Satellite Images Document Scale of Israeli Demolitions in Lebanese Villages

In the 14 weeks between late September 2024 and the end of January 2025, more than 10,000 buildings in southern Lebanon were heavily damaged or destroyed — and the majority of that destruction occurred after a US-brokered ceasefire was meant to stop the fighting [1][5]. Radar and optical satellite imagery compiled by academic researchers, human rights organizations and wire services has allowed, for the first time, a building-by-building accounting of what happened inside the Israeli military's operational zone along the Blue Line. The record it produces is starker and more granular than any previous accounting of an Israel-Hezbollah war, and it is reshaping arguments about whether the destruction was militarily necessary, punitive, or designed to make return impossible.

How the accounting was done

Two research efforts anchor the public data. Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab combined 77 verified videos and photographs with high-resolution satellite imagery to produce village-level damage counts between 26 September 2024 and 30 January 2025 [1]. In parallel, geographers Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University — whose Decentralized Damage Mapping Group has previously documented Ukraine and Gaza — used Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar, which detects structural change regardless of cloud cover, to map damage across the southern border belt [8][2]. Their data, licensed to outlets including AFP, the BBC and NBC News, showed that by 7 November 2024 more than half the buildings in 10 border villages had been destroyed and 18 villages along the Blue Line were each at least 70 percent destroyed, with an estimated 45,000 homes lost [2].

Source: Amnesty International / UNOSAT / Scher & Van Den Hoek satellite analysis

Data as of Jan 30, 2025CSV

Amnesty's August 2025 report named Yarine, Dhayra and Boustane in Tyre district as the most heavily affected municipalities, each with more than 70 percent of structures destroyed or severely damaged [1]. In Mhaibib, more than 84 percent of the village was razed; Yarun lost three-quarters of its roughly 500 central buildings; Aita Ash-Shaab lost 71 percent; Kfar Kila lost more than 1,300 structures along with 133 acres of orchards; Odeisseh lost 52 percent; Maroun el Ras lost 67 percent [1][2]. Destruction cut across residential housing, agricultural infrastructure (orchards, terracing, greenhouses) and civic assets including mosques, churches, schools, football pitches and the Khiam Detention Center — the former prison that had been converted into a museum of the 1980s–2000s occupation and whose remains satellite imagery captured being leveled by excavators as late as March 2026 [1][21].

A timeline that inverts the usual pattern

The most contested finding concerns timing. Under international humanitarian law, destruction of civilian property is lawful only when demanded by "imperative military necessity." The satellite and incident records both show that the pace of structure destruction accelerated sharply after 27 November 2024, the date the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect and during the 60-day window in which Israeli forces were supposed to withdraw [5][10].

Source: ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project)

Data as of Jan 30, 2025CSV

ACLED, the conflict-event monitor, logged more than 260 discrete property-destruction events inside southern Lebanon during the ceasefire period — more than seven times the roughly 37 recorded in the two months beforehand [5]. In Naqoura alone, ACLED catalogued 14 separate controlled-explosion or bulldozing incidents between 11 December 2024 and 6 January 2025, each involving multiple houses [5]. Amnesty identified 29 demolitions in Kfar Kila of which 26 came after the ceasefire, and 12 in Maroun el Ras of which 9 came after [1]. Open-source video verified by Amnesty shows Israeli combat engineers manually laying explosives inside intact homes, bulldozing orchards, and detonating rows of buildings days and weeks into the ceasefire window [1][10].

Those sequences are the crux of the legal argument. "Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly," is defined as a grave breach under Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and as a war crime under Article 8(2)(a)(iv) of the Rome Statute [15][16]. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and a group of UN special rapporteurs have argued that demolitions carried out after hostilities had ended, in areas under full Israeli control, cannot meet the necessity test and therefore must be investigated as war crimes [1][10][17].

Israel's justifications and the evidence behind them

The Israel Defense Forces and the Netanyahu government have offered a layered rationale. The first is the "buffer zone" doctrine. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said demolitions are needed to "expand the security strip" and keep Hezbollah anti-tank teams out of line-of-sight of Israeli towns that were evacuated after 8 October 2023 [6]. Defense Minister Israel Katz went further in public statements in early 2026, saying Israel intends a "security zone up to the Litani" — the river roughly 30 km from the border that marks the northern limit of the 2006 UN Security Council Resolution 1701 disengagement line [6][18].

The second is tunnel and weapons-cache clearance. The IDF says its forces reached roughly 1,000 Hezbollah sites during the ground operation, destroyed more than 50 tunnel shafts and used more than 100 tons of explosives on four major tunnels belonging to Hezbollah's Radwan force [9]. An IDF combat-engineering commander told Israeli press his battalion alone destroyed more than 1,000 "terror infrastructure" sites during a five-week rotation [9]. Israeli officials have publicly released photographs of what they say are anti-tank missiles, rockets and drones stored inside residential homes across at least 160 villages [9][19].

The third justification is the claim that many homes had been rigged with booby traps and could not safely be cleared in any other way. Israeli military spokespeople have pointed to at least one documented case in which returning Lebanese civilians were killed in an explosion inside a previously occupied house, and have used those incidents to defend controlled demolition as a force-protection measure [19]. Defenders of the operation, including a number of Israeli analysts and northern-Israel local officials, have argued the physical removal of buildings is the only way to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting the dense short-range fire network that forced the evacuation of some 60,000 northern Israeli residents after October 2023 [6][18].

Where the satellite record complicates those arguments is in the ratio of destruction to confirmed military infrastructure. In Mhaibib, where more than 84 percent of buildings were razed, the IDF has publicized one tunnel complex beneath the village [1][9]. In Aita Ash-Shaab, Amnesty mapped 264 destroyed buildings but the IDF has not produced village-specific tunnel documentation accounting for that scale [1]. Orchards, greenhouses and municipal sports facilities — flattened alongside homes in Kfar Kila and elsewhere — are difficult to link to tunnel clearance or booby-trap risk [1][10]. Amnesty's investigators concluded that "the scale, systematic nature and pattern" of the demolitions, including those filmed after the ceasefire, "cannot be explained by military necessity" and instead point to "collective punishment," which is explicitly prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention [1][15].

How this compares to prior conflicts

The 2024–25 campaign has already surpassed the 2006 war on almost every physical metric that satellite imagery can capture. Lebanese environmental authorities and the UN estimate the current conflict has generated roughly 32 million tons of rubble, compared with about 6 million tons after the 34-day war in 2006 [13]. Displacement at the peak exceeded one million people — more than during the 2006 war — and one year after the November 2024 ceasefire an estimated 64,000 Lebanese civilians remained unable to return home because their villages had been destroyed, were under Israeli occupation, or were judged too contaminated with unexploded ordnance and booby traps to re-enter safely [7].

Against other recent satellite-mapped conflicts, southern Lebanon sits in unusual company. UNITAR's UNOSAT programme found that by October 2025, 81 percent of all structures in the Gaza Strip were damaged — a figure still higher than any single southern Lebanese village on the Amnesty list, but covering a far larger built-up area and population [12]. Scher and Van Den Hoek's own comparative work, cited by CBC and Bloomberg, found that Gaza's rate and density of destruction exceeded the documented rates for Aleppo, Mariupol and Mosul [12][14]. Southern Lebanon is distinctive because the destruction is concentrated in small villages — most under 3,000 pre-war residents — and because a much larger share of that destruction occurred after active combat ended.

The bill, and who will pay it

The World Bank's Lebanon Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, published on 7 March 2025, put total recovery and reconstruction needs at US$11 billion [3]. Roughly US$8.4 billion is required in the first three years and US$2.6 billion in the 2028–2030 medium term [3]. The Bank estimated that US$3–5 billion would need to be publicly financed, with US$1 billion in infrastructure alone [3].

Source: World Bank, Lebanon Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment 2025

Data as of Mar 7, 2025CSV

The World Bank's Board approved a US$250 million loan in June 2025 to begin rubble management and emergency reconstruction [4]. Gulf donors — chiefly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — have conditioned larger pledges on Lebanese state disarmament of Hezbollah south of the Litani and the full implementation of Resolution 1701, a linkage Lebanese officials have objected to as inserting political conditions into humanitarian recovery [4][20]. The United States and the European Union have indicated support for reconstruction but have declined to commit funds while Israeli forces remain inside Lebanese territory [18][20]. Human Rights Watch in December 2025 documented Israeli strikes on reconstruction equipment — including more than 300 bulldozers, excavators and cranes destroyed in a single strike on a contractor lot in Msayleh in October 2025 — which it argued were unlawful attacks on civilian objects and a deliberate obstacle to return [11].

About 95 percent of the displaced households that have begun returning are still living in rental housing or with host families rather than in their own homes, according to the World Bank and UN agencies [3][7]. Evacuation orders posted by the IDF now cover roughly 1,470 square kilometres — about 14 percent of Lebanese territory — and in large sections of Bint Jbeil and Marjayoun districts, return is physically impossible because villages no longer exist [7][17].

The international response, and its limits

Formal international reaction has been mixed. A 14 April 2026 joint statement by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and several other European and Arab governments "condemned in the strongest terms" renewed Israeli strikes in Lebanon that killed more than 350 people, and urged full Israeli withdrawal [16]. UN special rapporteurs in April 2026 described the post-ceasefire bombing and demolition campaign as "unprecedented" and called for immediate cessation [17]. France and Indonesia requested an emergency UN Security Council session after French UNIFIL personnel reported intimidation by Israeli soldiers during deconfliction procedures at Naqoura [16]. Saudi Arabia's UN delegate condemned the destruction and displacement [20].

No formal legal proceedings have resulted. Lebanon is not a state party to the Rome Statute, which constrains the International Criminal Court's automatic jurisdiction; Israel is not a party either. The prosecutor's office has an open investigation into the situation in Palestine but has not publicly opened a Lebanon file. Customary international law — as codified in the 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1949 Geneva Conventions — prohibits collective punishment and wanton destruction regardless of treaty status, but enforcement depends on states' political willingness to initiate universal-jurisdiction prosecutions or to support a Security Council referral, neither of which is likely while the United States holds a veto [15]. The United States has defended Israel's campaign as a response to Hezbollah aggression and has not criticized the post-ceasefire demolitions publicly [6][18].

What the satellite record means going forward

The southern Lebanon case is the most detailed public demonstration yet of how radar satellite imagery, combined with local documentation, can produce a near-real-time building-level record of destruction — the same methodology now being applied in Iran following Israeli and US strikes in 2025–26 [8]. For researchers who work on laws of armed conflict, that granularity changes what is evidentiary: the burden of proving "military necessity" under Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention has historically rested on the attacking party, and individual satellite-verified destruction events now can be examined against the party's own public claims about the tunnels, caches or booby traps present at each address [15].

For Lebanese villages, the short-term stakes are different. Many of the destroyed municipalities — Mhaibib, Yarun, Kfar Kila, Aita Ash-Shaab — housed Shia communities who trace continuous residence in those specific villages to the Ottoman period and earlier. Their physical destruction, on a scale the satellite record leaves little room to dispute, has produced a border zone emptied not only of militants but of the civilian life that gave it meaning, and it has produced a reconstruction bill that neither the Lebanese state nor any single donor has so far committed to pay without strings attached.