Lebanese displaced by war turn to satellites to check their homes
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Middle East conflict
Lebanese displaced by war turn to satellites to check their homes
By Jane Arraf, Jawad Rizkallah
Updated Sunday, July 26, 2026 • 6:00 AM EDT
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images unfold slowly on Mazen Farah's phone —satellite views of the Christian section of the southern Lebanese village of Yaroun. They are a bit fuzzy but still clear enough to see what is happening.<br>"This is what it shows from the satellite — it shows that it has been destroyed," says Farah, referring to the two-story stone house his father built after 25 years of working in the Gulf.<br>In March, amid renewed fighting with the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah, Israel launched airstrikes and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in more than 100 villages.<br>After an April 17 ceasefire, Israel sent in bulldozers to demolish more buildings in southern Lebanon. It says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure but rarely provides details or evidence to support those claims.<br>Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in March his country intended to depopulate all Lebanese villages near the border with Israel in order to permanently remove any threats to citizens in northern Israel and form what Israel calls a "buffer zone."<br>Israel prevents the displaced from returning, even to visit. And residents of neighboring villages fear Israeli retaliation for taking video or photos. So residents of Yaroun and other communities are pooling their money to buy commercial satellite images to determine if their houses are still standing.<br>Searching from space
"Either somebody each time will buy it or we have to get the funds in a certain account and buy it," Farah says of the images. Each image costs at least $112.<br>But more often than not, the satellite provider tells them it can't provide images for the specific locations they are seeking and eventually refunds their money. In April, some satellite companies declined to provide images of Lebanon and other countries at the request of the U.S. government.<br>Geryes Saloum, a municipal employee, built a three-bedroom home in Yaroun 10 years ago. All the houses around it have been destroyed.<br>"Every day, I wait for a picture to arrive from Yaroun," says Saloum, who works in the water department. "When Mazen's house was destroyed three days ago I didn't sleep."<br>He says after the November 2024 ceasefire, the U.N. and other aid groups spent millions of dollars to restore the water supply and electrical systems. "We thought it was over, that there wouldn't be more wars," he says. But in March, as the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, the conflict widened again, reaching southern Lebanon.<br>"They have erased it"
Yaroun Mayor Hafez Ghacham says 180 of the around 200 houses in the Christian and Muslim village have been destroyed by Israeli forces since the current conflict broke out in March.<br>The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment from NPR on the destruction in the village.<br>War broke out between Israel and Hezbollah in October 2023, a day after Hamas-led militants launched a deadly attack from Gaza on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza war. By the following year, when a ceasefire was agreed upon, Israeli airstrikes had destroyed most of Yaroun's infrastructure.<br>"In the village they destroyed the landmarks, they destroyed the convent, they destroyed the church, they destroyed three mosques," as well as another Shiite Muslim religious center, says Riad al-Ridha, another village official. "All the cultural landmarks in our village were destroyed — they have erased it."<br>After the Greek Catholic Saint George church was destroyed in an airstrike, leaving only two outer walls still standing, displaced villagers still returned to pray in a nearby church hall. They are no longer allowed back. In early May, Israel demolished a convent and a Catholic school that had educated Christians and Muslims for the last five decades.<br>Israel repeatedly denied the military had destroyed the convent, despite satellite images and video evidence, and provided images of another building it argued was the convent.<br>Yaroun is part of the geographic Galilee region, which stretches into present-day Israel. It was the land where Jesus is believed to have preached and performed miracles.<br>In a country filled with picturesque villages, Yaroun was considered one of the prettiest. Old and new stone houses dotted a hillside green with olive and citrus trees. An oak forest, now demolished, had stood for centuries.<br>Some of the houses are small structures dating back 200 years while others, also built in the traditional local stone with red-tiled roofs, are palatial. The village, which is 2,600 feet above sea level, looks down into collective farming settlements in northern Israel.<br>A village scattered across the world
Israel invaded south Lebanon in 1982, staying for 18 years until it was driven out by Hezbollah, a militant group backed by...