Aitaroun, Lebanon - Sitting under the boughs of her lemon tree and surrounded by debris, the grief-filled wails of 76-year-old Mariam Khrayzat reverberate off the rubble and a mass of metal rods erupting from the gaping hole of what was once her home. Almost entirely destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, her ancestral home in the southern Lebanese town of Aitaroun stands as a monument to repeated loss.

Israel began bombing southern Lebanon on October 8, 2023, after Hezbollah fighters launched attacks in solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian group Hamas. A day earlier, on October 7, it had carried out an assault on Israel.

Forced to flee the violence that escalated into a war by September 2024, Khrayzat returned home in early February, after 460 days, when Israeli forces retreated. What she found was devastation: her home bombed, ransacked by Israeli soldiers for the third time in her lifetime.

“They uprooted the [olive] trees, they demolished the buildings, they took the furniture and burned it,” Khrayzat cried.

Stolen land

Her home is just one among some 40,000 destroyed by Israeli air strikes, which have also killed around 4,000 people across Lebanon - including former Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The World Bank estimates that reconstruction and recovery will cost around $11 billion.

Israel’s widespread destruction across southern Lebanon has drawn international condemnation. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, warned that Israel’s actions may constitute “domicide” - the systematic, arbitrary destruction of civilian housing in violent conflict, a crime not yet recognised under international law.

In her garden of navel oranges, lemons, and grapevines planted in her youth, Khrayzat’s land remains booby-trapped with Israeli explosives. A massive olive tree lies on its side, uprooted, a once living relic of her late grandfather, who planted it before he was killed by Zionist militias during the Nakba in 1948. Another olive tree, one that was centuries old, was stolen from her garden by Israeli forces months earlier.

For the people of southern Lebanon whose culture and livelihoods are deeply rooted in their land, the losses extend beyond the scattered bricks of their bombed-out homes.

“Trees [pine] for their owners when they’re not next to them,” she said of her stolen olive tree. “[My grandfather] didn’t pay gold liras [for this land] so that the Israelis would take it. We paid for it so that our children and grandchildren would live in it,” she said.

Under siege

Aitaroun is one of 37 villages that have seen entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble by Israeli air strikes.

Incinerated rooms. Cans of chickpeas. Discarded mattresses. Graffiti with the Star of David. Insults in Hebrew and English. This is what remains in the homes still left standing, remnants of Israeli soldiers who occupied Aitaroun until early February during their ground invasion of southern Lebanon, which began on October 1, 2024.

In response, one resident defiantly sprayed a line of poetry in Arabic by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “On this land, is life worth living.”

Under the US and France-brokered ceasefire, Israeli forces were supposed to withdraw from Lebanon by January 26, 2025, but the deadline was extended to February 18 after Israel refused to fully withdraw from Lebanon.

Even now, months later, Israel continues to occupy several areas, including five border outposts and until late February the town of Yaroun, which overlooks the Blue Line, the still un-demarcated Israel-Lebanon border.

“This modus operandi is not a first for Israel, it might be on scale,” Etienne Coppé, a heritage architect at the French Institute of the Near East told TRT World. He referenced previous instances of destruction, including the Nakba in 1948—when such destruction went undocumented— as well as Israel’s past bombings in Lebanon and parts of southern Syria.

Heritage experts have also raised concerns over Israel’s destruction of historic and archaeological sites in southern Lebanon. Among them is the ancient port city of Tyre, home to UNESCO-listed Roman ruins, which was bombed in October 2024. At that same time, the village of Mhaibib–home to the Shrine of Prophet Benjamin–was completely destroyed by Israeli soldiers who filmed the controlled demolition, levelling it completely.

While Israel’s intentions for such widespread destruction in southern Lebanon remain unclear, questions arose after the death of renowned Israeli archaeologist and settlement advocate Ze’ev Erlich in November 20204.

Erlich was killed while accompanying Israeli forces to inspect a historical site in southern Lebanon. His presence prompted Lebanon’s Minister of Culture, Mohammed Wissam Al-Murtada, to accuse Israel of attempting to legitimise territorial claims by linking the region to ancient Jewish history. 

“To misuse science to prove the rights of Israel, in my opinion … that is way more destructive,” Coppé said of Elrich’s presence, “because [the Israelis are] creating a narrative.”

Resisting occupation

Splintered terracotta tiles, craters in living rooms and collapsed roofs mark the destroyed villas of Yaroun’s diaspora––Lebanese emigrants who built their homes with decades of hard-earned savings in the US, Australia, Canada, and beyond.

Even as Israeli gunfire could be heard firing deeper in Yaroun in early February when the town was still occupied by Israeli soldiers, a handful of residents would drive to a temporary UN peacekeeping barricade every day, hoping to return home. Among them was Muhammad Nur-Udeen from the nearby village of Doueir, who drove to the barricade daily with his wife in a small act of protest against Israel’s continued occupation.

“The ‘bare minimum’ means that we should offer something of our time as an honour to those who died with their lives. Whatever our religion, sect, or class… we must be present,” he said defiantly.

The valleys of southern Lebanon are bathed in golden sunlight. Thousands of olive trees line the land, punctuated with lemons, oranges, and white walnut blossoms signalling the arrival of spring. But the land is also scarred with destruction–craters from air strikes, mounds of rubble, and the shattered remains of Khiam, a town at the centre of some of the war’s fiercest clashes.

Churches with gaping holes and shattered stained glass windows. Minarets toppled to the ground. Bullet-ridden walls. Khiam is unrecognisable. 

Even its graveyard was not spared. On their way to bury five Hezbollah fighters killed by Israeli soldiers, mourners tip-toed their way around shattered headstones–including the grave of Reuters journalist Issam Abdalla killed by an Israeli shell on October 13, 2023.

Latifa Awaala, 71, was one of over a million Lebanese people displaced by the war. Forced to flee Khiam, she found no safety in the southern city of Nabatieh, which was also bombed.

In her lifetime, Awaala remembers at least five Israeli incursions into southern Lebanon, the first in the 1970’s - building up to  Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978, another in the Hezbollah-Israel 2006 war. “This war was the hardest. No one stood by Lebanon,” she told TRT World. “[The international community] stood by Israel.”

Despite the ceasefire, Israeli soldiers continue to bomb southern Lebanon and carry out controlled demolitions of homes, with nearly 1,100 Israeli violations of the fragile ceasefire reported by Lebanese authorities, including at least 85 people killed and 280 others injured.

Many in southern Lebanon, like Awaala, feel abandoned by the world. But some put their faith in those who fought back against Israeli soldiers. 

The green and yellow flags of Hezbollah flutter at funerals, and the posters of the men wearing keffiyehs - young and old, killed in battle – these symbols allude to Khiam’s long history of resistance.

“Those who were martyred were my son’s friends, and the sons of my hometown, so when I came and saw the house, it didn’t affect me much,” said 46-year-old Fatima Nasrallah, a Khiam resident who returned to the skeleton of what was once her four-storey inter-generational family home. 

Nasrallah and her family fled to Nabatieh after her son was injured in an air strike. After Khiam was handed over to the Lebanese army by Israeli forces in December, Nasrallah counted the days she and her family could return home.

“I said that as soon as the ceasefire ends, I just want to go and cleanse myself with the dust of Khiam,” Nasrallah told TRT World.

The sight of death hangs everywhere in the rubble of the town, but residents are slowly beginning to sift through the chaos of debris and lay their dead to rest. Three months after the ceasefire, the largest mass funeral for 95 people killed in the war was held in Aitaroun in late February. 

Among those killed were five local paramedics and health workers whose bodies were dumped by Israeli soldiers - along with the body of a Hezbollah fighter - inside a building adjacent to the municipality building.

“The Israeli aggression on the town of Aitaroun has had a significant impact on the community, first and foremost on the local population, with more than 125 martyrs of all ages,” Aitroun’s mayor Salim Murad told TRT World, standing before the ruins of the town’s municipality building.

“The building is not more valuable than the people we have lost,” he added. 

Young volunteers flurry around Murad as they quickly sweep rubble from the street in front of the municipality building, crushed completely by a collapsed roof.

“This land is ours, and we will not leave it. We are determined to rebuild it,” Murad said, defiantly.

With additional reporting by Mahdi Yaghi and Arabic translations by Marwa Abed Ali.