Israeli strikes leave Lebanese border towns in ruins, satellite images show

Israel's military aggression 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 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 UN 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?"

Comparing satellite images from October 2023 with those from September and October 2024 reveals that many villages showing significant visible damage over the past month are located on 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 had been subject to a total of 3,809 attacks by Israel over the last year.

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

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 pulverised.

Further south, Meiss al-Jabal, a town 700 metres away from the UN-demarcated Blue Line separating Israeli and Lebanese territory, suffered significant destruction to an entire block near the town centre.

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

Widespread destruction

At least 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israel's strikes and more than 2,600 have been killed over the last year — a vast majority in the last month, Lebanon's government says.

Residents of the border villages have not been able to reach their hometowns in months. "After war came to Meiss al-Jabal, after the residents left, we no longer know anything about the state of the village," Meiss al-Jabal's mayor said.

The imagery of the nearby village of Mhaibib depicted similar levels of destruction.

Mhaibib is one of several villages — alongside Kfarkela, Aitaroun, Odaisseh, and Ramyeh — featured in footage shared on social media showing simultaneous explosions of several structures at once, indicating they had been laden with explosives.

Lubnan Baalbaki, the conductor of Lebanon's philharmonic orchestra and son of late Lebanese artist Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, said his family had been purchasing satellite imagery of their hometown of Odaisseh to check if the family house still stood.

The house had been transformed by Abdel-Hamid into a cultural centre, full of his artworks, original sketches and more than 1,000 books in an all-wood library. Abdel-Hamid passed away in 2013 and was buried behind the house with his late wife.

"We're a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home. We were trying to reassure ourselves with that thought," Baalbaki, the son, said.

Until late October, the house still stood. But at the weekend Baalbaki saw a video circulating of several homes in Odaisseh, including his family's, exploding.

The family is not affiliated with Hezbollah and Baalbaki denied that any weapons or military equipment were stored there.

"If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what's in that house," Baalbaki said. "It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life."