Lebanese village razed to the ground by simultaneous explosions

A Lebanese village has been razed to dust by more than a dozen simultaneous explosions, with the shocking moment captured in dramatic aerial footage. Footage of the destruction of Mais al-Jabal has been circulating online, with houses covering lush hills seen crumpling in seconds in a cloud of grey dust.

Local media has reported that thousands of residential buildings have been wiped out by Israel in southern Lebanon since last year, raising fears that it may be aiming to create a depopulated buffer zone north of its border. Similar aerial images have been captured of a number of border villages, including Mhaibib and Odaisseh, since Israel sent ground troops into southern Lebanon in late September.

Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the frontier in a bid to push the Iran-backed group away from the border and allow for its residents to return to northern Israel. Monday’s footage from Mais al-Jabal showed large detonations near a vacated hospital in the village, said mayor Abdul-Monhem Choukair.

The area has been repeatedly struck since Israel and Hezbollah started trading cross-border fire in October last year. ‘Seventy percent of Mais al-Jabal is destroyed,’ the mayor said, adding that the ‘Israeli enemy’s goal is systematic destruction’. Choukair said four people, aged between 85 and 90, are trapped in Mais al-Jabal pending their rescue.

More than 3,000 people have been killed and nearly 13,500 injured in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023, according to health authorities in the country. The Israeli army has erased 37 towns and destroyed more than 40,000 houses since last year, local media reported today. Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) said the destruction has impacted an area reaching almost 2 miles deep from Naqoura, a city in the south west of the country, to the outskirts of Khiam further inland.

NNA previously reported that Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month. Israel’s Channel 12 last month broadcast footage appearing to show one of its presenters blow up a building while embedded with soldiers in the village of Aita al-Shaab. Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission has said ‘the ongoing destruction campaign carried out by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon is a war crime’.

Between October 2023 and October 2024, locations ‘were wantonly and systematically destroyed in at least eight Lebanese villages’, it said, basing its findings on satellite images and footage shared on social media by Israeli soldiers. Israeli warplanes and ground forces have blasted a trail of destruction through southern Lebanon since troops first crossed the border to carry out raids from October 1.

The aim, Israel says, is to debilitate Hezbollah, push it away from the border and end more than a year of rocket fire into northern Israel. But United Nations peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in the south have also come under fire from Israeli forces, escalating concerns over whether they can remain in place. More than one million people have fled the Israeli bombardment, emptying much of the south of its residents.

Some experts say Israel may be aiming to create a depopulated buffer zone, a strategy it has already deployed along its border with Gaza. Some conditions for such a zone appear already in place, according to an Associated Press analysis of satellite imagery and data collected by mapping experts that show the breadth of destruction across 11 villages next to the border.

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