Analysis: Five decades of wars leave Lebanese weary, wary

BEIRUT, Lebanon, May 13 (UPI) -- After enduring more than five decades of wars, conflicts and hardships, Lebanese people probably have seen it all.

However, the severe human and material toll of the ongoing Israeli-Hezbollah war has deeply shaken their renowned resilience, leaving them clinging to the hope that this will be the last conflict.

For most of them, the recent war proved to be the final straw, prompting questions about its futility after it enabled Israel to reoccupy and devastate parts of southern Lebanon that had been liberated in 2000 -- except for a few disputed border areas -- largely through Hezbollah's guerrilla resistance.

What began on Oct. 8, 2023, as a Hezbollah "support front" for Gaza involving limited and relatively contained cross-border fighting soon evolved into a broader military conflict that cease-fire agreements have so far failed to stop.

Israel vowed to "eradicate" Hezbollah -- the heavily armed, Iran-backed group -- after significantly weakening it through sophisticated intelligence and cyber operations that targeted and assassinated senior officials, top military commanders and thousands of fighters.

Striking the group's suspected positions, arms depots, tunnels and missile launchers became part of Israel's daily military campaign, with civilians and civilian infrastructure bearing the brunt of the conflict.

Hezbollah, which remained inactive for 15 months after the Nov. 27, 2024, cease-fire in an effort to regain strength and reorganize its ranks, resumed fighting March 2, pledging to maintain its anti-Israel resistance and once again refusing to disarm.

Israel responded by intensifying its airstrikes, accelerating the Gaza-like destruction of border villages in southern Lebanon, and ordering large-scale repeated evacuations that have displaced 1.2 million people and triggered the country's worst humanitarian crisis.

"It is the toughest war," said Imad Bazzi, a member of the Bint Jbeil Municipality Council, echoing the belief shared by most Lebanese.

Bint Jbeil, a town in southern Lebanon close to the Israeli border, today lies in ruins like dozens of other villages in the region. It, however, carries symbolic significance for Hezbollah, which declared it "the capital of resistance and liberation."

It was there in 2000 that Hezbollah's charismatic leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah -- killed by Israel in September 2024 - announced the liberation of southern Lebanon after Israel withdrew, which he defied, calling it "weaker than a spider's web."

However, it was never the end, with three other rounds of war initiated by Hezbollah in 2006, 2023 and March, this time in support of Iran, fueling Lebanese anger and opposition to the group's "grave miscalculations" and causing heavy human and material losses.

Bint Jbeil alone has lost 65% of its housing units -- or 1,950 houses -- as well as prominent cultural institutions and commercial businesses as shown in satellite imagery from early April, Bazzi said.

He said the "systematic" destruction of the town is continuing every day and "is erasing its history, changing its geographic landscape, damaging its agricultural land and uprooting its olive trees."

"The whole city has completely changed and is now unrecognizable," he told UPI during a phone interview.

Worse, such destruction, which also targeted Bazzi's engineering and construction company, left the town without building documents and land registry records, many of which either went missing or were burned during the strikes or demolition.

Now, entire villages have been wiped off the map, leaving no trace of them -- only piles of rubble -- and making the current conflict very different from Israel's previous wars in 1978, 1982 and 2006, as well as its 22-year occupation of a security zone in southern Lebanon, Bazzi said.

"It takes a lifetime of work to build a house ... and this is not just about stones -- it is about our memories and our whole lives, with all their details," he said.

It was even more so for Mohammad Darweeh, a Palestinian journalist who hastily left his house in the southern port city of Tyre along with his wife and daughter after Israeli evacuation orders in early March and relocated to a safer area near Beirut.

He lost his house and his parents' home when Israeli airstrikes targeted and destroyed five buildings in a residential neighborhood in Tyre, just minutes before the April 17 ceasefire took effect. The strikes killed 17 of his neighbors and injured 15 others who had believed they were safe and did not evacuate.

Everything Darweesh and his late father -- a prominent photographer who settled in Tyre after fleeing the Palestinian village of Umm al-Faraj in 1948 -- had built over a lifetime turned to ashes that day.

It included their extensive archives of photographs and articles documenting the wars in southern Lebanon since 1969, photographs from the father's time in Palestine, old documents and property certificates from Palestine and some 2,000 books.

"Fifty years of my work as a journalist and 70 years of my father's photography are gone," Darweesh told UPI.

The only things left were an old photograph of his son found by a neighbor beneath the rubble of the collapsed building and his determination to remain in Lebanon.

In the past conflicts, southerners still had houses and villages to return to -- but not this time, amid the ongoing large-scale destruction.

Residents of Rmeich and other Christian-majority villages, including Ain Ebel and Debel, chose to take the risk and remain in their homes despite Israel's mass evacuation orders and amid fears they could be forced to leave at any time or live "under siege."

"For the first time, we felt that this war was bigger than we could handle -- a regional war," Chadi Kalakech, a 56-year-old school professor in Rmeich, said during a phone interview with UPI.

On the first days of the conflict, the residents of Rmeich already had their bags packed with essential belongings. However, contacts involving the town's bishops, the Lebanese Army, the Vatican's ambassador and the United Nations peacekeeping force, or UNIFIL, resulted in Israel allowing them to stay on the condition that they remain "careful" and "do not allow anyone" into their village.

Kalakech noted that Rmeich had been hosting some 30 displaced families from neighboring Shiite villages when Israel ordered their evacuation within a few hours, saying: "If they don't leave, you will also pack and leave with them."

"They are our friends, and being forced to ask them to leave was very difficult, but we had to protect our village, and they understood that," he said, adding that watching Israel demolish the surrounding villages was even more difficult.

The residents of Rmeich faced shortages of bread, gasoline, and vegetables, and were concerned about the challenge of treating urgent and complex medical cases. However, their greatest fear was the future and the possibility that only a few of the thousands of villages in southern Lebanon would remain livable, Kalakech said.

Would this "unprecedented, never seen before, ferocious war" be the last one? he asked.

"Maybe it will, but at the expense of southern Lebanon," he said. "It may be reconstructed and people may regain their lives. Maybe it will become a better place, or maybe it will disappear from the map."

Resilience, healing, rebuilding and dreaming of a better future have marked generations of Lebanese since the 1975-90 civil war and the successive waves of violence, internal conflict, assassinations, bombings, Syria's military rule and Hezbollah-Iran dominance.

Roula, a 66-year-old retired investment officer, has lived through every phase of that cycle, embracing the good days, cherishing joyful moments and surviving the violence.

Like most Lebanese, she had grown weary and wary of recurring wars and political turmoil.

"There are no words to define my feelings: I am fed up, disgusted. ... We have reached a point where we cannot take any more. What we are seeing and living through is surreal," Roula, who asked that her family name not be disclosed, told UPI.

Surviving the war -- maintaining a daily routine and even sunbathing, despite Israeli drones constantly buzzing overhead and "searching for a building to attack and level" -- remains a challenge and is "in God's hands," she said.

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This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 11:49 AM.