Israeli campaign leaves Lebanon's border towns in ruins, satellite images show

Israel's military campaign in southern Lebanon has caused vast destruction in more than a dozen border towns and villages, reducing many of them to clusters of grey craters, according to satellite imagery provided to Reuters by Planet Labs Inc.

Many of the towns, emptied of their residents by the bombing, had been inhabited for at least two centuries. The imagery reviewed includes towns between Kfarkela in southeastern Lebanon, south past Meiss al-Jabal, and then west past a base used by U.N. peacekeepers to the small village of Labbouneh.

"There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old. Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes," said Abdulmonem Choukeir, mayor of Meiss al-Jabal, one of the villages hit by Israeli attacks.

"Who knows what will still be standing at the end?"

Reuters compared satellite images taken in October 2023 to those taken in September and October 2024. Many of the villages with striking visible damage over the course of the last month sit atop hills overlooking Israel.

After nearly a year of exchanging fire across the border, Israel intensified its strikes on southern Lebanon and beyond over the last month. Israeli troops have made ground incursions all along the mountainous frontier with Lebanon, engaging in heavy clashes with Hezbollah fighters inside some towns.

Lebanon's disaster risk management unit, which tracks both victims and attacks on specific towns, said the 14 towns reviewed by Reuters had been subject to a total of 3,809 attacks by Israel over the last year.

Israel's military did not immediately respond to Reuters questions about the scale of destruction. Israel's military spokesman, Daniel Hagari, said on Oct. 24 that Israel has struck more than 3,200 targets in south Lebanon.

The military says it is attacking towns in southern Lebanon because Hezbollah has turned "civilian villages into fortified combat zones," hiding weapons, explosives, and vehicles there. Hezbollah denies using civilian infrastructure to launch attacks or store weapons, and residents of the towns deny the assertion.

A person familiar with Israel's military operations in Lebanon told Reuters that troops were systematically attacking towns with strategic overlook points, including Mhaibib.

The person said that Israel had "learned lessons" after its last war with Hezbollah in 2006, including incidents in which troops making ground incursions into the valleys of southern Lebanon were attacked by Hezbollah fighters on hilltops.

"That is why they are targeting these villages so heavily - so they can move more freely," the person said.

The most recent images of Kfarkela showed a string of white splotches along a main road leading into a town. Imagery taken last year showed the same road lined with houses and green vegetation, indicating the houses had been pulverized.

Further south, Meiss al-Jabal, a town 700 meters (yards) away from the U.N.-demarcated Blue Line separating Israeli and Lebanese territory, suffered significant destruction to an entire block near the town center.

The area, measuring approximately 150 meters by 400 meters, appeared as a swatch of sandy brown, signaling the buildings there had been entirely flattened. Images from the same month in 2023 showed a densely packed neighborhood of homes.

Reuters