Megaphone (CC BY 4.0)
Aftermath of Israeli strikes in Beirut, March 2026.
Satellite images and videos of Aita al-Shaab, a village just a few miles away from the southern border of Lebanon, reveal a stark absence where the town once stood. Images from early April, a month after Israel intensified its bombardment of Lebanon and began its ground invasion, show leveled buildings, uniform grey rubble, and Israeli armored vehicles.
Maps and images have increasingly become part of the way people in Lebanon are able to view the scale of destruction of their country as Israel tears it up with relentless bombing and an expanding ground invasion. Since March, the Israeli military has issued more than 130 displacement orders affecting around one-fifth of Lebanon, coming in the form of maps with red zones imposed on top, dispersed on X. The 772 square-mile area includes much of southern Lebanon as well as parts of the Bekaa Valley and the Dahiyeh suburbs of Beirut. The outlines of threatened neighborhoods in major cities are often poorly drawn and do not correspond to boundaries on the ground, leaving people unsure whether their homes fall under evacuation warnings. More than 1.2 million people are estimated to have already been displaced due to air strikes, demolitions, and Israel’s creation of a miles-wide “security zone” that would occupy 10 percent of Lebanon’s territory. For those who have been displaced, satellite images are the only way to check whether or not their houses are still standing.
Researchers at the Beirut Urban Lab (BUL) are more accustomed than most to interpreting their world with satellites. Mona Harb, cofounder and research lead at the organization, joined with colleagues in 2006 to study urban transformation in Lebanon during the Israel–Hezbollah war. By 2018, the team created the BUL, a research initiative whose work touches urbanization, reconstruction, and conflict. Despite their experience documenting devastation, Harb says, the images still take a toll on the researchers.
“It’s extremely difficult to work on this as researchers when you have colleagues and staff who are displaced, whose family is directly impacted, who are losing loved ones and who are always anxious and scared about what’s going to happen today and tomorrow,” says Harb, who is also a professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut.
In April, the lab launched the Nabatieh Built and Natural Environment Database, an interactive web tool mapping the Nabatieh district in southern Lebanon, from which many of the researchers hail. The database includes roads, waterways, land use zones, individual buildings and landmarks, and health care facilities.
“We’re documenting all these layers to highlight that this land is not just a military target,” Harb says. “It’s a land that’s lived, that includes an intricate web of facilities that are civilian, that includes a lot of ecologies of systems that date back hundreds of years where people have established memories and connections.”
The team hopes the tool can be a blueprint for reconstruction efforts after the current conflict has abated. Previous reconstruction efforts in Lebanon have drawn on funding from the United States, as well as European and Gulf countries. But with international attention divided by the war on Iran and humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Gaza, humanitarian aid to Lebanon has fallen when it is needed most. Amid this latest round of conflict, the World Bank has offered a $200 million loan, which could put fiscal stress on an already battered Lebanese economy, and many reconstruction funds from the United States and Europe are conditional on political changes in the country. Humanitarian grants designed for immediate crisis response amount to less than half of what Lebanon received during Israel’s intensified attacks on the country in 2024, when it faced displacement on a similar scale. Without the necessary international support, local organizations and individuals are making do with the accumulated expertise of previous reconstruction efforts.
“We’re trying to think ahead because we also are not very interested in waiting for the funding to come from international organizations to engage in this,” Harb says. “We’re trying to provide this platform as a tool for people invested in thinking about reconstruction to think collectively.”
During the current war in Lebanon, photo documentation doubles as a way of preserving areas Israel has razed, as well as the traces of people who lived there. The Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation (AIF) houses an archive of more than 600,000 photos from throughout the Middle East, including family photo albums, photo studio records, and private collections.
When possible, AIF tries to preserve not only the images themselves but traces of the photographers, including annotations or how an album was organized. “This is part of the story of the photographs,” says Rana Nasser Eddin, the organization’s director. “We tell the story of all the hands that took care of it and how it was exchanged between people, as much as we tell the story of the person depicted in the photograph.”
The foundation was established in 1997, during a period of what Nasser Eddin terms “archive fever” in Lebanon. Emerging from a long civil war and bouts of foreign occupation, people in Lebanon recognized the importance of recording their past, even if not everyone in the country was ready to process that history.
The foundation’s collection includes work by photographers from across the Arab world, including Palestine.
“Archives are often overlooked but [are] really the evidence against this expansionist state,” Nasser Eddin says, referencing the oft-cited Israeli myth that Palestine was ever a “land without a people.”
She adds that the organization is intentional with the terms it uses to describe the Arab world and its history. “We’re very conscious of the language that we use,” says Nasser Eddin, “and we create vocabularies that are really moving away from very colonial ways of describing towns, people, events, or situations.”
The AIF, Nasser Edin says, also places a particular emphasis on objects that are physically vulnerable and that provide a window into photographic practices outside the mainstream. The team prioritizes the preservation and digitization of film negatives, which degrade over time, and glass photographic plates, as well as material from areas under threat of looting or conflict, over modern digital photography.
“The practice itself of taking a photograph—especially in this region—and how photographs came to be is also very relevant to the social and political and economic contexts that we live in,” Nasser Eddin says. For instance, the AIF houses a collection of 55,000 film negatives from a photo studio in Tripoli, Lebanon, owned by photographers who survived the Armenian genocide. The photographs, taken across three decades starting in the 1940s, reveal changing fashions and culture along with political transformations as Lebanon gained independence from French Mandate rule and record vital turning points in the country’s history.
Archives play a profound role in maintaining a society’s collective memory—which has historically made them ready targets. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and pushed into Beirut itself, the military looted the archives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, confiscating documents and photographs integral to the collective history of Palestine and Palestinian displacement. Today, Israel is conducting a similar campaign in Gaza, annihilating both physical and digital repositories of information and memory.
During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, U.S. soldiers seized millions of records from the Ba’ath Party and shipped them to Qatar for analysis. When it became clear there was no evidence tying the Iraqi government to weapons of mass destruction—a lie upon which the publicity campaign for the invasion rested—the Bush Administration turned instead to weaponizing this archival material. A team at the Pentagon combed through the Ba’ath Party records to publicize atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein’s party and wrest back control of the narrative.
Archivists and researchers in Lebanon are well-attuned to the political implications of their work. In the country’s south, personal collections tell the stories of deep-rooted attachments to the land and bear witness to Israeli occupation.
“It’s not only land and people,” Nasser Edin says, “it’s [also] paper and photographs that we’re seeing erased.”