Since agreeing last week to a cease-fire with Hezbollah, the Israeli army has leveled neighborhoods across towns and villages in southern Lebanon, prompting growing concern that thousands of displaced residents may have no homes to return to even if the fragile truce holds.
Spread across a hillside of southern Lebanon, the tiny village of Beit Lif had been almost entirely flattened. Once home to a few thousand people, nearly every house had been reduced to piles of concrete by Israeli military demolitions.
"They were demolishing it gradually until they reached the main square and now, as you can see, there are no more houses," said Hassan Sweidan, a resident of a neighboring village looking across at Beit Lif – about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) north of Lebanon’s border with Israel – from a nearby hill.
The Israeli military claims it destroys buildings that were used as outposts by the Iran-backed armed group, Hezbollah.
But in many cases, like Beit Lif, the demolition is almost complete. The wide scale of destruction has Lebanese officials and residents increasingly worried that large numbers of people displaced by the latest war will have nowhere to return if the fragile truce holds.
