A fragile calm in Lebanon as a US-brokered truce holds and families head home

BEIRUT (AP) — A fragile calm settled over parts of Lebanon on Friday as a 10-day ceasefire brokered by the United States took hold between Israel and Hezbollah, prompting thousands of displaced families to begin the journey home — even as uncertainty, destruction and Israeli warnings against going back to parts of southern Lebanon clouded their return.

By early morning, cars were backed up for kilometers on the route leading south to the damaged Qasmiyeh bridge over the Litani River, a key crossing linking the southern coastal city of Tyre to the north. Vehicles piled high with mattresses, suitcases and salvaged belongings crept forward through a single reopened lane, hastily repaired after an Israeli airstrike just a day earlier.

Drivers heading back to their villages along coastal highways cheered each other, flashed victory signs and exchanged blessings.

The latest Israel-Hezbollah war displaced more than a million people. Despite warnings from Lebanese officials that they should not immediately attempt to return to their homes, many began moving toward southern Lebanon in the hours after the ceasefire was declared. The truce appeared to be largely holding overnight.

In southern villages like Jibsheet, a trickle of residents returned to flattened apartment blocks and streets littered with chunks of concrete, twisted aluminum shutters and dangling electrical wires.

“I feel free being back,” said Zainab Fahas, 23. “But look they destroyed everything — the square, the houses, the shops, everything.”

Many did not believe that their ordeal was really over.

“Israel doesn’t want peace,” said Ali Wahdan, 27, a medic walking on crutches over the rubble of the emergency services’ headquarters in Jibsheet. He was badly wounded in an Israeli airstrike that hit the building without warning during the first week of the war.

“I wish it were different," he said. “But this war will continue.”

In the neighborhood of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburb, entire buildings had been reduced to rubble after weeks of intense Israeli strikes. Ahmad Lahham, 48, waved the yellow Hezbollah flag standing on a mountain of rubble that used to be his apartment building, which had also housed a branch of Hezbollah’s financial arm, Al-Qard Al-Hassan.

“We are at the service of the fighters," said Lahham, pledging his loyalty to the group.

He praised Iran and said its pressure in its talks with the U.S. led to the truce, condemning Lebanon’s direct talks with Israel.

“Only the Iranians stood with us, no one else,” he said, calling Lebanon’s leaders “the leadership of shame.”

A local government official in Haret Hreik said Israel struck the neighborhood 62 times over the last six weeks.

“We’ve been able to clear up the rubble of the partially damaged buildings, but for those destroyed, we will need special equipment,” Sadek Slim, the neighborhood’s deputy mayor, told a press briefing.

The area was gridlocked with traffic, with people coming back to check on their homes and Hezbollah supporters zooming on scooters, waving the group’s flag.

Meanwhile, in Al-Najda al Shaabiya Hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh, officials there said Thursday was one of the heaviest days of Israeli strikes since this latest Israel-Hezbollah war began.

Hospital Director Mona Abou Zeid said the wounded continued arriving from nearby Israeli strikes until around an hour after the ceasefire technically took effect at midnight.

Among those wounded in the bombardment on Nabatiyeh Thursday was 33-year-old Mahmoud Sahmarani, who said he stepped outside his home to buy some charcoal for his shisha water pipe when an Israeli strike hit his five-story building, killing his father and cousin as they were peeling potatoes for lunch. All that remains of his apartment is rubble, leaving him and the rest of his family homeless.

“Israel should have withdrawn from Lebanon,” he said from his hospital bed, his left eye swollen shut and his head swaddled in bandages. “If we don’t get them out, they will continue to kill us.”

A member of Hezbollah stands guard next to a destroyed building in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Friday, April 17, 2026, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

A displaced woman holding her dog sits in her tent in Beirut, Lebanon, awaiting an official order from Hezbollah to return to her home in south Lebanon following a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Lebanese army bulldozers reconstruct part of a destroyed bridge that was hit in an Israeli airstrike in Qasmiyeh near Tyre city, south Lebanon, to facilitate the return of displaced people to their villages following a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

Displaced people returning to their villages following a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, cross the destroyed Qasmiyeh bridge near Tyre city, south Lebanon, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

Two girls chant slogans as one holds an image of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Friday, April 17, 2026, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is starting a two-day visit to Spain on Friday where he and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez will meet with other leaders, mostly of mid-to-small-sized countries, who are concerned with the fate of the democratic order and the rise of the populist far right.

Lula and Sánchez are both outspoken in their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened both with punitive tariffs. They are considered standard-bearers of progressive or liberal politics on their respective continents, where reactionary parties and far-right populism have been on the rise for years.

Lula and Sánchez, along with ministers from their cabinets, are meeting at a former royal palace in Barcelona on Friday when they are expected to sign agreements regarding their economies, technology and social policies.

Their bilateral meeting will be prelude for the following day’s double dose of gatherings when Lula and Sánchez confer with other leaders at two events inside a sprawling conference center in Spain’s second city.

The first gathering on Saturday is the IV Meeting in Defense of Democracy. The event was launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 as a forum to exchange ideas aimed at combating the “extremism, polarization and misinformation” that undermines participatory democracy, the organizers say. The first two editions of this event were held at the United Nations and the previous one was in Santiago, Chile, last year.

While both Lula and Sánchez have spoken out against many of Trump's positions and policies, including his decision to attack Iran along with Israel, Lula said that the multilateral summit should not been seen in that vein.

“This is not going to going to be an anti-Trump meeting,” Lula told Spanish newspaper El País on Thursday. “We are going to discuss the state of democracy, to see what went wrong and what we have to do to repair it.”

This edition will include the presence of European Council president Antonio Costa, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Colombia president Gustavo Petro, and other leaders of countries from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.

Sheinbaum’s participation comes after Spain’s King Felipe VI ironed out a longstanding diplomatic dispute regarding Spain’s colonial past when he recently acknowledged the Spanish conquest of the Americas had led to the “abuse” of native peoples.

At a time that Latin America has felt a rightward political swing and mounting pressure by the Trump administration, Sheinbaum has become one of the most powerful leftist voices in the hemisphere. She enjoys soaring approval in Mexico and has been able to strike a careful balance between maintaining a strong relationship with Trump, while pushing back on key issues like Latin American sovereignty.

Many of the leaders from the first event will stay put for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, held at the same venue later on Saturday. The gathering of left-leaning politicians and policymakers was launched after Sánchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, who is now President of the Party of European Socialists, discussed the idea at a meeting of European Socialists last year.

Sánchez and Lula will both give speeches at the event, which is expected to have 3,000 attendees, including U.S. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and feature round tables dedicated to issues ranging from wage inequality to how to improve election results for progressives.

The meeting comes amid a busy week for Sánchez, who just returned from meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years.

Sánchez's government declared its airspace closed to U.S. planes being used in the Iran war, and said it is not allowing the U.S. to use jointly operated military bases in southern Spain for actions related to the war.

Earlier this week, Lula released a video message expressing “deep solidarity” with Pope Leo XIV following public criticisms made by Trump after the pontiff slammed the Iran war.

Pol Morillas, director of the Barcelona-based foreign affairs think tank CIDOB, said that the gatherings are meant to be a show of force by traditional democratic leaders who have seen how the populist far-right has successfully forwarded its messages of anti-migration and economic nationalism through international gatherings.

Morillas also sees the meetings in the context of the speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that shook the Davos economic forum in January on the importance of so-called “middle powers” seeking out new strategies to deal with a world of aggressive superpowers.

Lula, Sánchez and other leaders at the events “share the understanding that the world is not just for the great powers,” Morillas told The Associated Press.

AP writers Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, waves next to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, waves nesxt to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

FILE -Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, left, speaks with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during their joint statement at Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil, March 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)