Key Excerpts:
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
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