Israel’s military campaign in southern Lebanon has caused massive destruction in more than a dozen border towns and villages, turning many of them into clusters of gray craters, according to satellite imagery provided to Reuters by Planet Labs Inc.
Many towns emptied of their inhabitants due to bombing had been inhabited for at least two centuries. The imagery reviewed includes the towns of Kafarkela in southeastern Lebanon, south of Meis al-Jabal, and then the small village of Labbouneh, west of a base used by UN peacekeepers.
“There are beautiful old houses there, hundreds of years old. The city has been hit by thousands of artillery shells, hundreds of airstrikes,” said Abdulmonem Choukir, mayor of Meis al-Jabal, one of the villages hit by Israeli attacks.
“Who knows what will happen in the end?”
Reuters compared satellite images taken in October 2023 with images taken in September and October 2024. Many of the villages that suffered astonishingly visible damage during the past month are located atop hills overlooking Israel.
Kfarkela, Lebanon – A satellite image of October 23, 2024 (left) and another image of October 24, 2023 (right) after the destruction
Nearly a year after the cross-border firing, Israel stepped up its attacks on southern Lebanon and beyond last month. Israeli troops have made ground incursions along Lebanon’s mountainous border and are fighting heavy clashes with Hezbollah fighters inside some towns.
Lebanon’s Disaster Risk Management Unit, which tracks both victims and attacks on specific towns, said a total of 3,809 attacks were carried out by Israel last year on 14 towns reviewed by Reuters.
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to Reuters questions about the scale of the destruction. Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on 24 October that Israel had struck more than 3,200 targets in southern Lebanon.
The army says it is attacking towns in southern Lebanon because Hezbollah has “turned civilian villages into fortified war zones”, hiding weapons, explosives and vehicles there. Hezbollah denies using civilian infrastructure to launch attacks or store weapons, and residents of the towns deny this claim.
A person familiar with Israel’s military operations in Lebanon told Reuters that troops were systematically attacking cities at strategically important points, including Mhabib.
The person said Israel had “learned lessons” after its last war with Hezbollah in 2006, which included incidents in which troops carrying out ground incursions into the valleys of southern Lebanon were attacked by Hezbollah fighters on hilltops. Had gone.
Yaroun Lebanon – A satellite image from October 23, 2024 (left) and another image from October 24, 2023 (right) after the destruction
“That’s why they’re targeting these villages on such a large scale – so they can move around more freely,” the person said.
The most recent images of Kafarkela show a series of white splotches along the main road leading to a town. Photographs taken last year showed the same road surrounded by houses and green vegetation, indicating that homes had been destroyed.
Further south, Meis al-Jabal, a town 700 meters (yards) from the UN-demarcated Blue Line separating Israeli and Lebanese territory, suffered significant destruction across an entire block near the town centre.
An area approximately 150 meters by 400 meters is visible as a sandy brown patch, indicating that the buildings there have been completely leveled. Images from the same month in 2023 showed a densely packed area of houses.
‘No sign of life’
The Lebanese government says Israel’s attacks have displaced at least 1.2 million people and killed more than 2,600 in the past year – most of them in the past month.
Residents of border villages have not been able to reach their hometowns for months. The mayor of Meis al-Jabal said, “In Meis al-Jabal after the war, after the residents left, we don’t know anything about the situation in the village.”
Similar levels of destruction are depicted in imagery from the nearby village of Mhaibib. Mhaibib is one of several villages – along with Kefarkela, Ataroun, Odaiseh and Ramayeh – that showed multiple structures exploding simultaneously in footage shared on social media, indicating they were packed with explosives.
Israel’s military spokesman said on 24 October that a command center for Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit was under Mhabib and that Israeli troops had “disabled the main tunnel network” used by the group, but did not give details.
Hagari said Israel’s goal was to “push Hezbollah away from the border, destroy its capabilities, and eliminate the threat it poses to Israel’s northern residents.”
“This is a plan you can put on the back burner,” said John Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “Armies plan, and they are executing the plan.”
Seth Jones, another senior vice president at CSIS, previously told Reuters that Hezbollah had used border villages to fire its short-range rockets into Israel.
Lubnan Baalbaki, conductor of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra and son of the late Lebanese artist Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, said his family was purchasing satellite imagery of his hometown Odaiseh to check whether the family home was still standing.
The house was transformed by Abdel-Hamid into a cultural centre, filled with his artworks, original drawings and an entirely wooden library containing over 1,000 books. Abdel-Hamid died in 2013 and is buried behind the house alongside his late wife.
“We are a family of artists, my father is well-known and our house was a well-known cultural house. We were trying to reassure ourselves with this idea,” son Baalbaki told Reuters.
By the end of October, the house was still standing. But over the weekend Baalbaki watched a video of several houses, including his family’s, exploding in Odaiseh.
The family is not affiliated with Hezbollah and Baalbaki denied that any weapons or military equipment were stored there.
“If you have such a high level of intelligence that you can target specific military figures, you know what’s in that house,” Baalbaki said. “It was an art house. We are all artists. Its purpose is to erase any sign of life.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
