"You don't call it a camp," says my fixer Halima as I try to thread our SUV through Beirut traffic.
The streets only have two settings, speed or gridlock. Driving here rewards aggression and punishes hesitation. I'm doing both at the wrong times. Mercifully, a knot of traffic untangles and we begin moving.
Not a traffic law in sight but everyone has a general understanding they want to get where they are going without dying or damaging their car.
Somehow this works.
We pass Mosques and med-spas. Churches and coffee shops. Three blocks of opulence punctuated by scars of civil war. Flocks of motor bikes. Bubbling water pipes. The smell gasoline and tea. A cat searching the sidewalk for a scratch or a snack. An Israeli drone whining over head
All of it normal. All of it not.
"What do I call the place that refugees stay?"
"We don't call them refugees either."
"How should I talk about the people who left their homes?”
Halima considers for a moment and mumbles to herself in Arabic, then in French, testing out the right vocabulary.
"We don't really have the right word in English." We settle on the term location for displaced families. Language matters here. Much more than it might seem.
See, to call them refugees would be to assume that they were never going home. To say they're living in a camp implies that the situation is permanent or equate them with the displacement of the Palestinians.
The displaced people still maintain their legal status as citizens. But they're citizens who are unable to return to their homes. So, they stay in a location and that location is not a camp.
Sometimes that location is a tent in a parking lot by the sea. Sometimes its a school with all the desks removes to make space for hundreds of families.
According to them, they are going back. According to Israel, they must accept their new reality. So are they refugees?
While the world is distracted with negotiations in Europe over the Strait of Hormuz, the real front line runs through Lebanon. It's ten miles of land on the Israeli border.
This war is being fought with tents and moving boxes, by an army of people with photos on their phones of houses which became rubble. Meanwhile the Israeli military runs drones overhead while publishing maps which show chunks of Lebanon tinted red.
The red marks areas under Israeli evacuation orders. Those orders have at points covered nearly 14% of Lebanon's territory, according to the UN human rights office.
Still people tie mattresses to the top of their cars. They buy snacks for the kids for the two-hour drive from Beirut into the zone tinted red. They're not refugees and it's not a camp because they're going back.
Here is the impossible situation as best I can put it:
Israel: We need the land for our safety from Hezbollah.
Lebanon: This place will always be our land.
Israel: If you wouldn't let Hezbollah use your land to strike us, then you could have your land.
Lebanon: Hezbollah defends us from you. We may not agree with them, but they keep us safe. Sometimes that means striking first. Something you do as well.
Israel: Right, so we need the land for our safety from Hezbollah.
The cycle of perverse incentives spins on.
The news focuses on negotiations, memorandums of understanding, and oil prices. Pundits navel-gaze about how political leaders are selling the war. But the geopolitical reality is that any deal will hinge on whether the more than one million people displaced at the war's peak can return to their homes, or whether southern Lebanon will remain tinted red.
As of this writing, thousands of people are packing up and heading back to their homes. Israel and Hezbollah have both respected the ceasefire meaning that for a whole 24 hour period no bombs have fallen in Lebanon or missiles sailed across the border into Israel.
It’s a tentative peace being being negotiated by Washington and Tehran. Lebanon and Israel seem to follow the clumsy dance. Little more than a diplomatic brow beating keeps the belligerent forces in line for now but stopping shooting and withdrawing troops are two very different things.
Ultimately, someone will occupy that land. This we know for certain.
Israel paints it red to hang a closed sign on Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, the people are coming back. They're moving with tents and mattresses. They've got non-perishable food and toys for the kids. For everyone I spoke with, it was never a question if they would come back, but when.
Do we call them refugees? Are they living in camps? Are they temporarily displaced, or adjusting to a new normal?
We'll be watching as that question finds an answer in the next couple of days. I'll be reporting from the south soon.
I'll let you know what I find.
Eric Czuleger is the author of You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist. He holds advanced degrees in writing from Oxford University, and National Security from the RAND School of Public Policy. He is a RANE Network Expert in Geopolitical Risk. The best way to support his independent analyst and on-the-ground reporting is through becoming a paid subscriber or direct donations.