A fragile UN-ordered truce took hold in Lebanon yesterday after Israel's month-long war with Hizbullah guerrillas, prompting thousands of refugees to rush back to blitzed villages in the south, write Michael Jansen in Beirut and Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem
Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said his fighters had achieved a "strategic and historic victory" over Israel and that it was the "wrong time" to publicly discuss disarming them.
He said Hizbullah would immediately begin repairing homes damaged by Israeli strikes and would pay a year's rent and other costs to help the owners of about 15,000 destroyed houses.
Mr Nasrallah chastised Lebanese politicians who had begun talking publicly about Hizbullah disarming.
"There is a mistake in timing, both psychologically and morally," he said, noting the destruction just meted out to Shia areas of Lebanon.
Ground clashes, along with Israeli air strikes and Hizbullah rocket fire, ceased after the 5am (GMT) deadline, but the Israeli army said its troops had shot five Hizbullah guerrillas, killing at least one, after the truce. The troops had felt threatened, the Israelis said.
Aware of growing public criticism of his management of the campaign against Hizbullah, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said that the Shia organisation had been severely crippled by the Israeli assault, while acknowledging that there had been "shortcomings" in the conduct of the war.
Addressing parliament just hours after a UN-brokered ceasefire went into effect, Mr Olmert said Israel's offensive had changed the "strategic balance" in the region.
Referring to Hizbullah, he said there was no longer a situation in which a "terror organisation is allowed to operate within a state as the arm of the axis of evil".
Careful not to declare victory, Mr Olmert did vow to "continue hunting" Hizbullah leaders "everywhere and all the time.
It is our obligation", he said, adding that the organisation's arsenal had been severely depleted and its confidence undermined.
A few skirmishes broke out between Israeli troops and Hizbullah fighters left in close proximity when the truce began yesterday morning.
But they did not escalate into wider fighting, and, for the first time since the war began on July 12th, the Israelis dropped no bombs and Hizbullah fired no rockets.
Meanwhile, Lebanon's desperate displaced citizens implemented the UN ceasefire resolution in their own way by piling their scant luggage into their cars and going to their homes in the battleground below the Litani River, the Bekaa Valley, and the blasted and battered southern suburbs of the capital.
The wave of tens of thousands who took refuge in Beirut, the mountains and Syria has swept aside the combatants on both sides and is now forcing the Lebanese government, the UN and the international community to meet the challenge of providing instant security, food, water, and medical care for people who are returning without knowing what has happened to their homes.
In the view of Chibli Mallat, a lawyer and dissident member of the US and French-allied March 14th movement which holds the majority of seats in parliament, the "next two weeks are critical. The longer the ceasefire sticks the more likely it will stick". Abdo Saad, director of the Beirut Centre for Research and Information, an independent analyst very familiar with Hizbullah thinking, accepts that the ceasefire is "very fragile".
If, however, Israel abides by the April 1996 understanding which bans attacks on civilians, Hizbullah will reciprocate, he believes, although there could be skirmishes between Hizbullah fighters and Israeli soldiers in the mountains of the south.
Meanwhile, the UN secretariat invited Ireland to participate in the 15,000-strong peacekeeping mission to Lebanon which is being established under a Security Council resolution, UN sources told The Irish Times last night.