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11:24 23.10.2026 •
Map: NYT
Today, 48 of the roughly 60 villages and towns within Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon are mostly leveled, The New York Times analysis shows.
The scale of Israel’s systematic demolition has fueled fears among many Lebanese that Israel is seeking to permanently empty the territory of its population.
Israeli officials say they have razed villages both to eliminate Hezbollah military facilities, like tunnels and weapons depots, and to prevent Hezbollah from returning to the border area. The Lebanese territory that the Israeli military has seized and occupied since fighting resumed in March extends as far as eight miles north of the Israeli border.
Much of the area is now uninhabitable.
At the same time, Israeli forces built new infrastructure, suggesting plans for a prolonged military presence.
Since the April cease-fire, about 16,500 acres across this swath of southern Lebanon were burned, including agricultural land, by wildfires that often coincided with Israeli military operations in the area. The fires, which claimed about 11 percent of the territory under Israeli occupation, spread rapidly, with Lebanese firefighters unable to enter the Israeli-occupied zone to extinguish them.
Nearly all the villages that are no longer inhabitable were predominantly home to Shiite Muslims, the sect from which Hezbollah draws most of its support. Residents of those villages left during the fighting as Israel issued evacuation warnings for much of southern Lebanon and have not been able to return since Israel declared the area a “security zone.”
The minority of villages that escaped the worst of the damage were home predominantly to Christians, Druse and Sunni Muslims. Many of those residents were assured by the Israeli military that their villages would not be targeted during the war and have been able to remain in their homes, even though they are now within the occupied zone.
The distinction is clear in the separate fates of Beit Lif and Debl, only two miles apart. The mostly Shiite town of Beit Lif has been nearly completely flattened since the cease-fire, while the Christian town of Debl is largely still standing.
The scale of the destruction in southern Lebanon surpasses that caused by the country’s 15-year civil war, several foreign invasions and two previous wars between Israel and Hezbollah, experts say.
“The level of violence, the scale and tools of destruction, is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Every bit of infrastructure is being destroyed, as if to prevent the population from returning anytime soon even if Israel withdraws.”
Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, has said his country’s approach to southern Lebanon is modeled on tactics used in Gaza, where the Israeli military reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble.
“All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza, in order to permanently remove the threats near the border to northern residents,” he said in March.
Israeli tanks and military vehicles in southern Lebanon, on April 25, soon after the cease-fire
Photo: Agence France-Presse
In Beit Yahoun, about a dozen buildings were destroyed before the cease-fire in April. Three months later, almost all the buildings in the town center appeared to be destroyed.
Mustapha Maki, the mayor of Beit Yahoun, visited it in August, escorted by troops from the Lebanese Armed Forces. Entering the village for the first time since he left when the war broke out, he said, he was completely disoriented.
The mosque had disappeared. The water tanks were gone. He tried to place where his neighbor’s house used to be or the football field where schoolchildren used to play in the late afternoons – but could not. The cemetery was a mangled mess of smashed headstones and tree branches.
“I couldn’t even find my relatives’ graves,” Mr. Maki said.
The scale of the destruction has drawn sharp criticism from rights groups, which say the wholesale demolitions could be a violation of international law.
Legal experts say it is unlikely that this bar is met by the possibility that Hezbollah could one day use homes in a village, and it would not justify destroying entire villages.
“Much of the destruction we're seeing in southern Lebanon is not with a view to imminent clashes with Hezbollah by I.D.F. forces on the ground,” said Adil Haque, an international law professor at Rutgers Law School.
The Demographic Divide
The swath of southern Lebanon under Israeli occupation was long home to a patchwork of Shiite, Sunni, Christian and Druse communities.
When war broke out in March, Katz, the Israeli defense minister, singled out Shiite residents, saying they “will not return to their homes” until the safety of Israeli northern communities was guaranteed. Other Israeli officials told some Christians and Druse communities they could remain in their southern towns and villages if they expelled Shiite Muslims seeking refuge there.
The ruin that followed the announcement of the cease-fire has followed the same pattern. Of the 48 villages that have been mostly destroyed, almost all are majority Shiite. The seven villages that have not been seriously damaged are home to predominantly Christian, Sunni Muslim or Druse residents.
Yet even within the Christian, Druse and Sunni communities there is growing unease about how long they will be able to sustain their daily lives in their villages.
“We are completely isolated, everything around us is destroyed, we can’t move freely,” said Guna Ginwa, 46, a resident of Ain Ebel, a predominantly Christian village within the Israeli-occupied zone.
Ms. Ginwa and others who remained in the village rely on aid convoys for basic goods like grains, vegetables and water. To travel from Ain Ebel to the nearest city outside of the occupied area, they must receive permission to join a convoy of Lebanese military and United Nations peacekeepers, and pass through Israeli army checkpoints.
“I want to stay, but if we can’t travel, if we can’t go to our jobs outside of Ain Ebel, people will be forced to leave,” she said.
“Even if we wanted to go back, there’s nothing for us to go back to. It’s not liveable anymore,” said Amira Chkeir, 46, from Meiss al-Jabal, a village in the occupied zone that has been destroyed.
Two months ago, Ms. Chkeir drove to another village just outside the Israeli-occupied zone and went to the top of a hill hoping to catch a glimpse of Meiss al-Jabal. The once vibrant green landscape had transformed into a barren stretch of beige and brown. Seeing it, Ms. Chkeir recalled, she burst into tears.
“It looked like a desert, I couldn’t recognize anything,” she said. “All I could tell is when the beige ended and the land was green, that was Israeli territory.”
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