The death of a Lebanese village

In a trash-covered parking lot near Beirut's Mediterranean coast, Hassan Yahya has taped a cardboard sign to a traffic light pole next to the tent wing that now serves as his home. "Kfar Kila welcomes you," it reads in thin pencil letters.

The cardboard sign resembles a signpost that once stood dozens of kilometers away, at the entrance to the centuries-old village of the same name. Kfar Qila is one of a dozen villages along Lebanon's southern border that have been gradually destroyed in waves of Israeli bombing over the past two and a half years.

Now, as Israeli forces move in with controlled detonations and bulldozers, those villages are being virtually wiped out, and vibrant communities are being transformed into lifeless landscapes.

Like tens of thousands of other southerners, Yahya watched as his ancestral land was transformed into a “buffer zone” that Israel was clearing to secure its border.

In Lebanon, villages occupy a place deeply woven into psychology and culture: they are where families gather from across the country and the world, preserving their roots by investing in homes and building community bonds, in the rhythm of weddings, holidays, and olive harvests.

Virtually everyone knows which village their family came from - "day'a" in the local dialect - even if they left generations ago. The sudden disappearance of these settlements left hundreds of thousands of people without a foothold.

“It’s like fish – if they get out of water, they die,” said 58-year-old Yahya, sitting hunched over on a plastic chair in his tent as the generator hummed behind him. “We can’t leave. We’re dying.”

Israeli forces claim that Kfar Qila and other razed villages are havens for Hezbollah, the political and military movement they have been fighting since Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, plunged the region into conflict.

The Israeli military told Reuters that Kfar Qila was designated a “leading Hezbollah village” and contained “extensive terrorist infrastructure,” including homes and schools. It said Israeli forces seized more than 90 truckloads of weapons there in 2024, with additional quantities seized this year, adding that the military was seeking to minimize civilian harm. Reuters could not independently verify the claims.

The latest round of fighting, which erupted early last month when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with its embattled ally Iran, has forced 1,2 million Lebanese, about a fifth of the population, to flee their homes.

To gain insight into what life was like in one of Lebanon's vanished villages, Reuters spoke to five former residents of Kfar Qila, now scattered across the country, and used satellite imagery, social media posts, and photos and videos shared by them and others to determine what happened to their communities.

Some of the earliest mentions of Kfar Qila appear in the travelogues of the 10th-century Arab geographer Al-Maqdisi, and later in the records of Ottoman tax collectors and British surveyors from the colonial era.

Before the outbreak of war in 2023, the village was home to about 5.500 people, according to Hasan Shit, the mayor of Kfar Qila. Agriculture dominated life, and the climate was conducive to growing crops ranging from wheat and grapes to watermelons, tobacco, tomatoes, parsley, beans and olives.

The village was proud of its olive oil, which was sold throughout the country and attracted buyers from as far away as Beirut, he added.

Daily life revolved around bakeries, restaurants and cafes where locals gathered to play cards, exchange news, gossip and jokes. During weddings, the community would gather for seven-day feasts. On the day of Ashura, which marks the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, crowds of people flocked to the center of the village, climbing onto rooftops to watch men in medieval dress reenact the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein was killed 1.300 years ago.

"Everything went up in smoke"

According to Shit, for most of the two decades leading up to the October 7 attacks, Kfar Qila lived in relative prosperity. Schools and clinics were opening, literacy was growing, and roads to the city of Nabatiya and other nearby centers were expanding the horizons. Expatriates were sending money home from Europe, the Gulf, and Africa.

Yahya's brother's children, who lived in Sweden, built a house next to Fatima Gate, a historic border crossing that has become a local attraction, while cafes and restaurants have sprung up nearby, along with a replica of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock and a graffiti-covered wall that Israel erected along the border. Yahya himself built a three-story house in the village of concrete and stone and installed an oven in the basement to serve pastries to friends.

However, within days of the attack, Hezbollah launched a “war of support” for Hamas, firing rockets into Israel. The Israeli border town of Metula was particularly hard hit, with hundreds of homes damaged or destroyed, according to Israeli media reports.

Israel responded with a fierce air and ground campaign, heavily focused on the south of the country. By January 2024, Kfar Qila was almost empty, Sheet said.

In the months that followed, Israel announced that it had destroyed dozens of underground facilities and hundreds of Hezbollah weapons found in the village.

Hezbollah officials have repeatedly condemned the demolition of the village and denied that the group is placing military infrastructure in areas where civilians live. Its media service did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the demolitions and the Israeli military statement on Kfar Qila.

Before the war, Hezbollah made no secret of its plans to invade northern Israel, even inviting journalists to watch its fighters simulate such an attack, and describing its tunnel network as extensive. At least one of the four tunnels discovered by Israel in 2018 ran from Kfar Qila under the border to Metula.

Shortly after the outbreak of the conflict, Yahya left Kfar Qila for the north, before ending up in Beirut. His neighbor and childhood friend, Heder Hamoud, had settled near the Syrian border. Shopkeeper Jamil Fawaz, whose shop and house had been destroyed, fled first to the southern town of Haboush and later to a school in the coastal city of Sidon, which provided shelter to hundreds of people who had been made homeless.

“Everything went up in smoke,” said Fawaz, sitting next to a wall in the school where displaced residents have displayed dozens of paper signs to preserve the memory of the names of villages affected by the war, including Kfar Kilu.

War with Iran brings new pain

A ceasefire in November 2024 encouraged some residents to return. But by then, nearly 85 percent of the buildings in Kfar Qila had been destroyed, Shit said. Among them was Yahya's extended family's newly built house, completed just before the war.

Several residents, including Hamoud, have erected prefabricated houses near the ruins, hoping for reconstruction. In February of this year, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam visited Kfar Qila and promised the impatient residents that reconstruction would begin soon.

Instead, war returned in less than a month. This time, Israeli forces used controlled demolitions and bulldozers.

One video, verified by Reuters and first posted on social media in late March, shows an excavator moving along the western edge of the village. Reuters could not confirm who was operating the machine.

By the end of April, Israeli forces had destroyed more than 90 percent of the homes in Kfar Qili, an Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

With little hope of returning soon, many former residents of Kfar Qila now rely on occasional phone calls to stay in touch. When someone dies, Yahya said, “we just pick up the phone. That’s it.” Weddings, if any, are often held without fanfare, Sheet said.

Although Israel claims the buffer zone is temporary, many Lebanese fear it will become permanent. The Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, were annexed in 1981. The West Bank, captured from Jordan in the same war, is now home to hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers.

One day this month, Hamoud drove his battered sedan from the northern mountains to a parking lot in Beirut to visit Yahya.

They walked together, as Hamoud leaned on his late mother's cane, one of the few items salvaged from his home, remembering the days of his youth.

“Everything in the old village has meaning and significance for us - the historic houses, the homes of our families, the homes of our ancestors,” he said. “Those things are impossible to bring back.”

Mayor Shit echoed this, sitting in his uncle's house in a village in the central mountains of the country, where he had found refuge.

“There is a spiritual connection, a psychological connection, a connection to the roots - very strong. That is essential for Kfar Qila,” he said. “It will take time, for sure, but when we return, we will rebuild it.”

He paused. "These are not just words," he said. "We are coming back."