The Wreckage Extends

They have lost even the Financial Times, in which Raya Jalabi and Aditi Bhandari write:

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

When they all departed, Bazzi realised she had never photographed the house into which she poured her life’s savings. But that afternoon, looking at the glass walls that wrap over the rolling hills, she felt certain she was seeing it for the last time.

Halfway down the road, she turned, raised her phone and took a picture. 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. Like most other towns along the de facto Israel-Lebanon border, 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.

Scattered around the country, Bazzi and Lebanon’s nearly 1mn displaced people have been reduced to studying satellite imagery for glimpses of their homes. But from the haunting remove of the sky, Bint Jbeil and other border areas look like dusty grey scars across hills once dense with centuries-old villages, traditional stone houses and olive groves — a moonscape of pulverised concrete.

“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. She is still unsure of the extent of any damage to her house. “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, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests.

Analysis of satellite imagery, open-source data and verified footage shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return.

“It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”

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 weeks into the latest conflict, 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. “Not house by house, but entire villages.”

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” and act against any threat for as long as the group remains present.

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, as Israeli forces advanced.

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 the truce did not hold and some clashes have continued even past the latest ceasefire in June, Israeli forces — who had already established control over many emptied villages — continued to lay waste to the south through air strikes, controlled detonations, bulldozers and the use of white phosphorus.

Scrolling map of damage detected in the Israeli occupied zone along the border. Before the first ceasefire the damage was scattered throughout the region, focused on a handful of key towns. But after that ceasefire the damage spread to almost all population centres in areas under Israeli occupation.

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.

Yet on the ground, it is a nebulous boundary with no official demarcations, and only one formal checkpoint on the coastal highway near Naqoura. Israel last week ordered residents of a village above the line to flee, before shelling it — the first such warning in weeks.

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 one stretch of the occupied area in late April, the FT saw entire villages with barely a building left standing: historic markets, squares and winding streets reduced to a sea of concrete. The sound of blasts, apparently from building demolitions, continued through the day.

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, although a handful of sparsely populated Christian and Sunni villages remain. They have been less heavily damaged, though their residents have also reported killings, detentions and threats.

But long-neglected Shia towns such as Bint Jbeil, which became bastions of support for Hizbollah, have borne the brunt of the Israeli destruction.

Earlier cycles of Israeli invasion and occupation drove Bazzi’s family from the town 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.

Returning in 2000 as Israel withdrew from its 18-year occupation, she found the family home left uninhabitable but the town’s dense weave of stone houses and alleyways largely intact.

After another conflict in 2006 reduced its centre to rubble, she and others nevertheless persuaded themselves that this would be “the last war” between Israel and Hizbollah, and poured their hopes into rebuilding.

This was despite the rise of Hizbollah as an increasingly dominant force, which narrowed the political and cultural diversity for which Bint Jbeil had been known. Bazzi, a journalist, ran unsuccessfully against the group in municipal elections in 2008 to highlight the town’s independent voices like hers.

On family land, Bazzi began building a house that she had painstakingly saved for. With large glass windows that overlooked the town and the hills beyond, it became a haven for her and her family.

Her dream is now being dismantled. She has watched countless videos of the destruction, some posted by the IDF, others sent by people in nearby villages. Last month she recognised her parents’ neighbourhood being blown up in a controlled detonation. Their house lay outside the frame and she does not know whether it survived.

“Israel is not only destroying stone,” said Bazzi. “Every shell and every air strike is killing part of our soul, part of our memories, part of our childhood, part of our history.”

Bazzi’s childhood home was left damaged and uninhabitable after the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation, her grandmother’s home was destroyed in the 2024 war and her Bint Jbeil home, which appears to be standing but she is unable to assess the extent of any damage.

CNRS estimates that almost 85,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed in the south — likely an undercount as at least 20 to 30 per cent of buildings have yet to be assessed amid ongoing Israeli attacks.

Satellite analysis by the FT and Lighthouse across Khiam, Taybeh, Bint Jbeil and Haddatha found clearance beyond isolated buildings and town centres, encompassing almost entire municipalities. In some areas, the damage radiated outwards over time.

The FT has found evidence of controlled detonations and demolitions by Israeli forces and civilian contractors in dozens of border communities.

Verified footage shows heavy machines and excavators clearing areas — machinery produced and sold by companies including Caterpillar and Volvo, according to FT analysis and the CNRS. Caterpillar did not respond to a request for comment, while 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 Unesco-listed sites, including 16th-century mosques, 19th-century libraries, religious shrines, ancient Roman ruins and Crusader castles.

“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 Lebanon’s cultural heritage. “How can they rebuild their communities if everything is gone?”

The Israeli campaign builds on methods used during a previous war with Hizbollah in 2024, when Israeli forces carried out air strikes and controlled demolitions despite a ceasefire that nominally brought the conflict to an end.

This time, they have been applied across a wider area and on a far greater scale, targeting not just the roofs over people’s heads but the water, energy, roads, schools, agriculture and healthcare needed to sustain communities. Lebanese authorities are operating under the assumption that 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, from pipelines to boreholes, according to figures from the local authorities and the CNRS.

Some were directly struck; others damaged by nearby blasts, according to officials, engineers and NGOs. Solar panels that power water systems have been targeted directly on several occasions, such as those that support the community well in the Christian village of Debel on April 26.

“Water is the most important element for life to return to south Lebanon,” said Sonia Ben Salem of Action Against Hunger, which has verified damage done to hundreds of sites via satellite. “Without it, we cannot see a massive return to those areas.”

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, which has also accused Israel of removing trees.

The country’s ancient olive groves have been worst affected, officials say. They have long sustained both identity and economy in southern Lebanon, which produces about 40 per cent of the nationwide harvest. Tens of thousands of trees need replanting.

Lebanon’s 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 — in both populated and agricultural areas. 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 agricultural land throughout the past three years of conflict, based on soil samples gathered in border areas — acts it says amount to “ecocide”.

The destruction has also hollowed out medical care, with dozens of healthcare facilities damaged or destroyed by air strikes.

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, often hitting medics and civilians who arrive to help victims.

Insecurity Insight, which tracks attacks on healthcare globally, 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 NGOs say Israel rarely provides evidence for specific allegations.

“The law is very clear on this,” Insecurity Insight’s director Christina Wille said. “Paramedics going about their business saving the wounded . . . are protected from intentional attack,” even if they are affiliated with Hizbollah. “The only moment where they lose their protection is when they conduct acts harmful to the enemy.”

Since October 7, Israel has seized about 1,000 sq km from neighbouring Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, relocating populations and creating wastelands within these so-called buffer zones.

One rightwing Israeli newspaper has called its approach the “rubble doctrine”.

This doctrine “depends on its ability to act proactively and without restraint against threats before they’ve fully emerged, especially outside its borders”, said Nathan Brown, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University.

“This is a new approach which has meant . . . reconfiguring territories and populations through military action rather than seeking diplomatic arrangements,” Brown said.

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. This type of destruction would be governed by the more restrictive law of occupation, said Janina Dill, an Oxford university expert on the law and ethics of war.

Under this, an occupying power may destroy civilian property only where required by “imperative military necessity”. A general claim that Hizbollah might return and use civilian structures in the future would not be enough, Dill said: “It’s deeply implausible that imperative military necessity applies to every house in a particular village.”

Preventing the return of civilians who have been forcibly displaced would also amount to a war crime, said Amnesty’s Beckerle. More than 400,000 displaced people have returned south, according to Lebanon’s government, but many remain displaced and others were “staying with friends, family or in damaged structures with lacking services”, Beckerle said.

For months, Lebanon and Israel have been engaged in US-brokered talks, with an ostensible goal of IDF withdrawal and eventual peace. But these have made little difference on the ground, as Israeli forces continue to demolish villages and set orchards ablaze, unfettered.

The negotiations have also enraged many Lebanese, who feel the state is helpless to stop the destruction of their homes. Bazzi, meanwhile, is still waiting to learn how much remains of hers.

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

And over in The Guardian, William Christou writes:

Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing.

Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih.

“Most of our missions are now related to fires,” Fakih said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.”

The Israeli military has caused fires across south Lebanon, in particular in olive groves and on agricultural land, according to videos and testimony from emergency services, in the nearly two-months since the 17 June ceasefire that mostly ended fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

“They started doing this right after the ceasefire, and there have been incendiary bombs every day,” Fakih said. “Small drones come out and drop incendiary materials, [white] phosphorus shells are fired at the woodlands, in addition to illumination flares that they drop during the daytime so the vegetation catches fire.”

Firefighters and residents of other areas in south Lebanon describe similar blazes being started by Israeli munitions and drones in dry scrub and woodlands. On Friday, Israeli munitions created large wildfires in two heavily forested areas, in Kfarchouba, close to the border, and between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.

The civil defence station chief in the area, Samir Hardan, said a fire was started near Kfarchouba on Friday afternoon after a drone dropped a munition in woodlands. After battling blazes overnight and extinguishing them on Saturday, a second drone started another fire on Sunday, Hardan said.

Firefighters are required to coordinate their movements with the Lebanese army, which relays their request to a “deconfliction” group that includes the Israeli military. They were given permission to fight the fires at only two spots, and not other areas where fires were raging.

According to environmental groups, the fires are part of a pattern of Israeli attacks against Lebanon’s environment that threaten the country’s woodlands and the biodiversity they support.

Hisham Younes, the founder of Green Southerners, a Lebanese conservation organisation, said: “These are long-established woodlands, dominated by productive stone pine alongside oak. They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds.”

Younes called the Israeli attacks an ecocide. “It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate and sustain life. When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”

Since fighting started on 8 October 2023 when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack a day earlier, Israel has repeatedly targeted Lebanon’s woodlands.

The Israeli military has said in the past that Hezbollah used these forested areas as cover for its fighters and its tunnels.

Ecologists and rights groups have said fires and other forms of widespread environmental destruction will have wider effects on civilian populations.

Asked for comment on each of the recent wildfire incidents, the Israeli military said its operations were “conducted while taking precautionary measures to mitigate harm to civilians and the environment”.

It is not the first time Israeli forces have been reported to have set fires deliberately. In the summer of 2024, Israeli troops used trebuchets – medieval catapults – to fling flaming debris over its border wall with Lebanon, while the Lebanese army published photos of Israeli drones that carried hoses that doused forests in flammable materials.

Health and environmental experts raised the alarm in February when Israeli planes dropped herbicides linked to cancer on farms in south Lebanon.

Besides the environmental and health consequences of these fires, residents of south Lebanon have mourned the loss of the green spaces in the villages where they grew up.

On 1 August, displaced residents of the border village of Yaroun found their olive and fruit groves, as well as their homes, had been set ablaze by occupying Israeli troops. People living in the nearby Christian towns of Rmeich and Aïn Ebel, among the few villages near the border not emptied out by the Israeli military, sent pictures of the fires.

Hafez Ghasham, the mayor of Yaroun, said: “They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees – large groves, with very old olive trees. They started there, then the fire spread along the outskirts of the village.”

People in Yaroun had already watched in previous months as all but 20 of the 900 houses in the village were bulldozed by the Israeli military. They pooled resources to buy expensive satellite imagery of the village during their displacement.

Ghasham said: “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village.

“They are trying to make the land uninhabitable. They are erasing our entire history, our entire culture, all our memories. Maybe the idea is that after some time, it will look as though nobody had ever lived here.”