On April 30, Mohammad stood in front of a pile of smoldering rubble where houses once stood in Mansouri, Lebanon. Beneath the rubble was his father’s body. Mohammad’s father had been among the first people to return to Mansouri after the ceasefire signed on April 16 between Tel Aviv and Beirut officially took effect. But just two days after, Israeli forces entered the village with ground troops, tanks, soldiers, and jeeps. Fighting erupted, backed by jet and drone strikes; one of which hit his father’s home.
Two weeks later, Mohammad arrived from Ghana to recover his father’s body. Mohammad’s face was swollen, his eyes red, and his stare distant. “Israel has wanted to take our land since 1976. . . .but we will not allow it,” he tells The Progressive, struggling to maintain eye contact. “This is not about Hezbollah.”
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Residents of Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh celebrate the ceasefire in a Hezbollah-controlled area, April 2026.
Hezbollah, a hybrid non-state organization that functions as both a political party and an armed militia with ties to Iran, became known in the Middle East as a “resistance force” after fighting the Israeli occupation that had previously ended in 2000. Hezbollah holds its most significant power in the predominantly Shiite Muslim south of Lebanon, where it has deep social, political, and military roots and enjoys broad support in many local communities stemming from its history of resistance against Israel. That support is also tied to the role Hezbollah has played in rebuilding homes after successive conflicts, protecting communities in the south, and maintaining an extensive social welfare network that provides financial assistance to the killed fighter’s families during the wars.
“Netanyahu wants to build Greater Israel,” Mohammad says, referring to what many see as Israel’s territorial ambitions to colonize the entire region. “The government is aligned with the United States, and here in the south, the only line of defense is Hezbollah.”
The war by the United States and Israel against Iran has quickly spread across the broader Middle East, including the six Gulf monarchies. In addition, on March 2, Hezbollah attacked northern Israel in response to the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former leader of Iran. Hezbollah has claimed it had the right to respond to attacks after Israel violated the 2024 ceasefire more than 15,000 times, according to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
After the March 2 attack, Israel renewed its operations to create a buffer zone free from Hezbollah’s presence south of the Litani River, a major waterway that flows across southern Lebanon. Since then, Beirut and southern Lebanon have been under daily bombardment, leaving more than one million people internally displaced.
After more than a month of war, including a single day of Israeli strikes against Lebanon that killed more than 300 people, growing international pressure eventually pushed both governments into direct talks in Washington, D.C.. Israel and Lebanon reached a ceasefire agreement on April 16, but since then, Israel has expanded its ground offensive and formalized its occupation through what it calls the “Yellow Line,” a system imported from the occupation of Gaza and designed to push the population northward and consolidate control over the area. A de facto cycle of ethnic cleansing and territorial occupation is unfolding in the region: On May 14, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir openly admitted that a “settlement plan for Lebanon” is under discussion. On May 29, Israeli forces crossed the Litani River for the first time in twenty years, advancing further north while continuing their campaign of air strikes and forced removals.
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Mourners attend the funeral of fifteen Hezbollah fighters in Tyre District in southern Lebanon, April 2026.
Majdal Zoun is the last village free from IDF occupation near the Israeli border. However, it is currently uninhabitable: A handful of homes remain standing, while the rest have been reduced to piles of rubble. As 600,000 people wait to return home from Beirut and northern areas, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has already made Israel’s position clear: No Lebanese resident will return home until Israel’s northern border is secured.
The minister's statements were not really threats; they were simply a reflection of the current reality. From Majdal Zoun, it is possible to see nearby Chamaa, a small village in southern Lebanon where Israeli flags are hanging waves from the hilltops amid thick black columns of smoke. Suddenly, explosions can be heard in the distance. “They’re blowing up houses,” says Ahmed, a forty-year-old resident of the village who returned to collect belongings from his home. As he speaks, machine-gun fire echoes from Tayr Harfa. “Those are the tanks. They go house by house, making sure there are no Hezbollah fighters left.” After bombing these villages, he says, Israel will continue its campaign of demolitions, just as it has in Gaza.
“They are not letting us farm or work the land anymore,” he adds. “We’ve lost many animals.” Several organizations have accused Israel of committing “ecocide” in southern Lebanon, destroying local farmland through the use of white phosphorus and other tactics.
Israel's war crimes extend further, impacting even healthcare workers. In Nabatieh, a little more than 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Majdal Zoun and Chamaa, a group of first responders from an independent rescue team called the Esaaf al Nabatieh Association gathers at the organization’s headquarters. “The strikes are getting closer and closer,” says Mahdi Sadiq, head of the ambulance crews. Seconds later, the crack of an incoming missile interrupts him, and a massive column of smoke rises just a few kilometers away.
“Many people came back because they thought there was a chance to live normally again,” he says. “But they quickly realized it was impossible to live like this. We tell them to evacuate wherever they can.”
Many residents of Southern Lebanon remain in their homes because they have nowhere else to go, or because they would rather die in their villages than face displacement. Esaaf al Nabatieh distributes gas canisters and cooks every day for the roughly 1,000 remaining residents in Nabatieh. The town’s main mosque serves as a central gathering point in the center of an empty city where the silence is constantly interrupted by artillery fire, warplanes, and ambulance sirens. Although it is supposedly a safer area than nearby cities where Israeli soldiers are operating a security zone, Israel has repeatedly terrorized the community’s residents by striking surrounding areas.
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Members of the Esaaf Nabatieh emergency service distribute gas cylinders to the few remaining residents in the city, May 2026.
Buildings have been reduced to mountains of rubble mixed with the remains of clothing, toys, and shattered furniture. But Mahdi says nothing will stop his team from continuing their work. “We firmly believe we must support our people, save lives, and help those who survive,” he says. “This is part of our mission in life, and we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for it.” He knows first-hand that the work is life-threatening, some of his colleagues have been killed by double-tap and triple-tap strikes, during which an area is hit with multiple intense attacks in a row. Those attacks, he notes, “were not mistakes”: they are designed to maximize casualties.
Beside Sadiq Mahdi at Esaaf al-Nabatieh headquarters sits Hussein Fakhredinne, a sixty-year-old man who was targeted by Israeli drones on three occasions while driving his “tuk-tuk” three-wheeled vehicle to deliver food to families in nearby Kfar Rumman. An attack on April 7 left him badly wounded before Esaaf al-Nabatieh rescued him—he says it’s a miracle he survived at all. Since then, the injuries to his leg have slowly healed, but he still refuses to leave his home while the rest of his family remains displaced in Beirut. “During every Israeli occupation I stayed, and I am ready to face the consequences now, too,” Fakhredine says. “We resist here on our land by continuing to do good.”
In many of the villages along the Yellow Line, daily life has become unbearable. The March 2 ceasefire agreement has triggered the mass displacement of people toward the north of Lebanon; now, with Israel occupying nearly 10 percent of Lebanese territory, concentrated primarily in the south, the prospect of returning home has become akin to a death sentence.
In Taybeh, a municipality within the Yellow Line, violence is near-constant. “Every night you can see explosions and hear machine-gun fire,” says Choukry, a thirty-two-year-old beekeeper who stayed behind in Taybeh to care for his mother. “We lost all our livestock. They starved to death because they were trapped in an area we are forbidden to enter. If we go down there, below the hill, [the IDF] will kill us.”
Choukry says the environmental impact of the war has been catastrophic, threatening the livelihood of those who earn a living through farming or tending livestock. “We lost seventy-two beehives,” he says. “The vibrations from the bombings forced the bees to flee. I fear I may never be able to recover them.”
In Halta, a village near the Israeli border, where violent clashes and supply shortages are similarly non-stop, the Afif family remains at home, devastated after three of their sons were abducted by the Israeli Defense Forces on May 19. That morning, the brothers went out to Rashaya Al-Foukhar, a nearby field, to collect fruit for their family. There, Israeli soldiers abducted them, according to their cousins and neighbors working with them that day. More than a month later, the family has no information about their whereabouts or physical condition.
As their children played nearby, members of the Afif family described to The Progressive the experience of losing their sons, seemingly unstartled by the constant sounds of explosions off in the distance. “This is how we live every day,” says Lubna, a sister of the missing Afif brothers. “As you can see, the children are used to it.”
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A woman searches through her children's toys, showing that there are no weapons in her home in southern Lebanon, May 2026.
As Israel continues to expand and consolidate its military presence in southern Lebanon, U.S.-brokered negotiations in Washington have produced a framework agreement aimed at ending the conflict. However, the deal allows Israeli forces to remain in an expanded security zone pending Hezbollah’s disarmament, effectively enabling Israel to maintain troops on Lebanese territory while negotiations over a permanent settlement continue. Despite the announcement, Hezbollah has rejected the agreement, and hostilities have persisted, raising doubts about its implementation.
Since the beginning of the war, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have made clear that they intend to maintain a long-term presence in Lebanon. Their stated objective is that the Lebanese army disarm Hezbollah. But, as Israeli leaders are well aware, the Lebanese government lacks the military strength and political will to effectively disarm Hezbollah without risking civil conflict along religious sectarian lines, or even internal state collapse.
Ali Murad, an adviser to Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, openly describes Israel to The Progressive as a “terrorist state,” while also distancing himself from Hezbollah’s politics, arguing that the group “has to assume responsibility as well.”
“We are living through a paradox,” says Murad, a legal expert originally from the south of Lebanon. “The state has the capacity and the intention to negotiate, but it does not have the monopoly on force or full authority. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has military power, but is incapable of negotiating.”
Sitting inside a large meeting hall was Ali Hamdan, a senior adviser to Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament and a leader of the Amal Movement—a Shiite political party active since the 1970s which has at times rivaled Hezbollah and has no ties to Iran. “My family is displaced, like another million people,” he said, his voice breaking as he mentioned it. “Nmairiyeh is very close to the areas being attacked.”
“Israel found an excuse in Hezbollah. Before that, it was the Palestinians; later, it will be something else,” he said. “Its goal is to divide the country between different communities, and even divide the Shiites themselves. But peace [in Lebanon] is the best way to fight Israel,” he said, acknowledging the dangerous internal divisions taking shape in Lebanon and the wide range of conflicting views surrounding the situation.
“I don’t know whether Hezbollah was right or wrong, that’s not my issue,” he continued. “What I do know is that Israel wants to hide the fact that for fifteen months it has continued attacking Lebanon despite the 2024 ceasefire.” He said he understood why Hezbollah responded to Israel on March 2, even though Berri’s office had previously criticized the group’s actions.
“The war is ongoing, and the negotiations are happening under fire,” he said while sipping his coffee. “Lebanon is asking for a complete ceasefire, but Israel is refusing. On our side, resolving this is simple. The problem is getting Israel to commit,” he added, expressing deep skepticism about the slow-moving negotiations. What Lebanon hopes for, he said, is “a guarantee that the United States will actually take responsibility as a mediator,” referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s inability, or unwillingness, to place limits on Netanyahu.
“Israel says it wants to secure its border, and of course that responsibility belongs to the Lebanese state,” he explained. “But to get there, there first has to be a ceasefire, and Israel has to withdraw from our territory.”
“They want the Lebanese army to secure the border, then they say the army is weak. After that, Western governments will offer to help build a stronger army. It sounds like a good narrative, but it will come with conditions, above all, don’t fire at Israel,” he said, describing the dilemma Lebanon faces as it loses strategic autonomy while Israel continues to use those same arguments to justify its intervention.
“With so many attacks against civilians, we have no other option,” he concluded. “We are forced to resist.”