Lebanon's Postwar Reconstruction Is at a Standstill

NABATIEH, Lebanon - After more than a year of tit-for-tat airstrikes and several months of higher-intensity combat, the devastating war between Hezbollah and Israel ended with a ceasefire in late November 2024. In addition to the nearly 4,000 people killed during the conflict, the fighting caused an estimated $6.8 billion in damage to housing and infrastructure.
Nearly 120,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, and nearly 900,000 people had been displaced at the height of the fighting in November. Lebanon's newly formed government now faces an immediate challenge: resettling those who were displaced while ensuring that reconstruction is efficient, transparent and free of corruption.
Zohair Hussain Jawad, a 50-year-old Lebanese-American dual citizen, left the U.S. in 2005 to settle in Nabatieh, in southern Lebanon. A year later, he lived through the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which was intense, but shorter and more limited in scale. The devastation this time, he says, is "incomparable."
"It wasn't like that in 2006," he recalls. "In 2024, unfortunately, it escalated to a point of no return."
After he nearly lost his home to Israeli airstrikes during the latest conflict, Jawad and his family relocated to Beirut in late September. Like many other Lebanese, Jawad's life savings are locked in the country's broken banking system. He used what he had on hand to survive, waiting for the war to end.
"We returned the day they called a truce, but our house was in ruins," says Jawad. Though the dwelling has now been repaired, parts of it are still patched together with plastic and cardboard. A building across the street was completely destroyed.
More than three months after the Nov. 27 ceasefire that ended the fighting, large parts of southern Lebanon still lie in rubble. And while Hezbollah pledged to cover reconstruction costs, whatever rebuilding has happened has been sporadic, with the process for accessing reimbursement anything but smooth.
When asked whether he has received any financial assistance for the repairs to his house and his lost furniture, Jawad says that a group of officials came to his home to check out the damage and take down the necessary information, without specifying whether they were from Hezbollah or the government. "We'll see where that goes," he adds.
A recent Financial Times report states that the damage assessment committee of Hezbollah's construction arm, Jihad al-Bina, has already inspected more than 270,000 homes. Once the assessment of the damage to a home is complete, residents become eligible for compensation checks and cash payments, which are distributed through local branches of Al-Qard Al-Hassan, Hezbollah's financial arm.
In December, Hezbollah's secretary-general, Naim Qassem, claimed that the group had already provided more than $50 million in aid covering 172,000 displaced families, with a total of $77 million allocated for the 233,500 households eligible for it.But with the cost of rebuilding in the housing sector alone estimated by the World Bank to be around $4.6 billion, that's a drop in the bucket.
Even if no further fighting breaks out, large-scale reconstruction remains uncertain given Lebanon's economic crisis and political instability.
Mukhtar Hassan Jaber, a member of the municipal council in Nabatieh who assists residents in obtaining the necessary documents to claim compensation from Hezbollah, says that the government has been of little help. "NGOs are providing machines to clear the rubble," he says. "They are working block by block to remove debris so that they can start rebuilding afterwards."
Imad Salamey, an associate professor and chairperson of the Lebanese American University's Department of Political and International Studies, understands the skepticism expressed by Jaber and others with regard to the Lebanese government. But he believes that such claims are often exaggerated to justify sectarian political control over local populations.
"After the 2...