Many of Lebanon’s southern border villages have become ghost towns. Some residents trickle in and out, gathering their belongings or attempting to repair their homes. Months after Israel’s withdrawal from most of Lebanon following a ceasefire agreement in November 2024, the vast majority of people displaced from Lebanon’s southern frontier zone are still unable to move back in. The immense destruction and continuing Israeli strikes render their villages unlivable.
At the entrance to Kfar Kila, a village on Lebanon’s southeastern border with Israel, a few men were gathered outside an old gas station. “There’s no electricity, no water, nothing, most people can’t return,” 45-year-old Mounif Hammoud told me, sitting beside an idle pump.
Hammoud, like the other men at the station, comes to Kfar Kila during the day, then leaves at nightfall. His home was destroyed, and he said that he has neither the cash nor the assurance to rebuild. “Every time we build something new, they bomb it.”
Israeli troops withdrew from Kfar Kila on Feb. 18, but only about 30 of the village’s 5,500 residents have returned so far, the village’s mayor, Hassan Chit, told me somberly over the phone. He said that 90% of homes were completely destroyed, along with the village’s electricity and water infrastructure, farmland and nearly 3,000 olive trees.
The scene in Kfar Kila was replicated in the majority of the eight villages we stopped in along the border. All were situated within roughly 2 miles of the Blue Line, the boundary between Lebanon and Israel as demarcated by the United Nations. In most places, the majority of the destruction occurred after the ostensible ceasefire was signed on Nov. 27, rather than during the more than 13 months of fighting prior to that.
“The border villages continue to lack the basic necessities that allow people to come back,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The majority remain, unfortunately, uninhabitable. The controlled demolition of hundreds of homes and razing of critical key infrastructure,” he added, made it “impossible for people to return.”
Hammoud guided us through Kfar Kila in his dusty white Honda flatbed truck. A lone white horse crossed the street in front of us, galloping out from the rows of devastated buildings.
We pulled over at what was once a bakery, the sign’s bright yellow and red paint still shining. Hammoud said it opened on March 14, as villagers attempted to return. For two days they had enjoyed fresh flatbread, until an Israeli strike on March 16 set the bakery on fire. All that remained of it was a single door frame and plastic cutlery poking out from the charred debris.
A few minutes’ drive from the bakery was an unfinished cinderblock house, just a stone’s throw from a wall erected along the Israeli border. In the backyard, a grove of dozens of olive trees had been uprooted, their roots left bare.
The home belongs to Ali Hammoud Chit, a local farmer, who was rebuilding it for his wife and three young children. He was hoping to return to his land, where he had been harvesting his father’s olives and farming tomatoes, he told me by phone.
One morning in mid-April, however, he returned to the village to find signs plastered on his unfinished walls. “Never allow Hezbollah members to return, at all, to your house or the general area, to avoid being exposed to danger. Don’t make your family, relatives and neighbors pay a heavy price. He who warns is excused,” the signs read in Arabic. The message was addressed to a man named Abbas Ali Saleh, whom Chit said he did not know.
Since Chit found the signs, he has nearly ceased the construction of his home. The hour-long trip from where he now resides, near the coastal city of Sidon, no longer seems worth it, he said.
We followed Hammoud into the village, driving up a hill to an empty courtyard, where a prefabricated building lay in tatters. Hammoud said it was hit in a recent Israeli strike. “Every day or two, they hit new things people build,” he said. “We don’t have enough money to keep trying.”
On the night of May 3, Israeli drones struck two prefabricated units in Kfar Kila. The village’s mayor said they were being used for municipal functions, such as housing and trade, and were installed about a week before being targeted.
The South Lebanon Council reported on April 30 that 47 of the 102 prefabricated units installed after the withdrawal of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon had been damaged. In five of the eight border villages we visited, we saw prefabricated units that were struck in April or May.
“On May 3rd, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) struck military infrastructure belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in southern Lebanon,” the Israeli army responded when I asked for a comment on the prefab strikes in Kfar Kila. “The IDF will continue to act to remove any threat to the State of Israel and its citizens and to prevent the rehabilitation of the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” the army added, regarding its continuing strikes on Lebanese border villages.
Residents of border villages said Hezbollah members had been using some of the prefabs for political purposes ahead of Lebanon’s municipal elections. In parallel with its militant activities, Hezbollah is also one of Lebanon’s major political parties. Rights watchdog groups in Lebanon have reiterated that membership or affiliation with Hezbollah, or other political movements with armed wings, is not a sufficient basis for determining an individual to be a lawful military target.
Just beyond Kfar Kila is the northern Israeli village of Metula, reported to be among those hit hardest by Hezbollah attacks during the fighting that began in October 2023. Its rows of two-story suburban homes, with their terracotta-colored roofs still intact, were a stark contrast to the piles of gray rubble that are all that is left of the homes on the Lebanese side of the border.
We were warned of danger on the road south, parallel to the frontier, from Kfar Kila to Houla. Israeli soldiers remain stationed at five outposts along the Lebanese border — two of which were blocking the road between the two villages. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in February that Israeli forces would “indefinitely remain” in a “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon, referring to the five positions.
A driver we stopped to ask for directions warned us that the Israeli soldiers shoot at cars driving past, so we decided to take a longer route. Just days after our visit, Israeli soldiers stationed near Houla opened fire on a journalist while she was documenting Israeli military activity, Lebanese media reported.
As we entered Houla, it appeared deserted. Not a sound could be heard except the gusts of wind whistling through the shards of debris. We drove up a hilly road to reach what was once the village center, overlooking the Israeli border. Most of the village had been flattened, barely a building still recognizable.
A small, elderly woman, hunched over her cane and gripping a key behind her back, hobbled down the dusty lane. She was known to villagers as “Hajjeh Hasna” and was 82 years old. She was on her way to visit her friend, one of the few people still living in the village. As I accompanied her, she told me her five adult children and their families had left Houla, their homes destroyed. “Where would they stay? They’re waiting for money to rebuild,” she said.
On our way out of Houla, we passed a small roadside shop, offering new chip packages glittering like gems amid the dust-colored rubble. The shop’s owner said he opened it about a month ago, hoping returnees would bring in business, but he was having little luck. At around 3 p.m., we were his first customers.
“There’s no one here, they’re not letting us return,” he told me. He was timid and hesitant to share his name, fearful that Israel would target him after publication. A few families had attempted to return to Houla, he said, but they fled after Israeli strikes scared them away. He recounted an Israeli strike on May 2, which hit a gas station on the village’s outskirts. Lebanon’s state news agency reported that five people were injured in the strike.
One of those injured was the wife of the gas station’s manager, the shop owner said. She had returned recently with her children but left immediately after being injured. As for himself, he said he had no children, so there was no huge risk to him staying — and he could no longer afford to rent elsewhere. “I don’t have another place to go,” he said.
As we left his shop, the deadly hum of an Israeli drone began to buzz over Houla, breaking the eerie silence.
Driving north, away from the border, life seemed to revive by the mile. Cars and trucks began to fill the roads, offering relief from the empty streets frequented mostly by armored Lebanese army vehicles and U.N. peacekeeping tanks, with guns mounted.
The destruction was still immense, but the signs of reconstruction became increasingly evident: freshly painted storefronts, brand-new scaffolding and bulldozers hauling away mountains of rubble.
We stopped for coffee at a crowded cafe in Beit Leif, just over 2 miles from the border. The sister of the cafe’s owner, 41-year-old Ghada Mustafa, strolled over to our table, smiling. Like most of the village’s 3,500 residents, she had returned shortly after the end of the initial 60-day ceasefire period, on Jan. 27. “Thankfully, we’re back in our homes,” she told me. “Here, it’s a bit safer, because the village is a bit farther from the border.”
Another Beit Leif local, 44-year-old Ali Mustafa, joined us, bringing warm flatbread from a bakery that had recently reopened across the street. After we enjoyed the food, coated with melted cheese and zaatar, Mustafa invited us to his home in the village square.
The square was bustling. In the center, a large prefabricated unit was serving as a mosque. Nearby, construction workers were installing the scaffolding of a new house. Mustafa’s elderly mother was sweeping the doorstep of their home. She paused to greet us as we arrived, kissing my cheeks.
Mustafa toured us through his home, showing off his new washing machine and the glittery white and pink beds he had bought for his three daughters. We strolled out to his balcony. He pointed to a distant hilltop, where he said Israeli troops were still stationed, watching the village. He then gestured to the left, to the location of their neighbors in Aita al-Shaab, a village touching the Israeli border. “At night, the [Israeli] drone shoots at them,” Ali said, noting that, unlike in Beit Leif, the majority of Aita al-Shaab’s residents still could not return.
After a 15-minute drive, we arrived in Aita al-Shaab, where only three shops were open. Few people could be spotted amid the ruins that the village had been reduced to by Israeli strikes. “In Aita al-Shaab, there is no peace,” Hala Qassam, 50, told me. She was attempting to reopen her bakery with her husband. “There is more destruction here than up there,” she said, gazing toward Beit Leif.
“The people want to return, but there are no homes,” she continued. “Now, if they come, Israel is also striking them, so people can’t come, they can’t return.”
Along Lebanon’s southern border, much of the agricultural land was devastated. Olive trees were toppled, oak forests bulldozed and pine trees sawed. For border residents, the destruction of the land not only eliminated a critical source of livelihood but also uprooted treasured parts of their heritage.
The rolling green hills of Yaroun, located near the center of the border, extend to the Israeli settlements of Dovev and Yiron. Most of Yaroun’s shops and buildings have been destroyed, along with its luscious natural areas, olive groves and farmland.
Yaroun’s mukhtar (a local official), 51-year-old Mohammad Chahine, guided us to the outskirts of the village, to what was once a 150-acre forest of hundred-year-old oak trees. “It was full of oak trees, you couldn’t see a thing,” he said, gazing ahead, where dozens of thick oak trunks lay in a field of red mud.
Chahine said the destruction of the forest began at the start of the war, in 2023. He pulled up his phone to show a video of smoke rising over the dense forest, which he recorded on Aug. 22, 2024, after an Israeli strike on the area. Over the course of a year and a half, Chahin estimated that roughly 1,000 to 1,500 oak trees were destroyed — chopped down, stolen or burned.
The villagers cherished the oak forest, Chahine said, prohibiting anyone from chopping down its trees and stealing their valuable wood. Years ago, the acorns once saved the villagers from starvation, he added. With a smile on his face, he recounted his memories under the trees: picnics, camping trips and collecting mushrooms. “The oak trees were like a home underneath, it felt cozy inside, you were protected.”
Out of the eight border villages we passed through, we witnessed five with olive trees that had been uprooted. In Aita al-Shaab, 740 acres of forest were also destroyed, in addition to olive trees adjacent to the wall demarcating the Blue Line, according to its mukhtar.
Water and electricity infrastructure were also devastated along the border. In Yaroun, large electricity generators that once helped power the village appeared as though they had been crushed. Chahine said Israeli soldiers plowed into the generators with their tanks, just before withdrawing from the village on Feb. 18. About 12 miles west of Yaroun, in the border village of Tayr Harfa, a water tower had been struck with “direct fire,” according to Richard Weir, a Human Rights Watch senior researcher.
“The [Israeli] aggression has completely destroyed the infrastructure, not even leaving the stones and trees untouched,” Tayr Harfa’s deputy mayor, Hussein Yousef, told me over the phone. He said that only about six of the village’s 1,000 residents had been able to return so far. All the villagers wanted to come back, he added, “but the lack of habitable homes, the lack of reconstruction capabilities and Israeli violations are delaying their return.”
On our way to Naqoura — the westernmost village on Lebanon’s southern border, by the Mediterranean coast — we passed through the Christian-majority village of Alma al-Shaab. It bore noticeably less damage than other villages we had passed through with Shiite Muslim majorities — communities from which Hezbollah draws most of its support and among which it often bases its military assets. Even so, it was still almost completely deserted.
“Most people still don’t want to come back,” Chadi Nayef Sayah, 47, told me, driving through the empty streets. “We have no electricity, no power and we always have the [Israeli] drone and jets above us,” he said.
He pulled over beside two homes that had been completely razed. Both belonged to his brothers, one a general in the Lebanese army. They were destroyed during the ceasefire, he noted, before Israeli troops withdrew. “It’s to make our return hard,” he said, contemplating why the homes were destroyed. “Maybe they are planning to make a buffer zone,” he added.
The seaside town of Naqoura echoed the scenes of destruction we saw along the border. Before the war, tourists would frequent the town, attracted to its crystal-clear water and white cliffs. But the fancy coffee shops and luxury hotels were shuttered, and the city center filled with wreckage.
Although the land border jutted to an end at Naqoura’s coastline, the danger continued into the Mediterranean. Israeli drones have shot at and even kidnapped fishers in Naqoura’s waters.
Two elderly men sat under the shade of a fruit tree, explaining that parts of the sea were now off-limits, too dangerous to fish. Hassan Jahir, 75, told me his brother, Muhammad, was kidnapped while fishing off Naqoura’s coast and had been in captivity for over three months. Lebanese state news reported that he was kidnapped on Feb. 2.
During the most intense period of the fighting, Israel forbade Lebanese fishers from entering the water within 30 miles of the border. The ban was never officially lifted. “If someone comes too close [to Israel’s sea border], they’ll come and take them,” Jahir said. Unable to fish freely, he now tries to sell milk in the nearby city of Tyre.
“I left the sea because of the Israelis,” Jahir said. “They’re occupying Lebanon’s land and sea,” he added, gazing into the sparkling blue waters.
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