walls, she said, had crumbled and broken glass and debris covered their home.

“We’re happy the war is finally over, but we are devastated our house has been destroyed,” Haidar said.

While this moment is bittersweet, Haidar refuses to be away from her community any longer and insists they will rebuild their lives.

“We don’t know where we’re going exactly, but we’re not going to stay here.”

Grief and loss

Israel escalated its bombardments across Beirut on Tuesday night, hours before the ceasefire took effect.

Kenj’s cousin Mohammed was killed in an Israeli air strike in Bashoura, a densely populated neighbourhood in the heart of the city. He survived the entire war, only to be killed in its final hours.

“My mother went today to the funeral to pay her respects and mourn him,” he told Al Jazeera. “I wish I knew him more, but he was older than me with a [wife and children who survived the strike], and we didn’t have much in common.”

Kenj is still wrestling with grief after losing a family member and his sense of home and security.

Unlike previous conflicts between Hezbollah and Israel, he doesn’t believe the latest one can be claimed as a victory.

“We’re mourning and we’re depressed. Anyone who tells you we were victorious is lying,” he told Al Jazeera, relating a common sentiment at the shelter.

Ayat Mubarak, 64, said the mood among her family is quite different compared with the 2006 war.

Even though they had lost their home, their spirits were high because they firmly believed Hezbollah was victorious. This time, they are less convinced.

Taking a drag from a cigarette, Mubarak added that her husband was heading to Dahiyeh to check if their home was intact. She hopes it is so they can finally return.

“If my husband tells us that our house is gone, then that is God’s plan,” she said with resignation.

“God writes the destiny of each one of us.”