Vidoes have been circulating on social media of dozens of houses in a Lebanese border village being detonated simultaneously by the Israeli army. Israel has been adopting this scorched earth policy since October in an attempt to set up a buffer zone along the border.
In one video, soldiers can be heard chanting a countdown before the detonation of several houses followed by celebrations.
Chamseddine told Asharq Al-Awsat that Israel has destroyed 29 villages dotted across 120 kms from the Naqoura area in the west to Shebaa in the east.
The villages of Aita al-Shaab, Kfar Kila, Adeisseh, Houla, Dhayra, Marwahin, Mhaibib, and al-Khiam have been completely destroyed along with some 25,000 houses, he added.
Last month, the detonations in Adeisseh and Deir Seryan were so powerful that they caused tremors that were initially mistaken for earthquakes.
Experts are in agreement that Israel is completely wiping out villages and all signs of life, including trees, to turn the area into a buffer zone so that residents of northern Israel can return to their homes.
They also believe that the scorched earth policy means that residents of the South won’t be able to rebuild and replant what they lost once a ceasefire is reached and they can return home.
Brig. Gen. Hassan Jouni, former deputy chief of staff of operations in the Lebanese Armed Forces, said Israel wants to be create a 3 km-deep buffer zone along its border with Lebanon.
Israel is destroying everything in that area, leaving it exposed so that any possible threat there can be easily spotted, he told Asharq Al-Awsat.
However, he remarked that Israel is not keeping its forces deployed in the South, so it won’t be able to hold any territory and keep these areas destroyed. Any political agreement will inevitably call for the return of Lebanese residents back to their villages where they will rebuild their homes, he explained.
The Lebanese state will in no way agree for the border strip to remain uninhabited and destroyed, Jouni stressed.
“In all likelihood, Israel already knows this, and its actions are part of a psychological war to punish the residents of those villages and towns because they are Hezbollah’s popular support base. Israel wants to drive a wedge between the people and Hezbollah. It is as if it is saying: ‘See how the party was unable to protect your homes,’” he went on to say.
Moreover, Jouni said Israel is mistaken if it believes that a buffer zone will restore security to its northern settlements because those areas can be targeted from beyond the border region.
So, what is taking place on the ground is in effect Israel just going to the extreme in violating international law, he added. “Its claims that it is targeting weapons and ammunition caches do not fool anyone because from a military standpoint, these caches are not stored along the border, but deeper in a country.”Israeli attacks on Lebanon have now killed more than 3,000 people in the 13 months since fighting erupted between Hezbollah and Israel along the southern Lebanese and northern Israeli border, Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health has said.
The ministry said late on Monday that 3,002 have been killed and 13,492 injured since the beginning of Israel’s “aggression” against Lebanon.
The figures show that there were 589 women and at least 185 children among the 3,002 people killed so far, according to the ministry.
While Israel claims that hundreds of Hezbollah fighters have been killed in its attacks, witnesses and independent reports from bombed communities across Lebanon attest to the high number of civilian casualties from widespread and indiscriminate Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling.
UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, said last week that at least one child per day had been killed in Lebanon over the past month.
“Since October 4 of this year, at least one child has been killed and 10 injured daily,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said.
“Thousands more children who have survived the many months of constant bombings physically unscathed are now acutely distressed by the violence and chaos around them,” the agency said.
The mounting death toll comes as an estimated 1.2 million of Lebanon’s population of 5.8 million have been forcibly displaced from cities, towns and villages as well as neighbourhoods in the capital, Beirut, which Israel has bombed repeatedly and continues to issue forced evacuation orders.
In Israel, 72 people have been reported killed in Hezbollah attacks since October last year, a figure which includes at least 30 Israeli soldiers killed in fighting with the Lebanese armed group. More than 60,000 people have been displaced from their homes in the north of Israel.
A cessation in the fighting appears to be a long way off amid the rising number of deaths and destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and civilian property.
On Friday, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati accused Israel of blocking any progress in the negotiations towards a ceasefire with Hezbollah.
