No victors

WITH CHOKING dust still rising from the ruins of Lebanon and a United Nations cease-fire in its fragile first day, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, declared his side had won a ``strategic and historic victory " in its war with Israel. Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, also claimed victory, telling the Israeli parliament that the fighting had ``changed the strategic balance" in the region. President Bush was more blunt. ``Hezbollah started the crisis and Hezbollah has suffered a defeat in this crisis," he said.

The claims and counterclaims of victory had the ring of schoolyard taunts, obscuring the terrible true calculus of this war: So long as bombs displace diplomacy, everyone loses.

Officials in Israel say that some 10,000 buildings there were destroyed or damaged in 34 days of fighting. Scores of Israelis died, including at least 39 civilians. In Haifa, Kiryat Shemona, and other places within range of Hezbollah rockets, homes and shops were blasted into rubble.

An estimated 700 Lebanese civilians were killed, and villages there are littered with unexploded bombs waiting to kill and maim more. The United Nations reports at least 1 million people were displaced by the fighting. Blankets, water, and mattresses are being distributed to refugees by the hundreds of thousands, as if a devastating earthquake had struck.

Globe reporter Thanassis Cambanis, in Tibnin, Lebanon, found defiance and grief in about equal measure among the residents whose lives had been ripped apart by the fighting. A 37-year-old butcher brought his family out of hiding to find the home he had just purchased scorched and smashed beyond recognition. ``I have nothing to do with this war," he said, weeping. ``I've worked all my life to get this. Now they've destroyed it."

Of course, Cambanis could only interview the living.

David Grossman, an Israeli novelist and peace activist, has written eloquently about the costs of war in the Mideast. In an interview on WBUR's program ``On Point" in 2003, he read an excerpt from his book ``Death as a Way of Life":

``This is the empty place in which every person, Israeli or Palestinian, knows with piercing certainty all that he does not want or does not dare to know. There, within himself, he understands ... that his life is being dissipated, squandered in a pointless struggle, and that his identity and self respect and the one life he has to live are being endlessly expropriated from him in a conflict that could have been resolved long ago."

This week the radio program replayed Grossman's words, because on Saturday -- one day after the United Nations approved the latest cease-fire resolution for Lebanon -- Grossman's 20-year-old son, Uri, a staff sergeant in the Israeli military, was killed.