Amid War, Lebanese Volunteers Race to Save the South's History

Israel's defence minister Israel Katz said in July that the army had completely destroyed 24 villages, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 homes. Lebanese heritage workers count more, and they are counting everything else too: mosques, shrines, cemeteries, olive trees and private libraries.

"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 nearby cuts the call short. He is one of the locals documenting what remains of the south's heritage — scanning old buildings, recording oral history, rescuing libraries.

A ceasefire agreed in US-led talks in June has not stopped the fighting. Israeli forces occupy around 600 sq. km of the south, reaching up to 10km into Lebanon behind what the army calls the Yellow Line. Strikes continue daily.

What has been destroyed?

Zrariyeh has around 2,000 houses, Al-Assaad estimates. By his count, this war has destroyed 65 and damaged more than 100. His father's house was hit twice. Like others who have repaired their homes "once, twice, three times", he covers the openings with plastic. "We are living in the nylon era," he says. What is at stake, he adds, is "our historical existence".

The archaeologist Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly founded Biladi, a heritage organisation monitoring the south since October 2023. Its numbers are stark:

• In 2025 it recorded 389 historical buildings in five villages; 85% are now destroyed, by Biladi's count.
• With architecture students from the Lebanese University, it has since logged around 850 sites across 105 villages, from archaeological ruins to pre-1950 houses.
• Around 98% of the area's Shia religious sites — mosques, shrines, mausoleums and husseiniyas (halls for religious gatherings) — are gone.

"We have 38 villages that have been bulldozed to the ground. Nothing remains," Bajjaly says. Villages still under attack, such as Al Mansouri, have not been assessed. Ali Badawi, the culture ministry's regional director for south Lebanon, puts the total near 50. Each village has an ancient centre built over older remains — Byzantine, Roman or Phoenician. "It is not just a matter of number of houses. The historical fabric itself is destroyed," he says.

Both Badawi and Bajjaly report historic cemeteries bulldozed. At shrines, Bajjaly says, the dead have been dug up. "This is total desacralisation, and these are well-calculated gestures," she says. In Naqoura, Badawi found a field stripped of old olive trees in early 2025; a French Lebanese businessman has filed a lawsuit in France alleging the Israeli military uprooted 600 trees his family cultivated for 250 years and took them to Israel.

The aim, in Bajjaly's view, 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".

What about Unesco protection?

Since 2024, Unesco has granted 73 Lebanese sites enhanced protection, which prohibits targeting them or military use. In July it inscribed the five castles of Mount Amel on the World Heritage List and its danger list. Three of them — Beaufort, Dubieh and Chama' — sit 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. Badawi's teams cannot reach the occupied sites; they rely on low-resolution satellite images and Israeli army footage. One broadcast showed Israeli soldiers in Beaufort's historical halls watching the Fifa World Cup on televisions he believes came from the castle's information centre. "We cannot do anything at the moment," Badawi says. "We have to wait."

His colleague Mohana Chahine, who manages artefact stores at Tyre's Al-Bass site, was seriously injured in an Israeli drone strike on 14 August 2024. A second strike threw her and her husband clear of their car. After a month in hospital and treatment in France, she has completed her PhD and returned to work. "I go to work actively, but I am constantly afraid, unsettled and distracted," she says.

How are artists responding?

The painter Oussama Baalbaki's family home in Odaisseh, built by his late father, the renowned painter Abdel Hamid Baalbaki, was rigged with explosives and detonated in October 2024. The house held manuscripts, rare books, sculptures, paintings and antiquities, and, beneath the garden trees, his parents' tomb. "We lost our connection to the land of our ancestors," Baalbaki says, "and were left wandering in a torn space of imagination and time."

The film-maker Ahmad Ghossein's family village, Al Qantara, was blown up in March and the hill levelled. "It's not that you don't find your house, you don't find the land. It became white sand," he says. His father's daily photographs — sunrise images sent each morning to say "I'm fine" — became a four-screen installation, The Sound of Silence, shown at the Beirut Art Center and Frieze London in October, and due at Art Jameel in Jeddah. "Yes, they are erasing," Ghossein says. "But I'm just continuing. This is a resistance by itself."

Can the libraries be saved?

Al-Assaad, who owns a construction company now working "like a civil defence company", supplies architectural scans of old mosques and houses to the culture ministry. "We can't remove them. We can't sandbag them," he says — but they can be documented. With Biladi he is rescuing private libraries: family collections handed down generations. In Zibqin, the village of poets, they found around 20; one of about 6,000 books was burned by an incendiary bomb. From another damaged home the team is recovering up to 2,000 volumes, many handwritten. Each is cleaned, photographed, catalogued and stored until its owner reclaims it. "We don't have the luxury of time," Al-Assaad says. "We don't have the luxury of doubt."

Bajjaly's fear is that the south's history becomes a myth — "We had a house here. We had a mosque here" — with nothing physical left to hold it. Biladi's survey goes to the culture ministry, which she says is pressing for heritage in any rebuilding. "Any plan of reconstruction for south Lebanon that does not include heritage would be a continuity of the destruction," she says. Baalbaki, for his part, is certain of return. The question is what awaits it: "We will return to our land. But with what imagination will we return, and to what landscape?"