Guns go quiet in Mideast

TIBNIN, Lebanon -- Tens of thousands of Lebanese streamed back to their homes in southern Lebanon yesterday, and Israelis in northern towns emerged from bomb shelters as a fragile cease-fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters appeared to be largely holding through its first tense day.

For the first time since the war broke out on July 12, no Hezbollah rockets fell in northern Israel. The Israeli military said its forces killed six Hezbollah fighters in four different episodes in southern Lebanon. But for the most part, both sides stuck to the cease-fire, meant to be the first step in a long-term peace process.

Early today the Israeli military said that 10 Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah had exploded in southern Lebanon, but that it would not respond because they did not fall in Israeli territory .

Israeli and Hezbollah forces remained intertwined along a front line a few miles north of the border and south of the Litani River. Thousands of Israeli soldiers still held ground captured in southern Lebanon, some of it taken in a final offensive over the weekend.

With Israel and Hezbollah both claiming victory -- and facing each other across overlapping front lines -- many pitfalls could prevent yesterday's cease-fire from evolving into a stable truce.

The Lebanese government said it was preparing to send 15,000 Lebanese troops to the south within three days to bolster the existing force of 2,000 United Nations peacekeepers, to be followed in coming weeks by another 15,000 international peacekeepers under the terms of a United Nations Security Council resolution adopted last Friday.

In Washington, President Bush said Hezbollah had started the conflict by attacking Israel, ``and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis." Bush said the Lebanese government would replace Hezbollah as the new power in the south of Lebanon, backed by a robust international force.

However, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, called the outcome a ``strategic, historic victory" against Israel. But Nasrallah said Hezbollah's forces would observe the cease-fire so that more than 1 million displaced Lebanese could return to their homes. Nasrallah added that his followers would immediately start rebuilding homes destroyed in the Israeli bombing and artillery strikes.

Across the border, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel's offensive had eliminated Hezbollah's ``state-within-a-state" in southern Lebanon. He admitted ``deficiencies" in the management of the war, but he warned Israeli politicians against ``falling into endless internal disputes."

He said the Israeli offensive had ``changed the strategic balance against Hezbollah," and said Israel would continue to hunt down the leaders of the Iranian-backed group.

But there were growing calls for a commission of inquiry, and the first post-cease-fire opinion poll showed most Israelis were displeased with the outcome of the war.

``We live in a coma, and we received a wake-up call," said Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud Party and a former prime minister.

Officers from Lebanon and Israel met with the UN on the border, the first time the two countries' military forces have met face-to-face since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation. UN officials said the two sides were negotiating a process of military disengagement, as required by the UN resolution that brought about yesterday's cease-fire.

Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan of the Israeli Air Force said the Israeli Army had already begun discussions with the United Nations ``to transfer the territory in Lebanon held by Israel eventually to Lebanese hands."

The Israeli Army said that on Sunday night, hours before the cease-fire was due to go into effect, Israeli intelligence identified a Hezbollah truck bomb driving toward Metullah from the east. It was destroyed several miles from the border.

In northern Israel, huge traffic jams built up yesterday as residents emerged from the bomb shelters. Some of the hundreds of thousands of people who had sought safety in southern Israel began returning home, but officials said residents of the northernmost villages should remain in bunkers until it was certain the danger had eased.

Shops and businesses closed for a month reopened as proprietors returned to assess the damage. Some 10,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged in about 4,000 Hezbollah rocket strikes, Israeli officials said.

On the ground in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's organization was operating openly. Hezbollah fighters came out in border towns near the front, giving instructions to returning refugees, hanging flags of the Shi'ite movement in battle-scarred towns, drinking tea, and moving crates into warehouses.

Hussein Rumeiti, head of the front-line village of Borj Qalaouay, celebrated in the front yard of his half-destroyed house by smoking his first waterpipe of tobacco since the war. A dozen bearded men in military fatigues, many with walkie-talkies, sat in a circle in the shade of Rumeiti's willow tree, drinking sweet tea from a tray on the ground.

``Even after all the destruction and all the loss of life, we think it's worth it and we're celebrating victory," Rumeiti said, eliciting nods of approval from the fighters around him. ``We have given an example for the rest of the Arab world: Small groups with a will to fight can stand up to Israel."

With his binoculars, Rumeiti could see Israeli tanks in the village of Ghandouriye, about two miles away. The Israeli border lies just beyond. ``What did Israel accomplish? With all the bombs they dropped, they weren't able to stop us from firing rockets at Haifa," Rumeiti said.

Hezbollah leaders accepted the cease-fire agreement but have already suggested they won't abide by its terms, which require Hezbollah to remove its fighters from southern Lebanon.

Thousands of refugees from Beirut and the mountains of central Lebanon traveled by car at first light, over roads heavily bombed by Israel until as recently as Sunday.

``I want to smell the fresh air of my village," Salma Khory, 40, shouted from the window of her family car while stuck in a traffic jam in Sidon.

Mohammed Barakat, 40, returning to his family house in the heavily hit southern city of Nabatiya, sounded a note of doubt. ``I don't trust the Israelis. I'm not sure it's over," Barakat said, watching earthmovers clear a path around a bombed highway overpass south of Sidon. ``Maybe in a day or two, war will resume."

The already narrow coastal road that still linked southern Lebanon -- home to more than 10 percent of the country's 3.8 million people -- was reduced to a single lane.

Engineers from the Lebanese Army, Hezbollah, and another Shi'ite Islamist group, Amal, hastily built a one-lane dirt causeway over the Litani River and cleared paths around gaping craters and recently bombed bridges.

Hezbollah cadres distributed pink leaflets to returning refugees warning them to look out for unexploded ordnance; villages in the south are littered with Israeli shells and cluster bombs.

``You have won a war against an enemy who destroys everything. There is and always will be resistance," read the flier signed Hezbollah.

Hezbollah operatives rode across the southern villages on motorcycles, flashing the victory sign. In the village of Borj Qalaouay, Hezbollah members stacked cans of gasoline in roadside warehouses, next to a wall where graffiti said: ``I love to die."

Hezbollah set off the conflict on July 12 by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid into northern Israel and killing eight others.

Around the south, refugees emerging from their houses had to navigate a wasteland of rubble and unexploded ordnance.

Israel dropped what appeared to be cluster bombs on the hospital at Tibnin, a market town a few miles from the Israeli border, on Sunday, the last full day of fighting.

``International law should protect people who seek shelter in a hospital," said Mohammed Zalaket, 30, an olive farmer from Bint Jbail who had taken refuge with about a hundred other displaced people in the hospital.

As he spoke, a bulldozer drove over one of the munitions, setting it off with a loud bang. No one was injured.

Globe correspondent Matthew Kalman contributed to this report from Jerusalem.