“Wow. Can you hear the bombing?” Riad Al-Assaad asks The Art Newspaper, speaking from his village of Zrariyeh in southern Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a nearby village cuts short a conversation about his efforts to save what remains of the heritage in the country’s south: scanning its old buildings, recording its oral history and now rescuing its libraries. Despite a ceasefire, south Lebanon remains under Israeli occupation and at war, and its people say their history is being erased.
The south has lived with Israeli invasion and occupation for nearly half a century. Israel invaded in 1978 and pushed north to Beirut in 1982, the year Hezbollah formed to fight it, and it did not withdraw from the south until 2000. In 2006, the two fought a month-long war after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.
The present conflict began on 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas attacks on Israel, with exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel. It escalated in September 2024 into full-scale war, with an Israeli ground invasion and strikes on Beirut, before a ceasefire that November. Fighting resumed in March 2026, when Hezbollah fired on Israel after the US and Israel attacked Iran; a ceasefire agreement reached in US-led talks in June has not ended it. Strikes continue daily, and Israeli forces occupy around 600 sq. km of the south, reaching up to 10km into Lebanon, behind what the army calls the Yellow Line.
Zrariyeh has around 2,000 houses, Al-Assaad estimates. By his count, 65 have been destroyed in this war and more than 100 damaged. His father’s house, in the middle of the village, was hit twice: first by shrapnel, then by blasts that “levelled” neighbouring buildings and blew out its windows and doors. Like others who have repaired their homes “once, twice, three times”, he now covers the openings with plastic. “We are living in the nylon era,” Al-Assaad says. But what is at stake, he adds, is “our historical existence”.
The most visible part of that history is the south’s ancient monuments, and international protection has not kept them safe from the war. Since 2024, Unesco has granted 73 sites across Lebanon enhanced protection, which prohibits targeting them or using them for military purposes. In July, it inscribed the five castles of Mount Amel, all of them granted enhanced protection, on its World Heritage List and its list of sites in danger. Three of the castles, Beaufort, Dubieh and Chama’, are under Israeli occupation. Days after the inscription, the Israeli military detonated 700 tonnes of explosives about 800m from Beaufort, claiming it was destroying Hezbollah tunnels. In Tyre, a World Heritage Site since 1984, strikes have damaged columns, mosaics and the site’s offices and stores.
Ali Badawi, the ministry of culture’s regional director for south Lebanon, says his teams cannot reach the occupied sites and rely on low-resolution satellite images and footage released by the Israeli army. One broadcast showed Israeli soldiers in Beaufort’s historical halls watching the Fifa World Cup on televisions he believes were taken from the castle’s information centre. Unesco has allocated some funding for the restoration of Tyre, but elsewhere donors are holding back while the war continues. “We cannot do anything at the moment,” Badawi says. “We have to wait.”
Badawi lives in a village south of Tyre, close to Al Mansouri, an area that he says Israeli forces strike daily. “Sometimes at night we don’t sleep, because it is just explosion after explosion,” he says.
‘Constantly afraid, unsettled and distracted’
His colleague, Mohana Chahine, who manages the artefact stores at Tyre’s Al-Bass site, was seriously injured in an Israeli drone strike on 14 August 2024, weeks before the war escalated. She was driving home with her husband when a missile was fired at a motorcycle behind them, shattering the car’s windows and leaving her unable to move. Her husband pulled her from the car, and a second strike threw them both clear of it. After a month in hospital and further treatment in France, Chahine has completed her PhD and returned to work. “I go to work actively, but I am constantly afraid, unsettled and distracted,” she says. “I am constantly anxious about another war or being injured again.”
Beyond Tyre and the castles lies heritage that appears on no Unesco list: the old houses, mosques, churches and cemeteries of southern Lebanon’s villages. Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, an archaeologist and former journalist, is the founder of Biladi, a heritage organisation that has monitored the south since October 2023. In 2025 it recorded 389 historical buildings in five villages—according to Biladi, 85% of them are now destroyed. It was preparing to publish a report last March, but the return of war halted that project and Biladi widened its survey instead. With architecture students from the Lebanese University, the organisation logged around 850 sites across 105 villages, occupied or under threat, from archaeological ruins to houses built before 1950. The full findings are being held for its delayed report, but Biladi shared some of them with The Art Newspaper. Among them: the loss of the area’s Shia religious sites—mosques, shrines, mausoleums or husseiniyas (halls for religious gatherings)—stands at around 98%.
The 18th-century St George’s Melkite Catholic church in Dardghaya in the Tyre district was severely damaged in Israeli attacks in October 2024 Photo: courtesy Biladi
In July Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said the army had completely destroyed 24 villages that were “hundreds of years old”, totalling 15,000 to 20,000 homes, by his estimate. Lebanese counts are higher.
“We have 38 villages that have been bulldozed to the ground. Nothing remains,” Bajjaly says, adding that villages still under attack, such as Al Mansouri, have not yet been assessed and the figure could rise. Badawi puts the total number of villages destroyed at around 50. Each village has an ancient centre built over older remains, he notes, some of them Byzantine, Roman or Phoenician, so the loss cannot be counted in homes alone. “It is not just a matter of number of houses. The historical fabric itself is destroyed.”
According to both Badawi and Bajjaly, historic cemeteries across southern Lebanon have also been bulldozed by Israeli forces. At shrines, Bajjaly says, the earth has been turned over and the dead dug up. “This is total desacralisation, and these are well-calculated gestures,” she says.
Olive trees have been destroyed, too. After seeing images of trees being uprooted, Badawi went to Naqoura in early 2025 and found a field stripped of its old trees. In September a French Lebanese businessman filed a lawsuit in France accusing the Israeli military of war crimes, alleging that 600 trees his family had cultivated for 250 years were uprooted and taken to Israel. “When they remove 500-year-old olive trees, this is not anymore an issue of security,” Al-Assaad says.
The aim, Bajjaly believes, is “to kill the relationship between the people and their land and their history, and therefore to make it clear for them that there’s no return”.
The artist Oussama Baalbaki knows all too well what that means. His late father, the renowned painter Abdel Hamid Baalbaki, began building the family’s house in their ancestral village of Odaisseh, close to the border, in 1984, two years after Israel’s invasion of Beirut displaced them. With the village under occupation, his parents built it “over a very long period, with limited financial means and amid occupation, recurring war and displacement”.
His father, an amateur collector, hoped the home would become “something like a museum, or a cultural centre for literature and poetry”, and filled it with manuscripts, rare books, sculptures, paintings and antiquities. “Most important of all, the house shelters, beneath the trees of its garden, the tomb of my mother and father,” Baalbaki says.
In October 2024 the house was “rigged with explosives, along with every neighbourhood of the village, in a systematic, annihilating manner”, Baalbaki says of the detonation, which was captured on video. His siblings visited the ruins in February 2025 to salvage what they could, but the village is now occupied and out of reach. “We lost our connection to the land of our ancestors,” he says, “and were left wandering in a torn space of imagination and time.”
The house had looked out over a valley towards a bare plateau, a view that shaped two generations of paintings. “This natural horizon imprinted itself on my father’s paintings and, in time, passed into my own,” Baalbaki says.
A 2017 painting by Oussama Baalbaki of his village of Odaisseh and family home, destroyed in 2024 Courtesy the artist
In Al Qantara, the family village of the artist and film-maker Ahmad Ghossein, the landscape itself has gone. His father returned there when the Israeli occupation ended in 2000, built a house and retired among his olive trees and chickens. When fighting began in 2023, he refused to leave, answering his son’s pleas from Beirut with photographs and videos.
“He was sending me all the time images of the sunrise, every morning, to say, ‘I’m fine’,” Ghossein says. He held out until September 2024, and even then went back whenever a ceasefire allowed. This March, Ghossein says, the village was blown up by Israeli forces and the hill it stood on levelled. “It’s not that you don’t find your house, you don’t find the land. It became white sand.”
Ghossein has made his father’s daily photographs, videos and WhatsApp voice notes into a four-screen video installation, The Sound of Silence. It was shown at the Beirut Art Center and at Frieze London in October, and is due to be shown at Art Jameel in Jeddah. The footage is as his father shot it: the garden, the chickens, the road to the village, never the war. The question behind the piece, Ghossein says, is: “Can you do something about a place that doesn’t exist anymore?” His father, who now lives in Beirut, is “lost, more or less”, facing the reality that he may not go back for a long time.
Installtion view of Ahmad Ghossein , The Sound of Silence
© Ahmad Ghossein. Courtesy: Beirut Art Centre
But Ghossein refuses to be cast as a victim. “Yes, it’s horrible. Yes, it’s a disaster. Yes, they are erasing,” he says. “But I’m just continuing. This is a resistance by itself.”
Rescuing private libraries
Al-Assaad’s answer is to save what can still be carried or recorded. He owns a construction company, which in wartime becomes “like a civil defence company”, handing out food, medicine and fuel. Working with the culture ministry, he supplies architectural scans of old mosques and houses in the border villages. “We can’t remove them. We can’t sandbag them,” he says, but they can be documented for future generations.
With Biladi he is now also rescuing private libraries: family collections handed down through generations. In Zibqin, known as the village of poets, they have found around 20. The two largest were lost under rubble; one of them, with around 6,000 books, was burned by an incendiary bomb, he says. From another damaged home the team is recovering up to 2,000 volumes, many of them handwritten. Each book is cleaned, photographed, catalogued and moved to safe storage until its owner can reclaim it. He is appealing to anyone in the south with a library at risk to get in touch. “We don’t have the luxury of time,” he says. “We don’t have the luxury of doubt.”
A destroyed home with a private library, containing manuscripts and historic books, in Zibqin, known as the village of poets © Riad Al Assaad
Bajjaly fears what happens to a people’s past when nothing physical is left to hold it. “Is the history of south Lebanon going to turn into a myth? ‘We had a house here. We had a mosque here’,” she says. Documentation is her answer, a way “to give back to the population a proof of their own existence”. Biladi’s survey will go to the ministry of culture, which she says is pressing for heritage to be part of any rebuilding. “Any plan of reconstruction for south Lebanon that does not include heritage would be a continuity of the destruction,” she says.
Baalbaki says the uprooting will be temporary. “We will return to our land. But with what imagination will we return, and to what landscape?”
