HANIN, Lebanon — The canvas-topped bed of a white truck where Zahra Abbas sits picking through dried thyme is home for now. What it lacks in comfort is more than made up for in location: She's parked for the first time in more than 20 years in her village in southern Lebanon.
Twenty yards away, past two men breaking the rocky soil with pickaxes to plant a Hezbollah guerrilla flag, Abbas' husband, Youssef Abdullah Soufan, 55, chips away an old concrete foundation. First, he'll put up a tent, then a house where the couple's old home stood.
A week after Israeli troops pulled out of southern Lebanon, many former Muslim residents of the south who had spread throughout Lebanon were checking up on their old homes and making plans to return.
Abbas, 57, said she and her family arrived in Hanin from near the port city of Tyre, 15 miles to the northwest, immediately after hearing that Israel had left southern Lebanon. Living in a truck or tent for what could be months doesn't concern her.
"I will stay here until my house has been rebuilt," she said.
Struggle for Reconstruction, an arm of the Hezbollah guerrilla group that led the fight to evict Israel from Lebanon, is taking the lead in helping the two dozen people who set up camp in Hanin. On Tuesday, workers from the group were laying concrete foundations for public toilets for the families who stay while they rebuild.
Damage caused during the fighting against Israel was estimated at $1 billion by Lebanese Finance Minister George Korom.
The Lebanese government and foreign donors are expected to contribute to rebuilding the south, and some former residents of Hanin say they will use tents provided by guerrillas until the aid comes.
Former residents say the Muslim village, three miles north of the border, was deserted after 30 residents were killed in 1976 by "Israel and its agents" and artillery pounded the town. Israel didn't invade Lebanon until 1978, but Lebanese Christian militias of the 1975-90 civil war began receiving military aid from the Jewish state as early as 1976 to fight Palestinian guerrillas who controlled large parts of southern Lebanon.
"Everything was destroyed ... because all the population refused to cooperate with Israel," said Hamad Ali Mansour, 28, who is planning to rebuild his family's home.
Shell-pocked concrete carcasses of houses line both sides of the main road, now decorated with Hezbollah flags. Hanin has become a whistlestop for government and Hezbollah officials who come to a canopy near the flattened school to reassure residents they will help them rebuild.
Down a dirt path to the old town center is a mosque that had been used as a stable until workers shoveled out the manure this week and laid down rugs for prayers. A trail grown over with thistles, once a road, leads through the nearby cemetery.
A bulldozer sent by Lebanon's Public Works Ministry pushed away rubble just beyond the cemetery, where more homes were destroyed, to clear a new road.
At the cemetery, Assad Ishab, who was 7 when his family fled in 1976, listens as his uncle parts weeds and points out the graves of Ishab's grandfather and uncles. Mohammed Hussein Ishab, 75, grows agitated when he recalls fleeing Hanin.
"We were family, not neighbors," he says of residents of nearby Christian villages blamed for driving the town's 3,000 residents away. "Why did they do this?"
If the south's patchwork of Christian, Muslim and Druse communities is to live together peacefully, many say such questions must be set aside.
All religions were represented in the South Lebanon Army, the Israeli-allied militia that ran the occupied zone until it collapsed last week. About 1,500 militiamen surrendered to Lebanese authorities to face trial while 7,000 people — hundreds of militiamen and their families — fled to Israel.