THE people of south Lebanon returned home over the weekend in lines of battered old Mercedes, BMWs and mini vans, their back seats filled with young children and their belongings.
The cars had started moving south on the stroke of the 4 a.m. ceasefire deadline on Saturday. By late Saturday morning, houses and shops were reopening and business was recommencing throughout the area.
Cattle were being slaughtered, skinned and boned in the streets outside butcher shops in the roadside villages up into the mountains above Tyre. By Saturday afternoon, groups of old men were already sitting around tables outside cafes, smoking and playing cards. The Lebanese civil authorities momentarily abandoned the reconstruction task in Beirut and moved south to open dozens of roads cratered by Israeli bombs.
By early Saturday evening, all the main roads were reopened and cars were bumping over the loose filling on their way home, passing wrecked houses and burnt out cars.
Four massive craters which had blocked the road from the coast at Tyre - stopping relief to the people of the interior trapped during the bombardment were filled by bulldozers and the route cleared by mid afternoon.
On the road south of Tyre, returning refugees stopped at the junction where a woman, her three children and another child were killed by a missile fired from an Israeli helicopter into the civilian ambulance in which they were travelling.
Soldiers and a group of journalists were on hand at the home of the Nassarawdena family in Din Atyr when the family arrived back in a van and an old Volvo Estate car piled with mattresses and other belongings.
Both vehicles were brimming with children, peering expectantly around the familiar turn in the road to their home.
Four Israeli bombs had struck the three adjoining houses in which the extended Nassarawdena family lived. The grandparents' four storey home had almost completely caved in. The outer walls of the other two houses were intact, but their interiors were a shambles, with furniture and kitchen equipment thrown on to the road.
The children's expressions turned to shock and incomprehension as they stared at what was left of their home.
The Israeli bomber pilots, the UN soldiers concluded, had been trying to bomb the houses outwards on to the road in order to block traffic.
The Nassarawdenas, like virtually every other ordinary family here, have no access to insurance to cover their loss. They, their extended family and friends, will have to come up with the money to rebuild. Until that is done, they will continue to live like refugees in their own homeland.
On the same road, a short distance from the houses, other returning families were forced to drive past two perfectly drilled holes, about two feet wide, where two 500 kg delay fused bombs had been dropped and driven into the road and downwards, out of sight into the rocky clay beneath.
Some time in the next few days, UN ordnance officers will have to deal with these bombs unless the time delay fuses reawaken beforehand. Every person of adult age who drove past the cylindrical holes knew they could explode at any minute.
Identical scenes were taking place all over the area.
In the village of Shaqura, the local dentist's house had literally been lifted from its site by a huge bomb and thrown into the street. Telephone wires were hanging like vines along the main street.
A taxi driver's three storey house had been levelled to a pile of rubble about eight feet high. The elderly man showed journalists the fin from the American manufactured rocket which had destroyed his home.
The local clinic, which recently received £2,000 as a gift from the Irish State towards a scanner in the maternity ward, had been raked by helicopter rocket and cannon fire.
Yesterday, the funeral of two local men, one a local Hizbullah figure, took place in the village. A mile away in the neighbouring village of Jimey Jimay, Irish and Norwegian engineers with heavy lifting equipment worked through the afternoon heat, searching the remains of another bombed house looking for the body of a 32 year old woman who had died there along with a man and a teenage girl.
Beside the house, in what had once been a garden, there was a crater the size of a swimming pool where one of the 1,437 Israeli bombs had struck.
Last night, a kind of normality was returning to south Lebanon. Soldiers from the Irish 78th Unifil Battalion, which served throughout the bombardment, were making preparations to fly home from Beirut tomorrow. In the still evening air, the sound of prayers in the surrounding villages could be heard from the muezzin calling from the mosque towers.
The hope here is that there will be peace for some time at least. Local UN officers expect that the Hizbullah guerrillas in the area will refrain from any attacks on the Israeli occupied territory of their country for at least two weeks while the local farmers sow their tobacco crop.