The Dispersal of the People of Jabal Amel

Israel currently occupies around 568 square kilometres of Lebanese territory, according to the buffer zone that emerged from the latest war, which erupted on 2 March 2026. At its widest point, the zone extends around 12 kilometres into Lebanese territory, covering approximately 6% of Lebanon’s total area.

In practice, over the past two years, Israel has achieved what it had failed to achieve since the Houla massacre in 1948. The area defined by the “Yellow Line” — the term adopted by the Israeli army to describe the roughly 55 villages it occupies — stretches from Naqoura in the far west to the western summit of Mount Hermon in southeastern Lebanon. It has been almost entirely emptied of its population.

The Netanyahu government has thus succeeded in establishing geographic contiguity between the areas it occupies in southern Lebanon and those it occupies in the Syrian Golan Heights — something that had not been possible since 2000.

The Israeli government’s military conduct has been characterised by genocidal violence, with the aim of emptying the occupied area and transferring hundreds of thousands of people from Jabal Amel deeper into Lebanon.

This objective is also reflected in the vision promoted by Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has spoken of extending Israeli settlement into southern Lebanon.

In the Israeli elections, Gadi Eisenkot’s position has also been associated with the Dahiya doctrine, developed and applied during the 2006 war against Lebanon. This doctrine involves the extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure in areas from which attacks are launched. Alongside it, Israel has sought to establish freedom of movement for its forces inside Lebanon.

The ceasefire did not produce a fundamental change in this situation. Seven rounds of negotiations followed, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israel had not withdrawn ‘a millimetre’ from the territory it occupied. Explosions continued on an almost daily basis.

Demographic Subjugation as a Means of Fragmenting a Community

Since the beginning of the ‘support front’ war in autumn 2023, Israel has used direct warnings as a means of imposing demographic subjugation on Jabal Amel, whose population is predominantly Shia.

Since October 2024, nearly a quarter of Lebanon has been subjected to targeted evacuation warnings. These warnings formed a roadmap for the largest forced population transfer in the country’s recent history, aimed at emptying the area south of the Litani River.

Amnesty International has described such practices as amounting to war crimes involving unlawful forced transfer.

On 23 September 2024, what came to be known as the ‘Great Displacement’ began. More than 80,000 calls were made, warning residents of more than 100 villages in southern Lebanon to leave. Around half a million people were displaced. Within less than 24 hours, approximately 650 air strikes targeted around 1,100 locations, killing around 492 people and injuring 1,645.

On the night of 27 September 2024, evacuation orders were issued for Beirut’s southern suburbs, described as the country’s largest Shia ghetto. Around 700,000 people lived there, many of them with roots in Jabal Amel.

Within less than 72 hours, around one-fifth of Lebanon’s population had been forced to leave their homes. The displacement became a demographic bomb, with Jabal Amel’s residents transformed into refugees within their own country.

The southern districts of Marjeyoun, Bint Jbeil and Tyre were almost entirely emptied. More than half of Lebanon’s population was compressed into six districts covering around one-fifth of the country’s territory. Around 38,000 people fled to Iraq.

During the war, forced evacuations also targeted places where displaced people had sought refuge in Mount Lebanon, Beirut and northern Lebanon. Roads, cars and motorcycles were likewise targeted. At the same time, sections of the media and political discourse resorted to dehumanising language towards displaced Shia communities, at times portraying them as a ‘viral plague’.

This dehumanisation compounded the burden placed on Lebanese society and fuelled communal tensions, while these tensions remained largely within their limits.

The warnings did not stop with the ceasefire. They continued for 15 months, leaving people in southern Lebanon effectively subject to Israeli threats and surveillance. Drones monitored the area, warnings were issued to residents, threats were made against people returning to their homes, and aircraft continued to hover over villages.

At the same time, Israel systematically destroyed infrastructure needed for residents to return. Prefabricated structures were erected, bulldozer hangars established and engineering teams deployed to survey villages. Reconstruction was obstructed, while five Israeli military positions were established south of the Litani River. By this stage, around 335 people had been killed and approximately 1,000 wounded.

The war resumed on 2 March 2026. Six missiles were fired at dawn, possibly serving as an early warning. Evacuation orders, the ‘Great Displacement’ and the evacuation of Beirut’s southern suburbs once again became features of the conflict.

On 8 April 2026, more than 100 targets were struck within minutes, killing more than 375 people.

The tactic was to drive the community out wherever it remained — scattering its members and breaking its social cohesion. The number of displaced people reached around 1.2 million at its peak, while approximately 500,000 people were unable to return to their homes, 80% of them from southern districts.

Spatial Genocide as an Operational Plan to Scatter the Shia of Jabal Amel

Palestinian sociologist Sari Hanafi defines the Israeli settlement project as an ideology with operational objectives. Its ultimate aim, he argues, is to drive local populations from their habitats. The operational plan consists first and foremost of what can be described as ‘spatio-cide’: making a place unliveable in order to facilitate the ‘transfer’ of the local population.

A report prepared by the National Council for Scientific Research (NCSR), in cooperation with the Lebanese Army and the Ministry of Environment, examined the environmental impact of the war between 2023 and 2025. Environment Minister Tamara Zein described the process as operating on three interconnected levels.

First: Domicide

The first level is domicide: the direct destruction of the homes of people in southern Lebanon, whether on the grounds that they contained Hezbollah infrastructure or were being used for storage, shelter or concealment.

Between 2023 and 8 May 2026, around 300,000 housing units were targeted. Some 57% of them were concentrated in Jabal Amel, including approximately 120,000 in Nabatieh and 53,000 in the South Governorate.

A further approximately 104,000 housing units were affected in areas of Beirut and Mount Lebanon where Shia communities from Jabal Amel are concentrated.

Around 46% of the housing stock inhabited by southerners in Jabal Amel was destroyed. Some 93% of the destruction was concentrated in Nabatieh, Tyre, Bint Jbeil and Marjeyoun.

Second: Urbicide

The second level is urbicide: the destruction of the built environment itself.

Around 11,000 buildings were completely or partially destroyed, generating more than three million cubic metres of rubble.

In Marwahin, Muhaybib, Maroun al-Ras, Blida and al-Adaisseh, more than 99% of buildings were destroyed. The overall destruction rate reached around 90% in Khiam and al-Adaisseh, and more than 80% in Kfar Kila, Naqoura and Houla.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz stated that Israel was replicating the Rafah model in Lebanon through the systematic destruction of civilian and urban infrastructure. Katz said that between 15,000 and 20,000 homes in the ‘Yellow Line’ area had been destroyed, describing them as military infrastructure to be permanently eliminated.

In both cases, the essence of the solution lies in removing a particular community — one classified as a strategic threat to the dominant political project — from the wider political landscape.

In the case of Jabal Amel, the Shia community is being targeted with the aim of permanently distancing it from the border, punishing it for its collective political positions, and dismantling its networks of solidarity and mutual support.

In this context, systematic destruction intersects with large-scale killing. The number of people killed has exceeded 10,000 since the pager explosions, in addition to tens of thousands of wounded.

But the process is reinforced by what could be called ‘dual normalisation propaganda’, which spreads like fungi across digital and media spaces through a network of online platforms, political programmes, journalists, advertisers, activists and politicians whose interests — and perhaps their values as well — are built around managing the engines of this dual normalisation.

On the one hand, it promotes normalisation with ‘safety with a genocidal government’ as the ultimate and natural way out of the complex crises Lebanon has experienced for more than three decades.

On the other hand, it promotes normalisation with the demonisation of the Shia community, either by questioning its national belonging or by falsely portraying it as a rogue community standing outside the process of building a just, sovereign and independent state.

The most immediate danger today lies in what a United Nations official reportedly conveyed following a visit to Israel shortly before the outbreak of the latest war. According to the account, the official met with an Israeli official who said that the aim of the next war, should it occur, would be to “scatter the Shia of Jabal Amel” across Lebanon’s geography, and perhaps beyond it.

So what is to be done in the face of a project built on scattering a community and emptying its land?

“We will go to our death. First, we will defend the trees we wear, and the night bell, the moon above our huts that we desire. We will defend the recklessness of our gazelles, we will defend the clay of our pottery, and our feathers in the wing of the final songs.”

Mahmoud Darwish — “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man”

Rabih Jamil is lecturer in the Sociology of Organisations and Work, and researcher specialising in the digital platform economy.