A ceasefire was announced Monday, but its text has not been released. Displaced Lebanese families are returning home anyway, weighing an invisible agreement against the bombed out evidence in front of them.
A family walks into Jebchit, a village in the Nabatieh area of southern Lebanon, and finds their building reduced to rubble. An Israeli armoured vehicle blocks the street. Hours earlier, the family had piled into a car to make the trip back. Hours earlier still, the United States and Iran had announced a ceasefire that, on paper at least, ended the latest round of fighting. The deal that supposedly ended the war has not been made public. No one can say whether it applies to Lebanon at all.
The BBC's Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega, reporting from Beirut, characterized the situation as a "fragile quiet" holding even as both Israel and Hezbollah carried out attacks over the past day. The Lebanon war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed armed group, lasted more than three months. An estimated 50,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed, and roughly one million Shia Lebanese were displaced.
In Jebchit, Abo Ali surveyed the damage. His family had come back, he told the BBC, "but with caution." "All of this can be compensated for, and rebuilt," he said, standing among the wreckage.
Further south, near Marjayoun, Moustafa walked into Aadshit carrying a single suitcase. "For someone who's used to this area and has lived here, to come back and see this destruction is extremely hard," he said. Asked whether the truce could be trusted, his answer was blunt: "Israel can't be trusted."
That distrust, named and unsoftened, is the load-bearing wall of the return. Lebanon's displaced are not waiting for the terms of the US-Iran agreement to be published. They are voting with their feet, calculating that even an unconfirmed and unwritten deal is better than the displacement camps. Lebanese authorities warned the ceasefire did not yet mean it was safe to come home. Families came home anyway.
Video widely shared online showed the contradiction at street level: returnees arriving by car to find an Israeli armoured vehicle blocking the road. The deal's opacity is the spine of the moment. The United States and Iran announced a ceasefire on Monday; the text has not been released; the question of whether the agreement extends to Israel and Hezbollah is open. Until that question is answered, the south is governed less by diplomacy than by a population's willingness to walk into a bombed-out building and look for what is left.
What to watch: any release of the agreement's text, any Israeli or Hezbollah statement tying themselves to it, and the next round of displacement figures from UN or Lebanese authorities. The truce's durability will be measured first in the number of cars on the road south, and only later in the language of the deal that, so far, no one outside the negotiating rooms has read.
Reporting by Hugo Bachega in Beirut; photography credited to Reuters.