Nabih Bulos
LA Times, Mar. 11, 2025
“People talk about victory. What victory? All this destruction and death? What was this for?”
The procession of coffins was heard long before it came into view, a chorus of ambulance sirens drowning out the crowd assembled at the main square of this devastated village.
“Arise, Aitaroun! This is the time of martyrs, and blood, and victory,” said an announcer, as four flatbed trucks rumbled to the square bearing 95 coffins. The dead were villagers killed or who died during the war between the militant group Hezbollah and Israel last year. They had been buried elsewhere while Aitaroun remained in Israeli hands.
The Israeli withdrawal early last month spurred what amounted to a homecoming, first for Aitaroun’s living, who returned in the thousands the morning soldiers left; and now, on this Friday in February, its dead.
In its myth-making and propaganda, Hezbollah portrays the war as a victory, a greater and more significant triumph than when it repulsed the Israeli military during the last major engagement between the two sides in 2006.
But the militant group now has to contend with an aftermath that for many Lebanese, including some Hezbollah partisans, looks very much like defeat.
Thousands of its fighters and supporters are dead, the upper echelons of its leadership decimated. Wide swaths of pro-Hezbollah areas are all but flattened; almost 100,000 people remain displaced and Israeli forces still occupy parts of Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s opponents are intent on defanging the Iran-backed group once considered one of the world’s top paramilitary factions and Lebanon’s most powerful political party….SOURCE