“I love my village,” Wansa Mohammed Nassar says, smiling. The 80-year-old is sitting on a couch surrounded by plants in small pots, and three cats. Her grandson is beside her. They once had 14 cats, but those went missing during the war. The family thought they were fleeing for a day and were gone more than a year. Nassar only returned to Ayta al-Shaab three months ago.
“I feel like a newborn,” she says. “I don’t know how long I will live. I love my country ... We just need peace and quiet from Israel ... Two years we are suffering from them.”
Her house is a rare functional one in a landscape of rubble. Once home to as many as 16,000 residents, locals say, Ayta al-Shaab is almost completely destroyed. It is not alone. Lebanese towns and villages along the border with Israel have been described as “wastelands” and “ghost towns”.
By November 2024, the World Bank estimated that 99,000 housing units had been partially or fully destroyed during the war between Hizbullah and Israel.
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But Israeli destruction efforts continued after the ceasefire came into force. Many Lebanese civilians won’t return because they’re afraid of being killed and have nothing to go back to.
The Irish Times spent time this month in two border villages – Odaisseh and Ayta al-Shaab – where most buildings are destroyed and almost all residents are still displaced.
Locals accuse Israel of deliberately turning these areas into a no-man’s land. The Israel Defense Forces says it has “identified attempts by Hizbullah to rebuild its capabilities since the ceasefire ... which constitutes a blatant violation of the ceasefire understandings reached between Israel and Lebanon”. It says the Israeli military acts “in accordance with international law, while employing the means at its disposal to minimise harm to civilians as much as possible”.
Fears of another all-out war are mounting, as Israel and the US pressure Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah, saying it continues to pose a serious threat to Israel. Hizbullah refuses to, saying it has a legitimate right to resist Israeli aggression and occupation. Hizbullah – which is also a political party and social movement – has in the past been described as a “state within a state”, though it was hugely weakened by the war.
Almost 4,000 people were killed in Lebanon and more than one million displaced between October 8th, 2023, and November 27th, 2024, in a conflict that began with Hizbullah firing rockets into Israeli-controlled territory “in solidarity” with Hamas, and drastically escalated in September 2024, when Israel launched heavy air strikes across much of the country.
Israeli forces also started a ground invasion on October 1st, 2024. At least 80 Israeli soldiers and 45 civilians in Israel were killed, Israeli authorities said.
The ceasefire that came into force on November 27th, 2024, is referred to as “one-sided” by many Lebanese citizens. By the beginning of November 2025, Unifil recorded almost 7,100 Israeli air violations of UN resolution 1701, which the ceasefire agreement was based on.
Unifil also says there have been more than 2,400 “activities” by the IDF inside Lebanon, while they have discovered about 360 weapons caches – mostly presumed to belong to Hizbullah. Unifil monitors only areas south of the Litani river, but Israeli attacks have also continued above it.
More than 270 people have been killed and about 850 wounded by Israeli actions since the ceasefire, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health, while Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Today puts the toll at more than 340. The UN human rights office had verified at least 107 of those killed as civilians or noncombatants by October 9th.
Israel says it is acting to enforce the ceasefire and remove threats, and that the IDF has reported about 1,827 violations to the ceasefire co-ordination mechanism. Three rockets have been fired from Lebanese territory towards Israel, an IDF spokesperson says. Hizbullah denied responsibility for three intercepted rockets back in March. It did claim one attack on the Israeli-controlled Shebaa Farms in December 2024. Neither incident caused casualties.
Despite withdrawal being mandated within 60 days of the ceasefire agreement, Israel also continues to hold on to what its officials term as “strategic” points inside Lebanese territory.
The IDF says this is not a ceasefire violation, “contrary to what is claimed”, and “its purpose is to protect the [Israeli] residents of the north”. In Odaisseh, a local points at a hill that he says is one of these strategic points. He believes it was seized with the aim of maintaining surveillance over the area.
Surveillance is constant anyway because of drones, which are audible during visits to both villages – where we drive a car with a “Press” sign taped to the roof so the drones will see it.
The consequence is what analysts have called a “remote occupation”.
“The situation in southern Lebanon is dystopian. Israel completely controls people’s lives in the area, a high-tech occupation without the need for boots on the ground: 24/7 surveillance, drones, fighter jets, cyber-espionage, intelligence assets on the ground ... The threat of death by drone strike or through a mass bombardment is permanent,” wrote Dany Moudallal, a journalist with Lebanese newspaper L’Orient–Le Jour, on X recently.
“The war didn’t finish,” says Dr Hassan Wazni, director general of the Nabih Berri governmental hospital in the city of Nabatieh, which remained open through heavy bombardments last year. “I don’t know what they are doing behind diplomacy but the ambience says that the war will happen [again] ... in two months, maybe one month.”
Wazni says his hospital, like others, is prepared with enough medication, though he expects fuel will be in short supply.
He worried about the lack of international reaction to what he sees as a disregard of humanitarian law. “What happened in the Middle East in these two years was horrible: no rules, no laws, no respect for the UN ... If these rules break things won’t just stay here,” he says. “The people here, they are not terrorists. They are like others.”
‘It was a really lovely place’
Hassan Rammal describes Odaisseh as “full of life” before the war. “It was a really lovely place, a commercial place, everything you needed was available,” says the 61-year-old. “Everybody knows each other. We spent a lot of money on our houses.” About 8,000 residents once lived there: now 85 per cent of homes are totally destroyed and 15 per cent partially destroyed, says Rammal, who works with the local municipality.
He is sitting in the remains of the building that once held his supermarket and money-exchange business, with apartments on the upper stories that he rented out. It was originally built with money he earned working in the United Arab Emirates for nearly three decades. His own home, out the back, is rubble. Rammal stays elsewhere now, only coming back for short visits.
“People thought it would be like the 2006 war: [after the ceasefire] we could come back to our houses. But there’s no commitment ... [The Israeli forces] don’t want anyone to live in this area,” he says. His parents’ olive trees were burnt by Israeli soldiers, he says. He used to earn at least $8,000 a month but now his son supports him.
“This stone, you can break it, you can rebuild it, it’s not a problem, but if you lose your dignity where will you get it again?” Rammal gestures around. Now, he feels, “either we leave the country or we fight to get our land back”.
A relative of his, 78-year-old Arif Rammal, also sleeps elsewhere, but returns to Odaisseh during the day to craft steelwork designs in his garage. Its front opens on to the street, where he describes a drone flying past at eye level one day. “What else should I do?” he asks. “I want just to keep my hand, my land, my family. I don’t want to beg.”
An Amnesty International analysis said videos were published on social media “showing the demolition of dozens of buildings by manually laid explosives” in Odaisseh. The Associated Press reported that some explosions were so extreme they triggered an earthquake alert in northern Israel.
Amnesty said the Israeli military continued to destroy parts of Odaisseh into mid-January 2025, almost two months after the ceasefire agreement went into effect, while it was still in full control of the area.
Air strikes continue. As we sit there, a new evacuation warning is issued online by the Israeli military for the next village, Taybeh, just three kilometres away. Most Israeli air strikes and attacks come with no warning. A few locals drive around the village sharing the news while questioning if it is real, given that communication networks are mostly nonfunctional, so few have internet access. One woman, who has tried to move home, starts panicking, packing a suitcase and gathering perishable food, preparing to leave again.
‘May your village burn’
An analysis of satellite imagery and social media by Amnesty International in Ayta al-Shaab found that the Israeli military laid explosives and bulldozed parts of the village while in control of it too, with destruction “far exceed[ing] the locations where it alleged military objectives were present”.
A social media video published on an Israeli soldier’s social media account in October 2024 showed troops singing “may your village burn” while excavators tore down buildings.
“You feel like you’re walking in Gaza, not Lebanon,” says a local woman.
A pink slipper is visible in the rubble beside her, a child’s baby blue Wellington boot a short walk away.
A lot of the metal from houses, which once lay here too, was removed by owners opting to sell it rather than let it be stolen. The Irish Times also sees multiple destroyed mosques, with “God is great” graffitied in Arabic on the ruins of one.
In Gaza, Israel has killed at least 312 Palestinians since its ceasefire with Hamas on October 11th, according to Gazan health authorities.
But Ibrahim ali Awada (50) said he didn’t want to draw comparisons, or talk about “politics” at all.
Awada reconstructed his house and moved back around July with his family – including four children, his mother and sister. They are one of only 35 families who have returned to Ayta al-Shaab, he says.
About two months ago, he says, a drone flew overhead broadcasting audio warning them to leave the village. In the aftermath the Lebanese army and Unfil set up a checkpoint nearby, which he feels offers some protection.
The family is sitting on cushions on the ground together, eating a meal of mujaddara – made with rice, lentils and onions. Awada’s mother, Noor Abbas, who is 86, gathers food with her hands and holds it out as an offering. She says she was afraid, then she was not afraid. “We cannot do anything,” she says. “I’m sleeping in this room.”
Beside where they eat, Awada has opened a small convenience-style shop “for fun, to pass time”. It has no customers, he says, as “nobody comes to the village” except for during funerals – and even then they are often too frightened.
He says residents are hoping for “any help from any other country ... We can’t make any [new] construction here. They always send the drone above, watching us. We’re farmers of tobacco, always they bother us with the drone. Can you send our voice for help?”
