Israel's Destruction of Southern Lebanon Intensified After the Cease-Fire

The cease-fire ended the worst of the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. But it did not end Israel's remaking of southern Lebanon.

Today, 48 of the roughly 60 villages and towns within Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon are mostly leveled, the 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.

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.

The destruction has reshaped not only the physical landscape but also the religious demographics of southern Lebanon.

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.

The Times analyzed satellite imagery before and after the cease-fire, verified photos and videos from the areas under Israeli occupation, and spoke to Lebanese political and military officials, local leaders, civil defense members, legal experts, rights groups and conflict researchers. The Times classified towns as mostly destroyed if the town center was almost entirely flattened, often along with the surrounding area.

The Israel Defense Forces have said the deliberate destruction was part of an effort to dismantle Hezbollah's military infrastructure near the Lebanon-Israel border and ensure the safety of communities in northern Israel. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets, drones and missiles at northern Israel since war first broke out in 2023, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from the north. Israeli officials have said their forces will continue to occupy what they call a "security zone" in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed.

In response to questions from the Times, the Israeli military's media office said there is no directive to "to carry out widespread damage to structures or to demolish villages."

"The I.D.F. operates in the security zone in southern Lebanon with the aim of removing threats posed by the Hezbollah terrorist organization to the residents of Israel and to I.D.F. troops. It does so in accordance with international law, the directives of the political echelon, and the understandings reached between Israel and Lebanon," the military's media office said in a statement.

The war reignited in early March when the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah fired on Israel in solidarity with Tehran soon after the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

The war in Lebanon has since killed more than 4,300 Lebanese, according to Lebanon's health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and Hezbollah militants, and at least 43 Israelis.

Since the cease-fire was announced, Israeli forces have carried out hundreds of controlled demolitions in villages under their control, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a conflict-monitoring group. Videos and photos show that, in some cases, the Israeli military appears to have used drones to place explosives.

The demolitions have transformed a landscape of olive groves, tobacco farms and centuries-old villages into an ashen wasteland of pulverized rubble.

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.

International laws of occupation govern activity by the I.D.F. in the Lebanese villages it controls and impose stricter limits than those governing active combat, according to legal experts. In occupied territory, destroying civilian property is lawful only when it is absolutely unavoidable in achieving a specific and immediate military goal.

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.

"Rather, it is about creating a new long-term security situation that will exist after Israeli forces withdraw or for the duration of their occupation," he said, adding this would not meet the threshold required by international law.

Preventing the return of the roughly 270,000 displaced Lebanese to their homes would also amount to a war crime and a crime against humanity, according to legal experts.

The wildfires that have swept the area occupied by Israel since April are unusual for the time of year and far more numerous than in the past.

More than 200 fires broke out in that area between early April and early September this year, according to a Times analysis of data from the Fire Database of the European Forest Fire Information System. Before fighting between Hezbollah and Israel erupted in 2024, there were just three fires of that size during the same months in 2023, according to the data, and none in 2022 or 2021.

On the Israeli side of the border, there have only been a handful of wildfires in the same period this year.

If residents are allowed to return, the fires will likely make it difficult for them to sustain their livelihoods in a region where agriculture is a major source of income. Around a third of the burned land was farmland -- mostly grain crops and olive trees that take generations to mature -- according to a Times analysis of U.N. land-use data.

"I see the destruction of trees as detrimental as the demolition of houses. It has the same consequences," said Ahmad Baydoun, an independent conflict researcher.

Lebanese firefighters and local officials who have witnessed the wildfires say that at least some appear to be set off by Israeli drones dropping small explosives. The Israeli military has also used flammable chemical material, including white phosphorus, in the region, according to experts, aid groups and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.

The Israeli military denied responsibility for the fires that have broken out and said their troops had assisted in extinguishing them.

Without farmers to routinely water the fields, vegetation in the occupied zone has also dried out, making it more prone to fire, firefighters say. Lebanese firefighters say they cannot respond to fires within the Israeli-occupied region.

Hassan Atta, 52, said he had around 1,000 olive trees in his orchard in the village of Yaroun, planted 50 years ago.

Displaced from his village, he kept checking on his trees over the summer by looking at online images. The last time he checked, he said, his land appeared to have been completely razed by fire.

"These olive trees were a financial resource - they were how my family supported ourselves," Mr. Atta said.

In addition to the land consumed by fires, dozens of orchards and olive groves have been leveled by bulldozers in recent months, a New York Times analysis of satellite images show. Since the cease-fire, thousands of trees have been razed in the districts of Bint Jbeil and Marjayoun alone. In late August, more than 900 olive trees were bulldozed in this olive grove south of Meiss al-Jabal.

In response to questions from the Times, the Israeli military said it was not aware of the razing of trees near Meiss al-Jabal.

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.

The result is that the region has been effectively drained of its Shiite Muslim population.

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 as Israeli forces have leveled the landscape, they have been constructing infrastructure of their own, suggesting that Israel is planning for a prolonged military occupation of southern Lebanon.

At the start of the war in March, Israel already held five hilltop positions inside Lebanon near the Israeli border, which they had occupied during the 2024 conflict.

The Times analysis of recent satellite imagery found what appears to be at least three more Israeli outposts completed or under construction since the cease-fire announcement.

At other locations, satellite images and photos analyzed by the Times show Israeli military vehicles stationed near buildings, indicating their possible use as temporary bases. Israel has built fresh roads and bridges connecting these outposts to the Israeli border. The U.N. peacekeeping mission says the Israeli military now has more than two dozen outposts in the buffer zone.

In a statement to the Times, the Israeli military described the construction as "part of preparations for defense" in the buffer zone it has established in Lebanese territory.

As Israeli forces put down roots in southern Lebanon, villagers displaced from the region are growing increasingly resigned that they may never go home. That sentiment is a noticeable shift from the early weeks of the war, when displaced Shiites said they were determined to go back to their lands, as they were after the two previous wars between Israel and Hezbollah.

"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."