Israel’s campaign to raze huge swaths of southern Lebanon may destroy not only people’s homes, but also their ability to even show they owned the properties, according to locals and officials from the Lebanese government — potentially leaving as many as a quarter million Lebanese unable to prove that they have property or homes at all.
Aerial imagery from Bint Jbeil, the seat of a municipality by the same name, shows what residents describe as burn marks at sites where official records were kept: civil registration files, land deeds, the paper infrastructure of a city’s legal existence.
With the notary gone, civil administration buildings bulldozed, and widespread destruction of homes that contained important personal documents, residents of the 36 villages of the Bint Jbeil district fear Israel’s total war has meant the destruction of all their records could permanently untether them from the homes they left behind when they fled under Israel’s evacuation orders.
That could make reconstruction after the war a nightmare. Bint Jbeil is Lebanon’s most southwestern district and the site of an Israeli campaign to evacuate entire populations before flattening their villages.
“The Ministry of Interior has not yet been able to obtain the civil registry records for Bint Jbeil district.”
