Lebanon-Israel Ceasefire Frays as Second Round of Talks Opens

The Lebanon-Israel ceasefire that took effect last week is already showing the structural weaknesses that ceasefires in this region characteristically show. Hezbollah fired on Israeli forces. An Israeli army reservist killed two Palestinians in a West Bank settler attack. Israel continued strikes in Gaza. The State Department announced a second round of talks between Lebanese and Israeli diplomats in Washington, to be held Thursday, which is the institutional response to ceasefire fragility — more process as a substitute for more stability.

The human dimension of the ceasefire's arrival was visible in Lebanon this week. Tens of thousands of displaced people moved back to their villages in the south to find destroyed homes and scenes of devastation that the ceasefire did not undo. In Tyre, relatives held funerals for people killed in the hours before the ceasefire took effect — the peculiar cruelty of dying in the interval between the decision to stop and the actual stopping.

Lebanon's health ministry documented the scale of what the preceding months produced. The numbers belong to a category of abstraction that is difficult to process as individual human events, which is why the images from Tyre and the testimony of people returning to their villages carry more information than the aggregate figures, even though the aggregate figures are more complete.