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Israeli forces lay waste to south­ern Lebanon

Mil­it­ary has left large areas unin­hab­it­able, des­troy­ing water, energy and med­ical infra­struc­ture needed to sus­tain life

RAYA JALABI — BEIRUT ADITI BHANDARI — LONDON Addi­tional report­ing by David Hind­ley and James Shot­ter

For three days in Janu­ary, Fadia Bazzi’s house in the south­ern Lebanese bor­der town of Bint Jbeil was filled with laughter as her fam­ily rang in the new year.

Bazzi took a pic­ture of the house. Soon after, war returned to Lebanon, engulf­ing Bint Jbeil and empty­ing the town of its 30,000 res­id­ents. Bazzi now fears that photo is all she will have left. Bint Jbeil has been dev­ast­ated — first in clashes between Israel and Hizbol­lah and then by the Israeli forces who now occupy swaths of Lebanon’s south.

Lebanon’s nearly 1mn dis­placed people have been reduced to study­ing satel­lite imagery for glimpses of their homes. But from the sky, Bint Jbeil and other bor­der areas look like dusty grey scars across hills once dense with cen­tur­iesold vil­lages, tra­di­tional stone houses and olive groves.

“We see noth­ing but destruc­tion, the col­our of ash,” Bazzi, who was dis­placed from Bint Jbeil by Israel as a child in the 1980s and longs to return for good, said from her ren­ted Beirut apart­ment. “We have become pris­on­ers of satel­lites, pris­on­ers of maps, wait­ing.”

An FT visual invest­ig­a­tion with journ­al­ism non-profit Light­house Reports found sys­tem­atic destruc­tion across Israeli-occu­pied south­ern Lebanon.

Ana­lysis of satel­lite imagery, open­source data and veri­fied foot­age shows much of the dam­age occurred after Israeli forces estab­lished con­trol over emp­tied vil­lages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas unin­hab­it­able, des­troy­ing water and energy infra­struc­ture to med­ical care. “It’s an extens­ive, long-last­ing and organ­ised attack on the people of south­ern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beck­erle, a deputy dir­ector at Amnesty Inter­na­tional.

South­ern Lebanon has long borne the brunt of Israeli bomb­ings and inva­sions, includ­ing before the rise of Shia mil­it­ant group Hizbol­lah and the threat it posed to Israel’s north­ern com­munit­ies. But defence min­is­ter Israel Katz invoked a dif­fer­ent approach, one used with dev­ast­at­ing con­sequences after Hamas’s Octo­ber 7 2023 attack: the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model”, a ref­er­ence to Israel’s whole­sale lev­el­ling of cit­ies in Gaza.

“All homes in Lebanese vil­lages near the bor­der will be des­troyed,” Katz said.

By July, Katz claimed his threat had been car­ried out. “Twenty-four Lebanese vil­lages, hun­dreds of years old, we des­troyed all the build­ings,” he said, boast­ing that up to 20,000 homes had been demol­ished.

Israel presents its cam­paign as defens­ive: an effort to dis­mantle Hizbol­lah infra­struc­ture, pre­vent the group from rebuild­ing near the fron­tier and pro­tect com­munit­ies in north­ern Israel. It has said its troops will con­tinue to occupy a “secur­ity zone”. The Israeli gov­ern­ment and mil­it­ary did not respond to requests for com­ment.

The war began on March 2, when Hizbol­lah fired on Israel in sup­port of Iran days after the US and Israel launched their war against the Islamic repub­lic. More than 4,300 people in Lebanon and more than 30 Israeli sol­diers and civil­ians have been killed in the fight­ing, accord­ing to local author­it­ies.

Israeli evac­u­ation orders for­cibly dis­placed some 1.2mn people in the war’s first 10 days, the vast major­ity from Hizbol­lah-dom­in­ated south­ern Lebanon.

Fight­ing raged for weeks, but most of the destruc­tion doc­u­mented by the FT and Light­house came after an ini­tial Israel-Lebanon cease­fire on April 17. While some clashes have con­tin­ued even past the latest cease­fire in June, Israeli forces con­tin­ued to lay waste to the south through air strikes, con­trolled det­on­a­tions, bull­dozers and the use of white phos­phorus.

Israel’s occu­pa­tion is now deeply entrenched, the area under its con­trol demarc­ated by what it calls “the yel­low line”. The zone cov­ers about 6 per cent of Lebanese ter­rit­ory and stretches roughly 10km inland from the two coun­tries’ informal bor­der. Israeli flags and Hebrew signs dot the area below the yel­low line, while new out­posts of the Israel Defense Forces have expan­ded in recent weeks.

On a trip to the occu­pied area in April, the FT saw entire vil­lages with barely a build­ing left stand­ing: his­toric mar­kets, squares and wind­ing streets reduced to a sea of con­crete. Accord­ing to Lebanese pub­lic research insti­tute the National Coun­cil for Sci­entific Research (CNRS), 62 vil­lages and farms fall inside the yel­low line, with about 270,000 res­id­ents barred from return­ing.

Most com­munit­ies within the zone are Shia but a hand­ful of sparsely pop­u­lated Chris­tian and Sunni vil­lages remain. Long-neg­lected Shia towns such as Bint Jbeil, which became bas­tions of sup­port for Hizbol­lah, have borne the brunt of the destruc­tion.

Earlier cycles of Israeli inva­sion and occu­pa­tion drove Bazzi’s fam­ily to Beirut, leav­ing the town fixed in her memory as “the dream that did not grow up with me”. She would later write a novel draw­ing on her exper­i­ence.

After another con­flict in 2006 reduced its centre to rubble, she poured hopes into rebuild­ing, believ­ing this would be “the last war” between Israel and Hizbol­lah. This was des­pite the rise of Hizbol­lah, which nar­rowed the polit­ical and cul­tural diversity for which Bint Jbeil had been known. Bazzi, a journ­al­ist, ran unsuc­cess­fully against the group in elec­tions in 2008.

She built a home with large glass win­dows that over­looked the town and the hills bey­ond. Her dream is now being dis­mantled. ““Every shell and every air strike is killing part of our soul, part of our memor­ies, part of our child­hood, part of our his­tory,” she said.

CNRS estim­ates almost 85,000 hous­ing units have been dam­aged or des­troyed in the south, with at least 20 to 30 per cent of build­ings have yet to be assessed. Satel­lite ana­lysis across Khiam, Tay­beh, Bint Jbeil and Had­datha found clear­ance bey­ond isol­ated build­ings and town centres, encom­passing almost entire muni­cip­al­it­ies. The FT has found evid­ence of con­trolled det­on­a­tions and demoli­tions in dozens of bor­der com­munit­ies. Veri­fied foot­age shows heavy machines and excav­at­ors clear­ing areas — machinery pro­duced and sold by com­pan­ies includ­ing Cater­pil­lar and Volvo. Cater­pil­lar did not respond to a request for com­ment. Volvo said it had lim­ited con­trol over how its products were ulti­mately used but worked to pre­vent their “mis­use”.

Israel has also done extens­ive dam­age to his­toric monu­ments and Unescol­isted sites, includ­ing 16th-cen­tury mosques, shrines and Roman ruins.

“It is an attempt to make the areas unre­cog­nis­able . . . to sever people’s con­nec­tion to their land and their his­tory,” said Joanne Farchakh Baj­jaly of Bil­adi, an organ­isa­tion ded­ic­ated to pre­serving cul­tural her­it­age.

Lebanese author­it­ies are oper­at­ing under the assump­tion any­thing below the yel­low line has been com­pletely des­troyed. That includes at least 2,500km of the infra­struc­ture used to col­lect, store and carry water to homes and busi­nesses, accord­ing to local author­it­ies and the CNRS. ““Water is the most import­ant ele­ment for life to return to south Lebanon,” said Sonia Ben Salem of Action Against Hun­ger.

Israel has also des­troyed all of the bridges over the Lit­ani river — only two of which have been par­tially repaired since — and laid waste to agri­cul­tural areas. More than 20 per cent of south Lebanon’s farm­land and forests have been des­troyed, accord­ing to the agri­cul­ture min­istry.

The envir­on­ment min­istry and rights groups have doc­u­mented Israel’s wide­spread use of white phos­phorus — an incen­di­ary chem­ical that trig­gers fires and can leave con­tam­in­a­tion in soil and water. Israel says it uses white phos­phorus law­fully to clear brush and cre­ate smokescreens, but use over pop­u­lated areas can viol­ate inter­na­tional law.

The min­istry has also accused Israel of spray­ing herb­i­cides over 2,000 hec­tares of land, based on soil samples gathered in bor­der areas, acts it says amount to “eco­cide”.

Lebanon’s health min­istry says 135 health­care pro­fes­sion­als have been killed on duty, many in so-called double-, triple- and quad­ruple-tap strikes. These tar­get the same loc­a­tion minutes or hours after the first attack. Insec­ur­ity Insight, which tracks attacks on health­care, doc­u­mented more than 30 such incid­ents. The FT and Light­house Reports veri­fied and geo­located foot­age of 10 of them.

Israel says it does not tar­get health­care work­ers or facil­it­ies but alleges that Hizbol­lah uses ambu­lances, hos­pit­als and other health­care sites for mil­it­ary activ­ity. But offi­cials, dip­lo­mats and non-gov­ern­ment organ­isa­tions say Israel rarely provides evid­ence for spe­cific alleg­a­tions. In Lebanon, the wreck­age extends bey­ond com­bat dam­age or sites Israel claims are Hizbol­lah infra­struc­ture to the broad clear­ance of vil­lages under Israel’s effect­ive con­trol.

Bazzi said: “Our people used to say long ago: ‘If only a bird would bring me news.’” But “even the birds are no longer there above the south and above Bint Jbeil. There is no one left to bring us news.”