As the death toll from Israel’s 13-month assault on Lebanon passed 3,000, satellite imagery analyses published by multiple media outlets in recent days revealed that nearly a quarter of all buildings in 25 municipalities in the southern part of the Mideastern country have been destroyed or damaged in a ferocious campaign that has left entire villages in ruins.
Satellite photos examined by The Washington Post, Reuters, and the Financial Times showed vast destruction caused by Israeli bombing and controlled demolitions of towns and villages, many of whose residents are among the more than 1.2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.
“There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old,” Meiss al-Jabal Mayor Abdulmonem Choukeir told Reuters. “Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes. Who knows what will still be standing at the end?”
Meiss al-Jabal native Fatima Ghoul told The Washington Post that “everything has been reduced to rubble” in the town of 8,000 inhabitants. Footage circulating on social media Monday showed large portions of the village, which has been inhabited for many hundreds of years, turned to dust in a simultaneous series of demolition explosions.
Israel has detonated parts of Meiss al-Jabal, the border village where we filmed our @Channel4News report on White Phosphorus back in July. The goal then, as now, was to make the land unihabitable, impossible for people to return. This is a scorched earth policy, a violation of… https://t.co/XxZDYnBtQc
— Simona Foltyn (@SimonaFoltyn) November 4, 2024
According to the Post:
Satellite imagery from Kfar Kila shows freshly turned soil where olive groves once stood, suggesting a clearance operation by Israeli forces. Dozens of crushed buildings line the town’s main road. The destruction is most intense near the Israeli border. The village centers in nearby Ayta al-Shab, Mhaibib and Ramyeh have also been decimated, the imagery reveals.
Videos published on social media show a series of controlled explosions in at least 11 villages. In a video published to X on October 22, half a dozen buildings fall in an instant after an explosion, covering the 400-year-old village of Ayta al-Shab in dust clouds and debris. In drone footage published online the next day, an Israeli flag flies over the town – now reduced to a sea of broken trees and collapsed concrete.
In one video verified by the Post, IDF troops cheer the demolition of a mosque in the village of Dharya, with one soldier exalting, “What a moment!” while others break out in religious song.
Religious and culturally important buildings are protected under international law. Scorched-earth tactics and disproportionate attacks are war crimes under international law.
“Even if civilians are not inside, those types of buildings don’t lose their protection,” former U.S. Department of Defense attorney Sarah Harrison told the Post.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces claimed the IDF was obliterating Lebanese towns and villages because Hezbollah – the political and paramilitary group based in Lebanon – is turning “civilian villages into fortified combat zones.” Hezbollah denied the accusation.
Retired Lebanese Armed Forces Gen. Akram Kamal Srawi told the Financial Times that “there are two reasons Israel is using this detonations strategy.”
The first reason, he claimed, is that the IDF is clearing the way for a possible deeper invasion of Lebanon.
“The second is that Israel has adopted a scorched earth strategy in order to wage psychological warfare on Hezbollah’s base people by televising these detonations and weaken support for the group – which will never work,” he added.
Israel began attacking Lebanon at almost the same time it launched its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Hezbollah has fired at least hundreds of rockets and other projectiles at Israel in a sustained yet measured campaign in solidarity with Gaza, where Israel’s bombing, invasion, and siege have left more than 155,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened in a war that the International Court of Justice is investigating for possible genocide. At least scores of Israelis have been killed or wounded by Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks.
In addition to the at least 3,002 people killed by Israel’s onslaught, Lebanon’s Health Ministry says that more than 13,000 others have been injured. The ministry does not distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilians. Critics say neither does the IDF.
“We’re a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home,” Lebanon Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Lubnan Baalbaki told Reuters after viewing satellite images confirming the destruction of his family home.
“If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what’s in that house,” Baalbaki added. “It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life.”
Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Wash, rinse, repeat… ICC.
Most moral military in the world? I beg to disagree. I'm not blind!
Destroying structures that house terrorist missiles-sad but necessary.
NATO and Israeli Military Bases are terrorist sites that launch missiles to kill people and should be destroyed.
ALL of the houses, hospitals, schools?
Did you read about the chants made by the Maccabi hooligans in the Netherlands for a soccer match?
"Death to Arabs"
"There are no schools because the children are dead"
Then the hooligans went on a rampage, attacking taxi drivers who were Arab, ripping down Palestinians flags from the front of homes. They were met with force. Brute force.
The false flag "pogrom" was successful in detracting attention from the ongoing pogrom in Gaza and Lebanon, garnering the usual trope about the innocent Jews being victimized in an antisemitic fashion. That was the trope spewed by major "news" sources.
Several months ago, Lancet estimated that 186,000 Palestinians were dead, not the 40,000 or so advertised by major media. Same for the 99 medical professionals who volunteered in Gaza, including a Jewish doctor from the U.S., Dr. Perlmutter MD.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” – Jesse Potter
Israel (and the Zionists before them) have been trying for over a century to "kill their way to peace". It has never worked once in all that time, it's beyond me why they think the next set of graves will change the equation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Mind_(Boston_song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr3B2V1RC8M
Nice, but I listen to and watch the video by Lowkey (Terrorist?) as my go to.
Banned from YouTube, reviled, it speaks truth.
Repeating History:
"Hundreds of Palestinian villages were left empty across Israel when their residents became refugees after the 1948 war, their lands and property confiscated. Most of the villages were razed by the new State of Israel and in dozens, communities of Jews were settled—many refugees in their own right. The state embarked upon a systematic effort of renaming and remaking the landscape, and the Arab presence was all but erased from official maps and histories. Israelis are familiar with the ruins, terraces, and orchards that mark these sites today—almost half located within tourist areas or national parks; but they rarely receive any official information about the Arab communities that existed there, and about how they came to be depopulated and ruined. Using official archives, kibbutz publications, and visits to the former village sites, Noga Kadman has reconstructed this history of erasure, which supplemented the physical destruction of the village"
https://www.zochrot.org/publication_articles/view/54566/en
Started way before May 1948
A good source is…..
https://www.plands.org/en/home
Even before Jabotinsky.
https://www.de-colonizer.org/mapping-the-palestinian-villages
Spot on John! Excellent posts from you!!!
I use to be a Smith, as well but got my new last name, when I married and happily divorced. ;-}
To create the State of Israel, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.
https://remix.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix/maps-and-data-visualisations.html
In photos: Returning to Palestine’s depopulated villages
https://www.972mag.com/photos-nakba-depopulated-villages/
war crimes and crimes against humanity
Only imagine the reparations required from Israel-US!
Only imagine the reparations required from the Arab world for their expulsion of 750,000 Jewish people.
Of course. Tried and proven method. Extinguish all life and create desert. A win.
Woman discovers footage of Israel soldier playing her piano in bombed-out home in southern Lebanon
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/lebanon-israel-piano-video-woman-soldiers-1.7373908
Ethnic cleansing and genocide spreads all around Israel. They are monsters, and must be put down.
America's greatest friend … as the saying goes, who needs enemies with friends like these?
Milk and honey? Oh my No … Hate, Gore and Death about sums it up.
Nov 8, 2024 Biden Helped Israel Bomb My People. So I Quit.
What would you do if you wanted to help make college more affordable, but the President who appointed you was arming your family’s killers? Former Department of Education official Tariq Habash tells us what led him to quit his government role.
https://youtu.be/rfaxZtvzgOE?si=5JJJnmwfYm6bprWf