THE welcome to my home town was certainly warm, but not the kind I would have expected from my family and friends. As we drove into Nabatiyeh, a terrifyingly loud blast blew our ageing 1970s Mercedes sideways.

Abu Ali, my driver, grappled with the steering wheel. We screeched to a halt and scrambled out of the car fearing another blast. Two or three seconds later a bomb exploded about 70 yards from us.

A plume of black smoke rose above a vegetable patch. We ventured forward to see what the target was, but the roar of an F-16, flying low and fast, made us jump back into the car and Abu Ali took off with the skill of a Formula One driver.

In Nabatiyeh’s old town my heart sank at the sight of the devastation. Here my family and I had sat last summer enjoying the sunshine, the food and the warmth of the people; now it lay in ruins.

Like most villages and towns in south Lebanon, Nabatiyeh had been bombarded for the past month. It was the fifth time since 1978. The market was eerily silent, its stalls wrecked.

The delicious smells I remembered, of skewered lamb slowly cooking on charcoal, fresh vegetables and baked bread, had been blotted out by the pungent odour of uncollected rubbish and rotting fruit oozing out of boxes abandoned by their owners as they fled north to the relative safety of Sidon and Beirut.

The surrounding buildings had been flattened and the few still standing were ravaged, exposing the occasional pink bathroom sink still intact.

Under the old apartments remnants of shops were barely recognisable. Bits of plastic buckets from a hardware store, torn dresses from a boutique and breeze blocks and twisted metal covered with grey dust littered the area.

As I surveyed the damage, an old, hunched woman appeared suddenly at the top of the street. “All this,” she waved as she tiptoed across the rubble, “is worthy of Nasrallah (the Hezbollah leader) and our brave mouqawama (resistance).”

The town clock had stopped at 8 on the morning the Israelis first attacked Nabatiyeh’s market. Stray cats fought over morsels of food in its shadow, amid the incessant buzz of Israeli drones and the dull thuds of jets dropping their deadly loads.

I came across a group of men sipping tea at the entrance to a shop. They eyed me suspiciously and asked where I was from. “Nabatiyeh,” I replied. Not until I gave them my family name did they smile.

Our family was the oldest and once the largest here. But the ancestral home was sold a few years ago after it had been damaged beyond repair during the Israeli invasion of 1982, and I decided not to visit it.

Instead, I went to the Hay al-Bayad neighbourhood. At a newsagent’s Kamel, 47, was smoking a pipe, his shop overflowing with outdated magazines but devoid of customers. Most of the 80,000 residents have fled, but Kamel was determined to stay. “Why should I leave? That is exactly what they want us to do,” he said.

“Look around you, they have destroyed much of Nabatiyeh, but that is all they can do, destroy people’s homes and livelihoods. They can’t destroy our spirit and that is what they don’t understand and why they will never win this war.”