The city was once the second largest in southern Lebanon, a pulsing trade hub where tens of thousands packed into a centuries-old bazaar, apartment blocks, coffee shops and a famed weekly farmer’s market.
Over the years, it came to symbolize southern Lebanon’s prosperous rise since the end of a long civil war.
Now, Nabatieh is deserted.
Its streets are empty, its storefronts shuttered or mangled from airstrikes. Israeli drones fly low enough that their cross-shaped silhouettes can be picked out against the sky.
The new front line between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli forces is visible just a few miles south, where the thuds of artillery and the crashing clap of airstrikes send plumes of gray smoke curling up across the hillside.
This is what a cease-fire looks like in Lebanon.
“It’s even worse these days than before the cease-fire,” said Kareem Saleh, 32, a member of the government’s civil defense crew in Nabatieh. “We wish we were living the war before the cease-fire.”
Mr. Saleh is one of only a handful of residents left in Nabatieh since Israel ramped up its military offensive in southern Lebanon in recent days, and the tenuous truce effectively collapsed.
Over the past two weeks, the Israeli military has pushed deeper into the country and intensified its bombardment of the south and east.
Hezbollah has responded with antitank missiles and explosive “first-person-view” drones that have wounded and killed dozens of Israeli soldiers.
The escalation in Lebanon has become a flashpoint in the larger conflict consuming the region, and threatens to torpedo the United States peace talks with Iran.
Iran has predicated those talks on an end to the war in Lebanon, from which Hezbollah, its ally, opened fire on Israel after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran in late February. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has declared his intent to continue the military campaign in Lebanon, no matter the cost.
Those stances collided on Sunday when Israeli forces struck the Dahiya neighborhood on Beirut’s southern outskirts, prompting a retaliatory Iranian missile barrage on Israel. Israel then responded with a wave of bombardment in Iran.
Both countries have since signaled that they would wind down that fighting, but in Lebanon the war has raged on. Now, it is once again seesawing between promises of new truces and the brink of all-out war.
That dynamic is on full display in Nabatieh.
Israel issued an evacuation warning for the entire city in late May as it escalated its offensive, the first such sweeping warning for Nabatieh since the war began.
Days later, Israeli forces seized Beaufort Castle, a 12th-century fortress on a hilltop just south of Nabatieh, planting an Israeli flag that could be seen from the city. It is the forward-most point Israeli forces have captured since this war began.
The Israeli warning and encroaching frontline stirred panic in the city. Over the past week, a team of rescue workers accompanied by the Lebanese Army has driven through the streets, escorting residents too afraid to evacuate alone — and pleading with those who refused to leave.
“The bombings, the drones, the warplanes — this has been much, much harder to endure than any war before,” said Muhammad Cham, 61.
Mr. Cham, a retired lab technician, is one of the few residents who have chosen to remain in the city. Earlier in the war, when the bombardment grew especially heavy, he would sleep in his car outside the city’s main public hospital, joining dozens of others who saw it as a refuge from Israeli strikes.
But since the Israeli campaign intensified, even the outskirts of the Nabih Berri Hospital no longer seem safe. Just over a week ago, Mr. Cham was approaching the hospital gate to collect medicine around 7 a.m. when an Israeli airstrike hit nearby, throwing him to the ground and propelling shrapnel into his chest and skull.
“I felt like there was burning fire in my body, that’s it, that’s all I remember,” he said.
Mr. Cham has since been admitted to the hospital he once sought out for safety, and is debating whether to return home or look for room in a shelter further north.
Most of the staff’s families began living there when the war broke out, but in recent weeks they have left to seek shelter in Beirut, the capital, or in the nearby city of Sidon. A white dog now wanders the halls, along with the few dozen staff members and a handful of patients.
“No one is leaving the hospital, everyone is scared,” said Dr. Mustafa Hamza, a neurosurgeon.
His wife, who is in Beirut, calls constantly to check in on him.
After every night of heavy bombardment, Dr. Hamza looks from an isolation-room window toward his home on a nearby hillside to see if it is still standing. The chickens in his garden are dead and the eggplant, lentil and apple tree orchards have withered. He does not know what became of his three cats, he said.
“Why should we live like this?” he said one recent morning. “We are heartbroken.”
On Thursday, the United States announced that the Lebanese government — which does not control Hezbollah — and Israel had reached a new cease-fire agreement. But for many in southern Lebanon, it looked like little more than political theater.
“Every night we hear that there will be a new cease-fire, and then every morning there are new strikes,” said Ali Omeiss, 37, another doctor at Nabih Berri Hospital.
The deal would have required Hezbollah to unilaterally stop all attacks while placing no explicit obligations on Israel, such as withdrawing its forces from southern Lebanon.
Those terms drew criticism across Lebanon’s political spectrum. Even supporters of the government asked why President Joseph Aoun would endorse such a deal.
A day later, Hezbollah rejected it, and immediately Israeli bombardment near Nabatieh intensified. Every few minutes, the thuds of artillery and nearby airstrikes rang out across the city.
Hassan Shatan, 52, watched on a hillside on the city’s northern edge, the roar of warplanes echoing overhead.
“Here we go,” he said, looking as the plumes of gray smoke billowed into the sky.
Mr. Shatan looked resigned.
“We are used to this now,” he said. “We don’t expect this war to end anytime soon.”
