Here’s what we know about how things are going so far.

Troop movements

The Lebanese Army, which is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, is expected to enforce the peace under the terms of the deal. It started to send military convoys into southern Lebanon on Wednesday, posting images of the troop movements on social media and saying the army had “begun to strengthen its deployment” and “extend state authority” in the area.

The Israeli military is still in Lebanon and is expected to withdraw in phases over the next two months. That withdrawal will be coordinated with the Lebanese Army, according to the cease-fire deal. The two militaries, along with an international oversight committee chaired by the United States and including France, are expected to come up with “a specific and detailed plan.”

Hezbollah is expected to withdraw from southern Lebanon, but when is not clear. Israel has killed or injured many members of the armed group’s leadership and rank-and-file and has destroyed its weapons stockpiles and factories.

Heading home in Lebanon

More than a million people in Lebanon were displaced by the fighting, mostly in the last few months as the conflict intensified and Israel invaded. As the cease-fire took effect on Wednesday, thousands immediately began returning to areas ruined by Israeli strikes, packing highways with cars loaded with people and belongings. But the movements of returning residents were still constricted. The Lebanese Army called on civilians returning to towns and villages along the border to avoid areas where the Israeli military was still in position.

Bachir Khodr, the governor of Baalbek-Hermel, a Lebanese province that has been hard hit by the war, posted on social media on Wednesday that about half of the displaced people in his region had returned. In separate posts, he said that he woke up Wednesday to the sound of gunfire and feared an Israeli raid, only to discover the sounds were shots of celebration.

On Wednesday afternoon, the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement that he and his defense minister, Israel Katz, had instructed the Israeli military to bar people from returning to communities in Lebanon near the Israeli border, in line with terms of the first phase of the cease-fire.

With little lead time, the Israeli military on Wednesday afternoon declared a curfew in southern Lebanon from 5 p.m. local time until 7 a.m. on Thursday, noting on social media that its troops were still deployed there and would deal “firmly” with violations. People north of the Litani River — which runs roughly parallel to the border with Israel and up to 15 miles away from it — were prohibited from moving southward, and those already in the southern zone were told to remain in place.

Heading home in Israel

In northern Israel, where about 60,000 residents were displaced by the conflict over the last year, some residents began trickling back on Wednesday for short visits to their homes, with the Israeli military’s permission. But most are staying away until it’s clear that the cease-fire is hold, and the Israeli government is not encouraging them to hurry back, at least for now.

The Israeli government has been funding housing for many displaced northern residents. In August, it approved an expansion of the state budget to allow that money to keep flowing this year. Questions remain about when and how damaged homes will be repaired.

Truce violations

The cease-fire largely brought peace to Lebanon and Israel, but both countries claimed some truce violations on Wednesday.

In a briefing with reporters late in the day, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s chief military spokesman, said that Israeli troops had killed Hezbollah operatives and had detained and captured suspects who were being interrogated. Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that Israel would “continue acting forcefully against any violation.”

Lebanon’s state news agency reported that Israeli troops violated the cease-fire on Wednesday, firing at journalists who were reporting from a town in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said it had received reports that “several journalists” were injured in the Khiam area of southern Lebanon but that “following an initial inquiry” it was “unaware of fire” toward the journalists. It added that the incident was under review.

A United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL and made up of about 10,000 civilians and soldiers from around 50 countries, is tasked with monitoring and reporting violations. The peacekeeping force had a similar mandate under a 2006 cease-fire deal that ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah and that provides the basic framework for the latest agreement.

On Wednesday, UNIFIL said in a statement that it “welcomes the announcement of the cessation of hostilities” and was “ready to support Lebanon and Israel in this new phase.”

Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

The Israeli government promised to retaliate immediately to any violations of the cease-fire, and officials are not encouraging residents to return yet. Those who do show up are generally there for a quick visit.

“It was devastating to see the damage to our house with my own eyes,” said Galit Doctorsh, 45, who used the truce as an opportunity to return home with her husband for the first time in more than six months, picking up warm clothing for their children. Their town, Metula, is just a few hundred yards from the Lebanese border and suffered significant damage during the war. Dozens of homes were in ruins. The Doctorshes’ car was destroyed by a strike that damaged the front of their home.

Nearly two months after Israel launched an invasion into southern Lebanon, a cease-fire agreement that took effect Wednesday offered hope for a return to normalcy in areas largely deserted for over a year, when Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in its war with Israel in Gaza.

While Israeli troops remain in Lebanon, the military has begun withdrawing some forces. Along a road leading to the border, several mud-covered tanks returned from the battlefield, surrounded by soldiers in military jackets who said they were both exhausted and relieved.

In Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, shops were still shuttered and streets were mostly empty. Yet a few more civilian cars were moving along its main road as a small trickle of residents seized the opportunity for visits considered too risky before Wednesday.

The clearest sign of the new reality was the quiet. There were no sirens warning of incoming rockets from Lebanon or the deafening blasts of Israeli artillery fire that had shaken the city day and night.

“I brought my 87-year-old mother to visit my father’s grave for the first time since the funeral,” said Lior Bez, 51, a member of Metula’s emergency squad. The town remained closed to visitors. Three soldiers manning the gate allowed entry only to residents, turning away others who braved the rain aiming to see the marks of war.

Residents were conflicted about the deal. While they said they looked forward to returning home, they remained skeptical that the agreement would ensure their safety. Some, however, were already preparing for more peaceful days.

Mr. Bez, who owns several getaway cabins damaged in a Hezbollah strike, was busy repairing them.

Some soldiers who fought in Lebanon took advantage of the calm to relax in a natural hot spring in the Golan Heights.

“Yesterday we were still engaged in intense military missions around the border,” said one, David Abokasis, “but now we can blow off some steam.”

Thirteen deaths came in an Israeli strike on Al-Tabaeen in Gaza City, a school complex that has been operating as a shelter, according to Palestinian Civil Defense, which runs emergency response in Gaza. Among the dead were six women, the agency said. A Hamas official, Fawzi Barhoum, said on Facebook that two of his sons also died in the strike.

The Israeli military said that it struck the school to kill Mumin al-Jabari, identifying him as a Hamas sniper who was operating out of a room in the building and had stockpiled weapons there. The military said it aimed to mitigate harm to civilians by using “precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”

The military said it also struck sites Hamas used for fighting and storing weapons in northern Gaza, after learning of them in interrogations of militants arrested in the area.

The cease-fire in Lebanon has left many Gazans feeling frustrated and hopeless. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appears far more reluctant to agree to a truce in Gaza, where Hamas continues to hold roughly 100 hostages, some of them dead. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to annihilate Hamas in Gaza, but the group has proved resilient, and fighting remains fierce nearly 14 months after the war began.

The result is a humanitarian disaster. More than 44,000 Gazans have died in the war and nearly 105,000 have been injured, according to the Gazan health ministry. The vast majority of the population has been displaced. United Nations officials have warned that hunger and disease are widespread, hospitals are hardly functioning and aid into parts of Gaza has significantly slowed, often restricted by Israeli forces or looted by violent mobs.

Supply shortages have complicated rescue operations. Mahmoud Basal, the spokesman for Palestinian Civil Defense, said that after the strike on Al-Tabaeen school, the agency’s teams could not send crews and equipment to dig victims out because of a lack of fuel. A donation of fuel allowed rescuers to arrive on Wednesday morning.

“We pulled out who we could,” Mr. Basal said. But three people, he said, would only have been reachable by removing the school’s roof, “and that was impossible.”

It was the second time the Israeli military struck Al-Tabaeen school complex. In August, when more than 2,000 displaced people were sheltering at the site, according to Civil Defense officials, a strike killed dozens out of 200 gathered for predawn prayers.

The Israeli military said it killed 30 militants in that strike. Then as now, the military said Hamas was exploiting civilians as human shields.

After 13 months of war, Hezbollah entered a cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday that it will struggle to convince anyone, other than its most fervent loyalists, is not in fact a defeat.

The 60-day truce, which is supposed to lay the groundwork for a more lasting cease-fire, comes after three months of withering Israeli attacks that have thrown the organization into disarray.

Deep intelligence infiltration enabled Israel to assassinate many senior leaders, including Hezbollah’s secretary general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel bombarded the group’s most loyal communities, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee and blowing up dozens of villages, ensuring that many people have no homes to immediately return to.

And Hezbollah’s fateful decision to consult no one before firing rockets at Israel, setting off a conflict that grew into Lebanon’s most deadly war in decades, has left it isolated in the country and in the wider Middle East, with Lebanon facing an exorbitant bill for reconstruction.

Many of Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon and elsewhere hope that the war has weakened it enough that it will no longer be able to impose its will on the country’s political system. But it remains unclear whether Lebanon’s other parties will now feel empowered to stand against it.

Hezbollah still has many thousands of fighters in Lebanon and commands the loyalty of a large share of the country’s Shiite Muslims.

After the cease-fire took hold on Wednesday, thousands of them poured back into Beirut’s southern suburbs to inspect the damage. Many honked their horns, waved yellow Hezbollah flags and said the fact that Hezbollah survived amounted to a win.

“Morale is high and there is victory,” said Osama Hamdan, who was cleaning out the shop where he sells water pumps. His family’s apartment had been damaged and would cost more than $5,000 to fix so they could move back in, he said.

“None of this is important,” he said. “What is important is the victory and the resistance. We are with them to the end.”

Yet Israel’s battering of Hezbollah will likely echo in Lebanon and across the region for years.

The group, which was founded in the 1980s with Iranian guidance to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, grew into the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It also served as a senior proxy force in the Iranian-backed network of anti-Israel militias known as the “axis of resistance.”

At Iran’s behest, it sent fighters to Syria to help quash a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, joined battles in Iraq against the Islamic State and sent experts to Yemen to enhance the capabilities of the Houthi militia there.

At the height of its power before the war, it was perceived to be such a military threat that Israel and the United States feared that a war with the group could set the region ablaze and devastate Israel.

But as the war escalated, Hezbollah’s allies failed to come to its aid in any effective way, undermining the credibility of Iran’s network. And Israel stepped up its attacks so fast — incapacitating thousands of Hezbollah members by detonating wireless devices and heavily bombing their communities — that Hezbollah found itself unable to mount a response close to what it had threatened for years.

Securing the cease-fire required the group to make serious concessions.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For months, as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s leaders swore that the battle would end only when Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

That demand is nowhere to be found in the new cease-fire, leaving Israel free to continue its quest to destroy Hamas.

The new cease-fire also gives an oversight role to the United States, which Iran and Hezbollah have long railed against for its staunch support for Israel. Iran and Hezbollah would have only accepted such an arrangement if they were desperate to stop the war, analysts said.

“It indicates the degree to which Iran is concerned and worried about its new vulnerability and the incoming Trump administration,” said Paul Salem, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a think tank.

Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border also deterred Israel from attacking Iran, because of fears that Hezbollah would bombard northern Israel in response. That threat has been drastically reduced, depriving Iran of a key defense. Iran and Israel have exchanged direct fire in recent months but Iran has yet to respond to Israel’s most recent bombardment, apparently to avoid a broader war.

“The shoe that hasn’t fallen yet is the obvious fact that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and Iran,” Mr. Salem said. “Israel can attack Iran at will and Iran cannot do the same.”

In Lebanon, too, Hezbollah is likely to face an array of economic, social and political challenges if the cease-fire holds.

For years, it justified its arsenal to other Lebanese as essential to defend the country against Israeli attacks. Now, it has not only failed in that defense but must answer to fellow Lebanese who are angry that it single-handedly dragged the country into a costly war that no one else wanted.

“Hezbollah is worried about the internal dynamics in the country,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There are many people who are not happy with what happened, and not just opponents but people in Hezbollah’s orbit.”

The war has displaced 1.2 million people, the government says, mostly Shiite Muslims from Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Many of them are now sheltering in areas dominated by other sects — Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druse — many of whom do not want them to stay and fear that Hezbollah members could draw Israeli fire.

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will pose a major challenge to Lebanon, whose economy was in crisis before the fighting began, and to Hezbollah, whose supporters have been the hardest hit.

A World Bank report this month estimated that nearly 100,000 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and about 166,000 people had lost their jobs in the war. It estimated the total physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Given Iran’s own economic troubles and Hezbollah’s unpopularity with other Middle Eastern governments, it is unclear who may contribute funds for reconstruction, and with what conditions.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s remaining public figures have already begun marketing the cease-fire as a victory, saying their fighters kept firing missiles, rockets and drones into Israel and valiantly confronted the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon.

“From now, we confirm that the resistance will remain, will continue, will carry on,” Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese parliamentarian from Hezbollah, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

In fact, Hezbollah’s social service arms were already prepared to help the displaced return home, he said.

“When Israel’s aggression against Lebanon ends, then the resistance that was fighting in the battlefield will itself be working to help its people to return and to rebuild,” he said.

“France will comply with its international obligations,” the ministry said in a statement. But it added that while the Rome Statute — the 1998 treaty that established the court — demands “full cooperation” with the court, it also says that a state “cannot be required to act inconsistently with its obligations under international law with respect to the immunities of states not party to the I.C.C.”

The ministry added, “Such immunities apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the other ministers concerned and will have to be taken into account should the I.C.C. request of us their arrest and surrender.”

The court’s warrant, which accuses Mr. Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, immediately confronted governments around the world with a vexing question of whether to detain the prime minister. Mr. Netanyahu is the first leader of a modern Western democracy to be accused of war crimes by the court and — unlike other leaders targeted by the court — he is a close ally of the United States and many other countries.

Some I.C.C. members, like Ireland, have taken a firm line on the arrest warrants, saying Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on their soil. But others, like Italy, have also raised questions about the feasibility and legality of an arrest.

The court warrants have drawn outrage in Israel, where the authorities said on Wednesday that they would appeal them before the court and ask for a delay in their execution.

“Israel’s notice of appeal reveals in detail how far-fetched and without any factual or legal basis the decision to issue the arrest warrants was,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

President Emmanuel Macron and Mr. Netanyahu have a strained relationship, but France has played a key role in trying to keep the conflicts in the Middle East from spiraling out of control, especially in Lebanon. The French Foreign Ministry’s statement came a day after France and the United States helped broker a cease-fire to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

France and Israel are “two democracies committed to the rule of law” that have a “longstanding friendship,” the French ministry said, adding that France would continue to work “in close cooperation” with Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities.

Some of Mr. Macron’s opponents criticized the ministry’s position and suggested it was politically motivated, with the aim of securing the cease-fire in Lebanon.

“France has once again bowed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands, choosing him over international justice,” Marine Tondelier, the leader of France’s Green party, said on X.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, said on Franceinfo radio on Wednesday that “France is very attached to international justice” and that “France, as always, will apply international law.”

But Mr. Barrot did not directly answer when asked if Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on French soil, and he also said that the Rome Statute provided “immunity for certain leaders.”

“The final decision rests with the judicial authorities,” he added, suggesting that Mr. Macron’s government would let French courts rule on the validity of the arrest warrant before potentially enforcing it.

French officials have not publicly laid out which parts of the court’s founding treaty were applicable to Mr. Netanyahu’s situation. The Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

The scope of leaders’ immunity before international courts has long been a subject of intense debates, and there is still no consensus on the issue among scholars, judges or other authorities. But with accusations of atrocities in the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East in recent years, countries and activists have increasingly called for leaders to be held accountable under international criminal law.

Article 27 of the Rome Statute says that it applies to all officials, including heads of state or government, and that “immunities or special procedural rules which may attach to the official capacity of a person, whether under national or international law, shall not bar the court from exercising its jurisdiction over such a person.”

But Article 98 of the statute says that the court “may not proceed with a request for surrender or assistance” that would require a state to “act inconsistently with its obligations under international law” relative to the diplomatic immunity of a person.

Some judges and prosecutors have argued that diplomatic immunity under that article is restricted and does not include large-scale crimes under international law.

France seemed to take a far firmer stance toward President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the target of another arrest warrant issued by the court. Russia, like Israel and the United States, is not a member of the court.

Commenting on Mr. Putin’s recent visit to Mongolia, which is also an I.C.C. member, the French foreign ministry has said that each member nation was obliged to cooperate with the court “and execute the arrest warrants it issues.”

But French authorities voiced full-throated support for the arrest warrant against Mr. Putin when it was issued last year, calling it a “landmark” decision and adding that “no one responsible for crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, whatever their status, should escape justice.”

Philippe Dam, the European Union director for Human Rights Watch, said on X that the ministry’s statement about Mr. Netanyahu was “absurdly insane.”

“Does this also apply to Russia’s Putin?” he asked, adding that French officials were “weakening France’s commitments to justice and its credibility on the world stage.”

Several experts on international law said that as an I.C.C. member, France should not defy the court’s judgment simply because it disagreed with it. France would undermine the court if it were to ignore its obligations, said Stephen J. Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador and international prosecutor.

French courts could also come to their own conclusions, he added, noting that a French appeals court had recently found that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — which is not a member of the I.C.C. — could be tried in France for the use of chemical weapons against Syrians in 2013. Prosecutors have asked France’s highest court to review that ruling.

But some experts also said it appeared unlikely that Mr. Netanyahu would risk setting foot in France or other European nations.

“I don’t think any indicted officials will come to Europe anyway because of the risks,” said Emmanuel Altit, a French lawyer involved in international cases. “The legal issues around arrests are open to debate and nobody knows what sealed arrest warrants may exist.”

And even if the French government tried to reassure such officials, they may not feel confident that they could avoid detention, said William Schabas, a scholar of international law.

“The French justice system is independent and what it might do is unpredictable,” he said.

Ephrat Livni contributed reporting from Washington.

Palestinians there say they have lost hope that the war will ever end.

Majed Abu Amra, a 26-year-old displaced from his home and living in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, said he was frustrated that the international community had managed to secure a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, while Gazans were still trying to survive relentless Israeli bombardment.

“There is no global pressure to achieve an agreement here,” he said. “It is not only the occupation that is killing us — the world is complicit in what we are suffering,” Mr. Abu Amra added, referring to the presence of Israeli forces in Gaza.

“The blood of Gazans has become cheap,” he said.

A lasting cease-fire has proved harder to reach in Gaza because the hostages held by Hamas give it more leverage in negotiations, and because any deal with the group could create political peril for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

That leaves Gazans heading into a second straight winter of war. United Nations agencies have repeatedly warned that Gazans face a worsening crisis, with falling temperatures adding to the plight of hundreds of thousands living in makeshift shelters. The war has displaced the majority of the enclave’s 2.2 million people, many of them multiple times.

“Another winter in Gaza. How to describe misery on top of a human tragedy?” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on social media on Tuesday, renewing his pleas for a cease-fire in Gaza and for more humanitarian aid to be allowed into the territory.

Mohammed Ahmed, a 23-year-old businessman displaced from Gaza City to Deir al Balah with his family, said they felt “betrayed by the truce” reached between Israel and Hezbollah, which began attacking Israel in October 2023 in support of Hamas. He said he believed it would lead to an escalation of the bombardment in Gaza, as Israel’s military would intensify its focus there.

“We’re disappointed with this news because we will be alone in facing the occupation without anyone to support us or relieve the pressure from us,” he said.

Ahmed Al-Mashharawi, a 26-year-old father of two in northern Gaza, said he had similar fears.

“Last night it felt like an earthquake,” he said of the intensity of the Israeli airstrikes. “My children woke up from the bombardment and were terrified. I thought the cease-fire had happened and they had withdrawn the army from Lebanon and brought it to Gaza.”

Abdul Aziz Said, a 33-year-old social worker, said that he was glad a cease-fire had been reached in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah should never have started its hostilities in support of Hamas.

“I want to see war in Lebanon end, even though that might not be the best thing for the Gaza war, as Israel will be freed up to focus on Gaza,” he said. “But let’s hope lives can be saved in Lebanon at least.”

Rawya Ahmed Al-Nabih, a 42-year-old who has been displaced multiple times, also welcomed the news but said she saw no end in sight to the plight of Palestinians.

“We need the attention of all Arab countries and the whole world to turn to the tragedy of the Palestinian people, because our suffering has become enormous,” she said.

She said she hoped that “a cease-fire will be achieved in Gaza as well, because we have the right to live in peace like the rest of the peoples of the world.”

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

He failed to see how the war had done anyone any good.

“We did not win. We lost,” he said. “No one gained anything from any of this.”

Across Lebanon, people greeted the cease-fire that ended the country’s deadliest war in three decades with profound relief, hoping that both sides would stick to it and allow some sense of normalcy to return.

For many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who had fled Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion, it provided a chance to return home and take stock of what they had lost.

Many found homes that would require forbiddingly costly repairs to make them livable again. Some found no homes at all, just piles of concrete and twisted metal with their possessions somewhere beneath.

In one hard-hit neighborhood in the capital, Beirut, Zubaida Amru, 37, stood atop such a pile, looking for her belongings. She spotted her family’s oven, destroyed, and furniture from her late father’s bedroom.

“My whole life was here,” she said. But now, that life was gone. “It is not just your possessions. It’s the way that you felt walking through your own home.”

Throughout the war, Israel focused its attacks on predominantly Shiite Muslim communities near Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley. These were places where Hezbollah operated freely, providing social services and enjoying significant support for what it called its armed “resistance” against Israel.

Hezbollah started the conflict by firing on Israeli troops in support of Hamas in Gaza after that group’s deadly assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Even though the war killed more than 3,800 people in Lebanon, displaced more than a million others and caused billions of dollars in economic losses, Hezbollah and its supporters on Wednesday portrayed it as a win.

“The cease-fire, of course, is a victory for the blood of the martyrs,” said Manal Hamadeh, 49, referring to Hezbollah militants who died fighting Israel.

Her beauty shop supply business in Beirut was destroyed in an airstrike. But she said the most painful loss was Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for 32 years before Israel assassinated him in September.

Many of the displaced came from southern Lebanon and loaded up their cars on Wednesday to head back that way. Heavy traffic clogged the highway south. Cars were loaded with the suitcases, mattresses and blankets that people had grabbed when they fled or received in the shelters where they had spent the war.

A bakery along the road blared songs by the Lebanese diva Fairouz, a familiar and comforting soundtrack in the country, and gave out cookies with tiny banners that read, “Smile, better days are coming.”

But the sense of jubilation for returning home faded as people drove further south, passing piles of wreckage where buildings once stood and storefronts shattered by blasts.

At a Lebanese Army checkpoint at the entrance to the southern city of Sidon, soldiers distributed fliers warning not to touch any unexploded bombs people might find near their homes.

“We are happy now, but I know it won’t last,” said Maryam Shoaib, 42, who had stopped for lunch with her relatives in Sidon before heading to their home further south.

“Heartbreak awaits us in the village,” she said.

Samia el Zein, 53, said that she, too, had hit the road in the morning in a good mood, thrilled at the thought of returning to her own bed. But as soon as she arrived in her neighborhood in Tyre, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast, her chest tightened and tears rolled down her face.

“I’m sad. I’m happy. I don’t know,” she said. “Look at all the destruction.”

As she carried her bags into the entry hall of her apartment, glass from the broken front door crunched under her feet. Inside, the sliding glass doors that once opened onto a large balcony were shattered and curtain rods from the windows were flung across the floor.

Her brother, Mohammad el Zein, 55, had arrived earlier and swept the shards of glass into neat piles. On the dining room table, he had organized the remains of everything he found: plates, teapots, pans, cups and lamps, some of which he hoped to salvage.

His father’s collection of antique ceramic pots was intact — a tiny miracle, he said.

Still, he and his sister felt uneasy, worried that the bombardment could resume at any time.

“We’re not feeling the victory,” Mr. Zein said. “I don’t think it’s over yet.”

Elsewhere in Tyre, some families waved yellow Hezbollah flags from their car windows and young men who appeared to be from the group’s civil defense force flashed peace signs and cheered at the passing cars.

That was too much for Ousama Aoudeh, 60.

“What victory? Look at the destruction. Look at all the death,” she said. “How can anyone say this is a victory? We were defeated.”

She was the first member of her family to return to Tyre and was pleased to find her apartment still standing, she said.

But her daughter’s building had been cleaved in half and a blast had thrown two cars on top of the building’s remains, with windshields shattered and doors hanging from their hinges. Mattresses still wrapped in purple and green bedsheets stuck out of the rubble.

“I was watching the news from Tyre on TV this whole time. But seeing it for myself, I can’t believe it,” she said, taking in the crushed cars and tangled piles of electric wires as men elsewhere in the neighborhood fired celebratory gunshots.

“There’s no electricity. These buildings are all gone,” she said. “Why are they shooting? What do they have to celebrate?”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Tyre and Dayana Iwaza from Beirut.

“We don’t know what we will be returning to,” said Mr. Arbel, 77. Families who left temporarily and enrolled their children in schools elsewhere, he noted, might choose to stay away permanently.

The cease-fire agreement has cast a light on what lies ahead for tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel who have been moving between hotels, rentals and friends’ and relatives’ homes for more than a year.

It has made those residents wonder about the social fabric of their communities and whether they should return home at all. Some express worry that it is still not safe to go back, while others sound more hopeful.

Orly Gavishi-Sotto said that she, her husband and three daughters hoped to return to Hanita, a hilltop kibbutz with a view of the Mediterranean Sea, but added that she was worried the deal would leave Hezbollah in a position in which it can still threaten Israelis.

“Do I believe in UNIFIL and the Lebanese military? No,” Ms. Gavishi-Sotto, 46, said, referring to the United Nations peacekeepers and the U.S.-backed Lebanese armed forces, the entities that the agreement makes responsible for keeping Hezbollah out of the border region in Lebanon.

Referring to the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, she added: “When we tried that after the last war, Hezbollah armed itself and built tunnels. What will be different this time?”

Hezbollah started firing at Israeli positions in northern Israel more than a year ago in solidarity with Hamas, its ally that ignited the war in Gaza. In the succeeding months, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged cross-border fire, but Israeli forces exponentially increased their attacks against the Lebanese militant group in September and invaded southern Lebanon in October. Hezbollah responded by firing deeper into Israel.

The cease-fire deal calls for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to move north, in effect creating a buffer zone between the two sides.

Avichai Stern, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, a city near the border, criticized the agreement and predicted that many residents would elect not to return.

“I don’t dispute that we’ve achieved a lot in the war. But what happens the minute we withdraw?” Mr. Stern said in an interview late Tuesday. “They’ll return to the same place, just a minute from the border, with a clear line of sight — ready to conquer northern Israel.”

Mr. Arbel, however, said he believed that Israel would be making a mistake if its forces pushed deeper into Lebanon, risking becoming entangled in a war of attrition. The most important thing, he said, was whether Israel would act with force against any attempt by Hezbollah to reconstitute itself near the border.

“This is the main question now,” he said.

Lior Shelef, 42, a resident of Kibbutz Snir in the Galilee Panhandle, said the Israeli military had achieved as much as it could in Lebanon.

“We have accomplished what we came in to do,” he said. “Nothing matters more to me than bringing my family back to Snir, back to our home.”

Still, he said that his family would not return to the kibbutz immediately, and he predicted that it would take at least a few months to make the transition back.

Idan Ishach Erez returned months ago to Betzet, a moshav, or cooperative village, just over a mile from Lebanon, but she said that she hoped the cease-fire would finally bring quiet for her family.

“We would like to hear the birds chirping outside, not rocket sirens,” said Ms. Ishach Erez, 42, an owner of a dried fruit factory.

Rockets and drones fired by Hezbollah have set off air raid sirens in northern Israel for more than a year, sometimes several times in the same town in a single day.

Ms. Ishach Erez said that she was conflicted about whether Israel had made the right decision in agreeing to a cease-fire.

“If you ask me in general, I think we still could have accomplished more,” she said. “But if you ask me as a mother, it was time to bring our kids home.”

Myra Noveck and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting to this article.

The truce in Lebanon was possible in part because Hezbollah — weakened by months of assassinations and battlefield losses — had lost its leverage at the negotiating table. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could afford to compromise because a deal in Lebanon would not significantly weaken his grip on power at home.

A breakthrough in Gaza is harder to achieve because Hamas still holds roughly 100 hostages, a significant trump card that allows the group’s top negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, to maintain a hard-line negotiating position. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu cannot compromise with Hamas because doing so might collapse his ruling coalition, forcing early elections.

Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies, many of whom hope to settle Gaza with Jewish civilians after the war, have threatened to abandon his alliance if the conflict there ends without Hamas’s complete defeat. When it came to Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu was under less domestic pressure to deliver a knockout blow to Hezbollah, even if many Israelis — including much of his base — remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat posed by the group.

“The Lebanon deal happened because Netanyahu wanted it and Hezbollah needed it — and because it wasn’t a deal breaker for Netanyahu’s coalition,” said Aaron David Miller, an American analyst and former negotiator in previous Mideast peace talks. “The Gaza deal is different,” he said.

Still, both U.S. and Israeli leaders expressed optimism that the Lebanon deal could be a turning point.

In announcing the Lebanon truce on Tuesday, President Biden said he hoped the agreement would lead to renewed momentum in parallel negotiations over Gaza. He repeated that promise in a social media post on Wednesday, pledging “another push” for a Gaza deal, even though talks have been stalled for months.

In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech on Tuesday night. “With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own. We will increase our pressure on Hamas and that will help us in our sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”

But Palestinian analysts said that Hamas, having already weathered many serious setbacks over the past year, was unlikely to suddenly give up the hostages or relinquish power in Gaza. Though Hamas’s leadership has been decimated and ordinary Gazans yearn for an end to the suffering, the group’s remaining leaders are holding out for a deal that would allow the group to survive the war intact.

To that end, Hamas issued a statement on Wednesday, shortly after the Lebanon truce took hold, in which it repeated its core demand for Israel to permanently withdraw from Gaza. Since the killing last month of Yahya Sinwar, the group’s strongman leader, Hamas has said that it is being governed by a five-person leadership council — which appears to have maintained Mr. Sinwar’s aversion to compromise.

“I really do not think the cease-fire in Lebanon will have any impact on Gaza,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political scientist displaced from his home in Gaza City. There is “no light at the end of the black tunnel for Gaza,” he added.

Gaza is partly stuck in limbo because the Israeli military, despite decimating much of the enclave and killing tens of thousands of people, has avoided holding and governing most of the land it has captured.

Instead, Israeli forces have usually retreated soon after defeating local Hamas battalions, allowing the group’s surviving members to return to fill the vacuum.

Ending that cycle, either through a diplomatic compromise or a decisive battlefield victory, would require Mr. Netanyahu to set out a plan for Gaza’s postwar future, something he has been reluctant to do. That is partly because it would force him to choose between the goals of his domestic partners and those of his potential foreign allies.

Saudi Arabia has said it could normalize its ties with Israel if Israel allows the formation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. But Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition partners oppose a Palestinian state.

A deal with Saudi Arabia would give Mr. Netanyahu a landmark foreign policy victory, somewhat salvaging his legacy domestically after presiding over one of the biggest security failures in Israeli history — the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

But the collapse of his coalition would endanger his domestic influence, potentially making Mr. Netanyahu more vulnerable to an ongoing corruption investigation. Since 2020, Mr. Netanyahu has stood trial on charges of bribery and fraud, accusations that he strongly denies.

Against that backdrop, some analysts said, Mr. Netanyahu will be even warier of angering his base, particularly after spending political capital on a Lebanon deal.

He is now “less likely” to cede ground over Gaza, according to Michael Koplow, an analyst at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.

“If anything this will cause them to ramp up the pressure on him even more not to let up on Hamas in ways they would consider to be premature,” Mr. Koplow said.

Still, pressure works both ways.

Israeli commentators have speculated that Mr. Netanyahu agreed to compromise in Lebanon because he feared that Mr. Biden might freeze arms supplies or withdraw diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations Security Council. (In a press briefing on Tuesday, a senior Biden administration official denied it had made such a threat.)

In the final weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Obama administration broke with U.S. diplomatic policy and declined to veto a U.N. resolution that criticized Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“That was a big trauma for Netanyahu and he is afraid that it will happen again under Biden,” said Mazal Mualem, a biographer of Mr. Netanyahu and a commentator on Israeli politics. “He knows there are still two months left in the Biden administration and he needs to be careful,” she added.

Now, some Israelis hope that Mr. Netanyahu, having brushed off his supporters’ opposition to a deal in Lebanon, will be motivated to do the same with a compromise in Gaza.

For the families of hostages held in Gaza, a diplomatic arrangement appears to be their relatives’ best chance of leaving the territory alive — and they are now amplifying their calls for a hostage release deal.

For now, though, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have bought himself some time, according to Ms. Mualem, the prime minister’s biographer.

“Netanyahu is always buying time and maneuvering,” Ms. Mualem said. “Yesterday, he bought time until President Trump takes office.”

On Tuesday, in anticipation of a new deal, UNIFIL said in a statement that it supported a truce and would fulfill its mission “impartially,” noting that “responsibility for implementing the mandate rests with the parties involved.”

The force, which has been in Lebanon for more than four decades, has a stake in keeping the peace, beyond doing its job. Peacekeepers are in personal danger and have come under fire from both sides over the last two months of fighting.

On Tuesday, Israel kept up intense airstrikes in southern Lebanon, including in the town of Naqoura, where the peacekeeping mission is based. The UNIFIL spokesman, Andrea Tenenti, who was sheltering in a bunker as bombs pummeled the area, affirmed that the peacekeepers had no intention of leaving.

Last week, UNIFIL said four Italian peacekeepers had been injured by rockets that were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups,” and it blamed “non-state actors” for an earlier strike that had injured four Ghanaians. In October, Israeli soldiers fired on UNIFIL members at an observation post, the group said. And earlier this month, the force accused the Israeli military of taking a series of “deliberate and direct actions” against peacekeepers and their positions.

“Despite the unacceptable pressures being exerted on the mission through various channels, peacekeepers will continue to undertake our mandated monitoring and reporting tasks under Resolution 1701,” UNIFIL said, referring to the 2006 truce deal.

The U.N. Security Council created UNIFIL in 1978 to monitor Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and help the Lebanese government restore security and authority after a three-month invasion by Israel. The incursion was partly in response to an attack in Israel by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon who had landed by sea and commandeered a bus, killing 35 Israelis and an American. When Israel withdrew, it handed control of southern Lebanon to a Lebanese Christian militia, and oversight was given to the U.N. peacekeeping force.

Resolution 1701 expanded the peacekeepers’ mandate. UNIFIL was to monitor the cease-fire; support the Lebanese Army, which is not a party to Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel; and help provide humanitarian assistance to civilians and displaced populations.

That deal called on Israeli troops to withdraw from southern Lebanon to an area in the Golan Heights below what is known as the Blue Line. Hezbollah was to withdraw north of the Litani River in Lebanon. The area in between would become a buffer zone that the peacekeeping force would monitor for violations by either party.

The latest deal is based on a similar arrangement, and it will still require UNIFIL to oversee and report violations. But there are new developments meant to address the failings of Resolution 1701, which was never fully put into effect, largely because the Lebanese Army did not or could not force Hezbollah — also a political party with significant power in the Lebanese government — out of southern Lebanon.

Among the new twists, an international committee, including two countries that helped broker the latest deal, the United States and France, will report any violations of the commitments that the countries have made in the latest agreement. Israel and Lebanon will report violations to both UNIFIL and this committee.

The agreement will “create the conditions to restore lasting calm and allow residents in both countries to return safely to their homes,” President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a joint statement announcing the cease-fire on Tuesday. They pledged that their countries would “work with Israel and Lebanon to ensure this arrangement is fully implemented, and enforced, and remain determined to prevent this conflict from becoming another cycle of violence.”

Euan Ward, Eve Sampson and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.