Psychological toll mounts as Lebanese villages erased by Israel’s war
Beirut, Lebanon – In February 2025, Ali stood outside his house in Naqoura, in southern Lebanon, and pointed at the crack in the foundation and
Beirut, Lebanon – In February 2025, Ali stood outside his house in Naqoura, in southern Lebanon, and pointed at the crack in the foundation and fruit trees pulled up by the Israeli military. The Israeli military had recently withdrawn from the town as part of a ceasefire agreement, but had left behind detonated homes, a graffiti-laden school, and power lines pulled out of the ground. Ali, an elderly man from the town, said at the time that he would fix it all. But a little more than a year later, Israel has completely razed the area of Naqoura, one of many towns and villages in southern Lebanon that the Israeli military has made completely uninhabitable. Forced to flee when the Israelis invaded again in March, Ali has traded his garden and family home by the sea for a room on a rooftop in the heart of Beirut. Sipping coffee, he lamented. “We had 20 good years,” he said, roughly referring to the period between the end of the 2000 Israeli occupation and the start of hostilities on October 8, 2023. For thousands of people like Ali, who are from towns or villages now razed to the ground, the future is unclear. The pain of having lost their homes is devastating, but experts expect an even greater psychological burden should these people eventually return to their villages. “When a village is flattened, and even the landmarks around it are gone, people lose more than their homes. They lose the markers that told them where they belonged, and that’s part of why we’re seeing such deep distress, including in people who have never struggled with their mental health before,” Basma Alloush of the International Rescue Committee told Al Jazeera. “For many, it’s losing the physical traces of childhood, the tree they grew up near, the street they played in, the home that held a lifetime of memories, with no way to find or confirm any of it was ever there,” she added.
“That kind of grief has nowhere to land, because the past itself feels erased along with the place that held it.” Villages razed On March 2, Israel intensified its war on Lebanon for a second time in less than two years. It responded to Hezbollah firing rockets – the first such attack against Israel by the group in more than a year – by re-invading southern Lebanon and striking targets all across the country. Since then, Israel has killed 4,257 people in Lebanon and wounded more than 12,000 more. More than 1.2 million people were displaced at the peak of Israel’s attacks. Some of those people have gone home, but thousands remain displaced because their villages are occupied or because their homes were destroyed. Israel currently occupies approximately 6 percent of Lebanese territory and a recent agreement signed between Tel Aviv and Beirut seems to indicate that Israeli troops will not be abandoning their positions anytime soon. Human rights groups like Amnesty International were already calling Israel’s destruction in southern Lebanon “extensive” after Israel’s 2024 destruction. But following the 2026 offensive, a UNDP assessment found that 11,095 buildings were completely destroyed. Satellite analysis conducted by the French publication Le Monde also found that since March 2026, 45 percent of urban areas in southern Lebanon have been damaged or destroyed. Among those areas are towns like Bint Jbeil, Kfar Kila, Meiss el-Jabal, Taybeh, Deir Siryan and Ali’s home town of Naqoura. The level of destruction is so severe that it can be hard for residents to determine where their homes are in relation to the rest of the town. Davide Musardo, a clinical psychologist with Doctors Without Borders – known by its French initials MSF, who spent time in Gaza, said that residents from the devastated strip often lost “reference points” to where their homes were.
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