NABATIEH, Lebanon—After more than a year of tit-for-tat airstrikes and several months of higher-intensity combat, the devastating war between Hezbollah and Israel ended with a ceasefire in late November 2024. In addition to the nearly 4,000 people killed during the conflict, the fighting caused an estimated $6.8 billion in damage to housing and infrastructure. Nearly 120,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, and nearly 900,000 people had been displaced at the height of the fighting in November. Lebanon’s newly formed government now faces an immediate challenge: resettling those who were displaced while ensuring that reconstruction is efficient, transparent and free of corruption.
Zohair Hussain Jawad, a 50-year-old Lebanese-American dual citizen, left the U.S. in 2005 to settle in Nabatieh, in southern Lebanon. A year later, he lived through the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which was intense, but shorter and more limited in scale. The devastation this time, he says, is “incomparable.”
“It wasn’t like that in 2006,” he recalls. “In 2024, unfortunately, it escalated to a point of no return.”