The Ottoman-era arches of this city’s Old Market had stood witness to the many conflicts that have plagued Lebanon’s south.
They tumbled, along with rest of the market, in an Israeli airstrike in Nabatieh. A few days later, another airstrike hit the city’s municipal building, killing 16 people, including the mayor. Then a neighborhood in the city’s west was leveled. More strikes followed.
After this month’s bombing campaign on Nabatieh, 40 miles from the border with Israel, more than 33 people were dead and large swaths of what was once southern Lebanon’s second-most populated city had been flattened.
It is a scene that is playing out in cities and villages across the south in what officials at the United Nations, in Lebanon and at human rights groups warn appears to mirror some of the patterns of destruction and displacement seen in Israel’s attacks in the Gaza Strip.
After Israel severely increased its bombardment of Lebanon last month, it sent troops across the border in what it called a “limited incursion” to secure its northern border against rocket attacks by the militant group Hezbollah.
But multiple visits to Lebanon’s south, the Bekaa valley and parts of Beirut — all areas where Hezbollah holds sway — reveal that the attacks have affected more than a third of the country.
Israel’s bombardment has uprooted 1 of every 5 people in Lebanon, emptying out much of Lebanon’s Shiite heartlands and destroying infrastructure — according to Lebanese leaders, U.N. officials and experts — that preclude residents’ timely return. Places like Nabatieh are rapidly becoming unlivable.
“Israel is targeting economic infrastructure, the agricultural sector — all that is required for normal life,” said Howaida Turk, the governor for the south Lebanese governorate of Nabatieh. “This is more than just a response and a counter-response between Israel and the Resistance,” she said, referring to Hezbollah.
“We’re seeing places where life is unsustainable now.”
One of the most recent attacks in Nabatieh, which has been under evacuation orders since early this month, was another strike on the remains of the Old Market. Hidden in the rubble were the falafel restaurant whose owner learned his trade over the border in Acre, Israel; the sweets shop; the stationary store that was a one-stop shop for kids returning to school.
“This is our history, the most beautiful days of our childhood — we’re seeing them turned to rubble,” said Hussein Jaber, 30, who heads Nabatieh’s fire services.
“And for what? These are shops, civilian areas. All they’re doing is destroying livelihoods.”
Israel says it is targeting “terrorist infrastructure sites, Hezbollah command centers, and weapons storage facilities… embedded by Hezbollah adjacent to civilian infrastructure” and “exploiting the civilian population as a human shield.”
But the level of destruction has prompted calls for restraint from world bodies and rights groups.
“Over the past days, we have witnessed increasingly severe impact on civilian infrastructure and civilians across Lebanon due to Israeli airstrikes,” Imran Riza, the U.N.’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon, said in a statement following the strikes on Nabatieh.
“Healthcare facilities, mosques, historical markets, residential complexes, and now government buildings are being reduced to rubble.”
In recent days, Israeli army troops demolished buildings en masse, in villages including Muhaibib, Ramia and several others along the Lebanese border, all but razing them, according to Lebanese army sources and footage released on social media. The Lebanese army has remained neutral in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
Israeli bombardment in the south has destroyed at least 28 water facilities serving more than 360,000 people, UNICEF said in a statement last week, and six hospitals are out of service. A further 15 hospitals, 70 primary healthcare centers and several schools have sustained damage. UNICEF said the true extent of the damage is “likely higher.”
Meanwhile, thousands of Israeli airstrikes reaching deep into Lebanon, along with extensive evacuation warnings from the Israeli military, have left wide swaths of the country a no-man’s-land.
That includes the Dahieh, the cluster of suburban neighborhoods south of Beirut where Hezbollah dominates. One of Israel’s strikes in a residential neighborhood in the Dahieh last month killed Hezbollah’s longtime top leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The area once held more than 700,000 residents, many of whom now sleep in makeshift shelters across Lebanon’s north; or, for the more desperate, Beirut’s squares, parks and seaside boulevards.
“We are seeing the same patterns that we saw in Gaza, the same means and methods of warfare that are being used,” Jeremy Laurence, spokesperson for the United Nation’s human rights commissioner, said in a news briefing this month, adding that civilians are the ones who “pay the ultimate price.”
“The devastation is beyond belief for all people in Lebanon as it is in Gaza. We can’t let this happen again.”
Israeli officials have said they are aiming to degrade Hezbollah and return to north Israel residents who fled amid Hezbollah missile and rocket attacks, which began a day after Palestinian militants from Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hezbollah said it was seeking to aid Hamas and force Israel to fight on two fronts.
The Biden administration has warned Israel about the breadth of Israel’s bombing campaign. When asked about the strike on Nabatieh and the destruction of villages, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said he didn’t know what Israel’s “intent was or what they were trying to accomplish” but that Hezbollah operates from underneath and inside civilian homes.
“Obviously, we do not want to see entire villages destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian homes destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian buildings destroyed,” he said. He added that Israel has the right to go after legitimate Hezbollah targets “but they need to do so in a way that protects civilian infrastructure, protects civilians.”
In Nabatieh, the attack on the municipal building came as the mayor and other members of the city’s crisis team were assembling aid packages for the remaining residents.
“There are no rockets, no ammunition here. Bring police dogs if you want; they won’t find gunpowder, just bread,” said Abbass Salloum, an administrator in the municipality’s complaints section who had spent hours finding the scattered remains of his fallen colleagues.
On a piece of wrapping paper he reverently carried in his hand was a charred piece of flesh he was taking for DNA analysis.
“All this is happening because the Israelis want us to leave.”
Nadim Houry, director of the Arab Reform Initiative think tank and who in the past led Human Rights Watch’s Beirut office, said the attacks on Nabatieh were of a piece with Israel targeting political, educational and social institutions affiliated with Hezbollah or that operate in its areas.
“Israel has long been thinking about Hezbollah’s civilian infrastructure, but there’s a very deliberate military doctrine to target what Israel has defined in its own intelligence writings as ‘the Resistance society,’ ” he said.
The displacement, in which some Lebanese have had to seek new shelter multiple times, said Gebran Bassil, who leads the Free Patriotic Movement, a Maronite Christian party allied with Hezbollah, evokes the mass evacuations seen in Gaza.
“Israel specializes in population transfer… And this transfer is being waged against the Lebanese, and especially the Shiites,” he said in an address last week.
Nabatieh, once a noisy, compact city of 120,000, famous for the market and its yearly 10-day gathering for Ashura — when Shiite Muslims commemorate the 7th century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson — is now ghostly quiet. Only a skeleton crew of volunteers and medical and municipal workers remain, along with residents too old, poor or infirm to leave.
Outside one of two hospitals still open in Nabatieh, nestled on a hill overlooking part of the city, ambulance crews sat outside the hospital courtyard, smoking and drinking coffee. Every so often, a loud thump would hit somewhere in the distance, and they would crane their necks trying to see smoke and identify where it might be. Soon after, an ambulance would peel off, sirens ripping through the silence.
Mukhtar Mroueh, a general surgeon, was operating on a casualty of one of the day’s strikes: a man injured along with his wife in a nearby village. The man, his clothes dusty and his arms streaked with red, had a broken shoulder blade and a punctured lung. He panted as Mroueh sewed up an incision by his shoulder.
Mroueh remembers the city in previous bouts of conflict, like in 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah fought in a hugely destructive 34-day war.
“It’s already worse than that for us here. Ten times worse,” he said.
The hospital still had sufficient medical supplies, but it was getting harder to secure the 500 gallons of fuel it needed every day for the generators — no one was willing to make the drive to pick up more. Staff had resorted to sleeping in the hospital with their families rather than risk the back and forth on the roads. It felt like the city was being strangled, he said.
Mroueh said he believed the timing of the strike on the city offices, hitting when residents were expecting aid deliveries, was a message from the Israelis.
“They’re telling people to get out. Doesn’t matter who it is — no one should stay.”
Mroueh said he had received a phone call a few days before from a Danish number; it was someone named Tony, who, speaking in broken Arabic, claimed he was with the Israeli military and was warning residents to get out. Mroueh said he was going nowhere.
“We can’t leave the hospital.”
