LEBANON: No one in southern Lebanon believed the US secretary of state's assertion that a "sustainable ceasefire" was possible by the end of this week, certainly not the refugees who clogged the hot, dusty, backroads north of Tyre, jolting through orange groves and banana plantations, desperate to reach the relative safety of Sidon or Beirut before Israel's promised pause in bombing broke down completely.
With grim, expressionless faces, they stood packed in the back of vegetable lorries, rode on top of bedding strapped to the roofs of their cars, sat in an open boot or perched on the edge of a car window.
At the wheel of a battered 1981 van, Hussein Azzaki from Deir Kanoun said he did not know where he was taking his parents, wife and nine children. "We've been terrorised in our house for 20 days," he said. "We just took a few clothes and this car is not so good; I'm afraid it won't make it." As the van waited in the traffic jam at the Qasmieh junction, one of Azzaki's veiled daughters read the Koran.
Israel looks close to reaching its goal of emptying the south of its civilian population, turning the area east of Tyre into a free fire zone. Some Lebanese wondered aloud yesterday whether Israel deliberately killed more than 50 civilians in Qana on Sunday as a warning to frighten away those remaining.
Israel and their enemies in Hizbullah give the impression of waiting for a dramatic showdown. I saw only three Lebanese on the empty streets of Qana on Sunday: all had the bearded look of "the resistance". All were smiling. "Who will fight the Israelis if I go?" one said. "I see victory."
"The worst is yet to come," predicted Youssef Kawsarani, the owner of an empty luxury hotel on the much-bombarded road to Nabatiyeh. "The Israelis are absolutely determined to establish a demilitarised zone several kilometres wide along the border. It's purely symbolic, since Hizbullah can launch rockets from 70 kilometres away. They haven't even touched Hizbullah."
You have to come to Nabatiyeh, Lebanon's largest Shia Muslim city, to see how deeply Hizbullah has penetrated Shia civil society, including the middle classes. This war has only increased Hizbullah's prestige; in the wake of Monday's massacre at Qana prime minister Fouad Siniora, a pro-western Sunni Muslim, thanked the guerrilla group for their "sacrifices".
The Bayad neighbourhood in Nabatiyeh has been bombed seven times in three weeks, and now looks more like the surface of the Moon than the middle- class, residential district that it was. Bayad's inhabitants became refugees weeks ago, but some took advantage of the Israeli promise not to fire on cars and returned to retrieve belongings yesterday.
"We are terrorists. All of us are terrorists," Amal Hamdoon, a housewife, said with bitter irony, standing on the steps of her former apartment building. The ruin across the street had been the office of al-Manar, Hizbullah's television station, and a Hizbullah official lived two buildings away.
"My home is destroyed and the ministers and deputies are in palaces," she said. "We're living in a school in Beirut with no water, no milk, no money - not even nappies for the baby." She had come in search of the family's clothing and passports.
Amal Hamdoon and her cousin, Dina, wore tight jeans and sleeveless tops - not the sort of women you'd expect to be Hizbullah supporters. They drove away in a late model Mercedes, with a clean-shaven young man who filmed the devastation of Bayad out of the car window. "We are all with Hassan Nasrallah," he shouted.
A red ambulance from Hizbullah's social welfare agency stopped to check our identity; the group is on the lookout for spies. Four days ago, a German photographer was beaten up when he took pictures of a building hit by a guided missile in Tyre.
Ahmad Haji Ali, an architect, returned to Bayad yesterday to find his office badly damaged. "Of course the bombing's going to start again. We support the resistance, because this is a justified resistance."
The souk in the centre of Nabatiyeh has also been reduced to rubble. "This was a clothing store, a jeweller's, a grocery store . . .," Mahmoud Fakhi, a civil defence worker, said. A six-floor apartment building had collapsed in the shape of a mountain, with a pink-tiled bathroom tethering on the top.
We could hear the Israeli bombardment of Taybé, 27km away. Fakhi worried about the drone that buzzed overhead, so we took shelter in a vegetable shop on the periphery of the destroyed area. "Israel wanted to destroy Lebanon first, then Hizbullah," he said. "There are no Hizbullah in the airport, on the bridges, in the markets."
The smiling Hizbullah men who lurked in doorways or walked casually through town seemed invisible to the journalists and a team from Human Rights Watch (HRW) who visited Qana yesterday. Emaciated dogs, cats and cows, abandoned by their owners, wandered on the empty streets.
The US-based human rights group intends to issue a preliminary report on Israeli war crimes in Lebanon tomorrow.
"What we see in case after case is that Israel is not making an effort to distinguish between civilians and military," said Nabil Houry, HRW's Lebanon representative. "At some point, this lack of distinction amounts to a war crime. Israel says they are taking care to spare civilians. We haven't see any evidence or that."
Lebanese radio reported that Israeli aircraft yesterday dropped leaflets over Shebaa and Kfar Shouba, villages in southeastern Lebanon, ordering residents to leave by 6pm.
"They often give people only two hours to leave," said Peter Bouckaert, the emergency director for HRW. "Twenty-one people were killed at Mar Wahir after the Israelis came to the border with a loudhailer and said they had to leave within two hours."
The Israeli justice minister, Haim Ramon, said last week that anyone left in southern Lebanon must be associated with Hizbullah, implying they were legitimate targets. "What Ramon said is contradictory to the Geneva Convention," Bouckaert said.
"It's a prefabricated excuse to hit civilian homes. It's like Vietnam, where they said, 'If you're dead, you're red'."