Ahmad Ibrahim has only a few photographs of his home in Deir Seryan. The rest — the pictures, the possessions, the accumulation of a life lived entirely within 13 kilometres of the village he was born in — he left behind when he fled on 2 March, certain, as so many were, that he would return to collect them. He has since watched videos of his house being blown apart in a mass detonation.
“My whole life is there,” the 50-year-old farmer said. “I’ve never really left beyond 10-13km. It’s a beautiful, typical village — at least it was before the war. Its people are kind and generous.” The village, like dozens of others strung along Lebanon’s southern border, no longer looks the way he remembers it.
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages in south Lebanon as part of its ongoing invasion — rigging homes with explosives and bringing them down in massive remote detonations that have been captured on video and shared widely online. Footage posted by the Israeli military and circulated on social media shows large-scale demolitions carried out in the border villages of Taybeh, Naqoura, and Deir Seryan.
Lebanese media has reported similar detonations in other border villages, though satellite imagery to independently verify those specific claims was not immediately available.
The demolitions did not happen without direction from above. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz explicitly called for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages, citing what he described as the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza. That model, as documented by satellite analysis, resulted in the destruction of approximately 90% of homes in Rafah in southern Gaza.
The Israeli military has defended the demolitions as targeted operations against Hezbollah infrastructure — tunnels and military facilities that, it claims, the armed group embedded within civilian homes. Critics, however, point out that the scale and indiscriminate nature of the destruction goes far beyond any plausible military justification.
A War Crime in the Making?:
Rights groups have been unequivocal in their alarm. The mass remote detonation of civilian homes, they argue, could constitute wanton destruction — a war crime under international humanitarian law, which prohibits the deliberate demolition of civilian property except where strictly necessary for lawful military purposes.
Academics studying the tactics used in Gaza have employed the term “domicide” to describe what is happening — a systematic strategy of destroying and damaging civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable. The same pattern, they warn, is now being replicated in Lebanon.
Israel has made no secret of its broader territorial ambitions in the south. It has stated its intention to occupy vast stretches of the region up to the Litani River, establishing what it calls a “security zone,” and has indicated that displaced residents will not be permitted to return until the safety of its northern cities is guaranteed.
World War III? Ghanaian Prophet Issues Chilling Warning
For rights organisations and humanitarian observers, that framing raises a deeply troubling question: whether the destruction of homes is not merely a military tactic, but a mechanism for ensuring that return becomes impossible.
More Than Houses:
To understand what is being lost, it is necessary to understand what these villages represented — not just to the people who lived in them, but to the broader Lebanese diaspora scattered across the world.
South Lebanon’s border villages have been sites of invasion and occupation on and off since the late 1970s. Over generations, that cycle of conflict pushed families outward — to Australia, to Africa, to Europe — in search of stability and a livelihood that the region’s volatility made impossible to sustain at home. But the villages never stopped mattering. They served as anchors for scattered families, as the fixed point around which diaspora lives quietly orbited.
Every spring and summer, those families would return. Old family homes would fill up again. Border villages that sat quiet for most of the year would sometimes see their populations double during holiday season, as grandchildren who had grown up in Melbourne or Abidjan or Paris came back to the houses their grandparents had built.
Those houses are now being blown up by remote detonation. For Ibrahim and the countless others watching from exile, the videos circulating online are not just documentation of destruction. They are the erasure of something that cannot be rebuilt by simply laying new foundations — the sense that no matter how far you go, there is always somewhere to return to.That anchor, for many, is gone.