Psychological toll mounts as Lebanese villages erased by Israel’s war

The Israeli military had recently withdrawn from the town as part of a ceasefire agreement, but had left behind detonated homes, a graffiti-laden school, and power lines pulled out of the ground.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.”

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.