(Naqoura) “Eid al-Adha is completely different this year,” laments Rabab Yazbek, displaced by the clashes between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah on the border between the two countries. She returned to her town in southern Lebanon on Monday for this major Muslim holiday after authorization from the authorities.
Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7, the powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah has regularly exchanged fire with the Israeli army, in support of its Palestinian ally.
More than eight months of violence have left at least 473 dead in Lebanon, including a majority of fighters from the Lebanese Islamist movement and 92 civilians, according to an AFP count. On the Israeli side, at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians were killed, according to Israel. On both sides of the border, tens of thousands of residents have been displaced.
After the announcement by local authorities in Lebanon of a brief possibility of return to certain localities in the south of the country on the occasion of Eid, several people gathered there, notably in Naqoura, a coastal town bordering Israel .
The Naqoura municipality said it had coordinated with the Lebanese army so that residents could go to the cemetery and mosque for two hours for Eid which began on Monday for many of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims.
According to an AFP journalist, women in black chadors consoled each other in front of several graves, embellished with flowers and large photographs of the missing, including Hezbollah fighters.
Every family lost someone, whether it was “a cousin, a friend or a neighbor,” said Yazbek, a 44-year-old teacher, in the Naqoura cemetery, telling AFP that two people she taught had been killed.
Yellow flags of Hezbollah and green flags of its ally, the Amal movement, were displayed in the cemetery located a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
The army coordinates its activities with UNIFIL, which communicates with Israel as part of efforts to restore calm.
In Naqoura, a sign reading “thanks for your visit” lay along the highway. Not far away, a family photo lay on the ground, surrounded by debris from a destroyed building, the glass in the frame broken. Elsewhere, a little pink child’s car was lying among the rubble.
Rawand Yazbek, 50, inspects his clothing store, whose glass storefront has been destroyed but the door is still intact.
“Thank God a thousand times,” she said, grateful that the rest of her store, “filled with merchandise,” had so far been spared.
Hezbollah intensified its attacks on northern Israel last week, after one of its commanders was killed in an Israeli strike.
The official Lebanese news agency Ani reported Israeli bombings in the south of the country over the weekend, as well as a deadly strike on Monday. Hezbollah later said one of its fighters had been killed.
Hostilities between the two sides have resulted in the displacement of more than 95,000 people in Lebanon, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Like other residents who support Hezbollah and Amal, the head of Naqoura’s municipality, Abbas Awada, called the attacks on the town “cowardly.”
Last week, a strike blamed on Israel killed an employee of the region’s public water company.
Hassan Ezzedine, a Hezbollah MP, who attended the prayer at the Naqoura mosque, believes the crowd is a message: “This land is ours, we will not leave it.”
And added: “We support this resistance [Hezbollah], because it is it which protects us, it is it which defends us”.