Israel Ethnically Cleanses South Lebanon

CrossFireArabia
Features
April 2, 2026

By Lylla Younes

BEIRUT—On March 28, George Saeed, 62, and his 24-year-old son Elie were driving back to their home in Debel, a village in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. It was a route Saeed knew well. He ran a small laundromat beneath his house, where he washed uniforms for a Polish unit in the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the nearby village of Tiri. The trip from Tiri used to take a few minutes, but after the main road was bombed by the invading Israeli military he had begun taking a longer route through the neighboring village of Rmeich.

That afternoon, villagers saw George’s car pass through Rmeich and enter Debel, disappearing along the village’s steep, winding roads. When they were roughly 60 meters from their house, the crackle of gunfire rang out, followed by the blare of a stuck car horn.

Elie Louqa, Saeed’s nephew and the former mayor of Debel, was in Beirut when he got a call from his brother describing what had happened. He began contacting UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL), the Lebanese Army, and the Red Cross, asking them to reach the car. Both the Red Cross unit in Rmeich and the nearby UNIFIL contingent told Louqa they could not secure permission from their superiors to move.

After about 90 minutes, a group of young men from the village decided to go themselves. Carrying white blankets and mattresses to signal they were civilians, they reached the site of the attack and found the father and son dead inside their bullet-ridden car. They pulled the bodies out and carried them to the village cemetery for burial.“You won’t find a man with cleaner hands. He was generous to a fault,” Louqa told Drop Site News. “Go and ask the people of our villages who George Saeed was.

”The killings were just one in a series of attacks on residents of several villages along the southern border who have chosen to remain in their homes despite repeated sweeping displacement orders by the Israeli military covering all of southern Lebanon.

Earlier this week, the Lebanese army announced its forces had withdrawn from southern border villages, leaving residents without even the semblance of protection. At least six Lebanese soldiers have been killed by Israel over the past month. The army said its troops had to “reposition” as they were being encircled and cut off from their supply lines but claimed it continued to “stand by residents” by “maintaining a group of military personnel” in the villages. What this meant in practice, according to residents, was that soldiers from the area could stay in their homes provided they did not wear army uniforms or carry arms.

“We don’t know why the army made this decision,” said Boutros al-Rai, a local farmer and civilian administrator. “For us, its presence made us feel protected.”Drop Site News is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Lebanon is being ravaged as Israel’s escalated assault enters its second month. More than 1,300 people have been killed, including over 120 children, and over 4,000 injured in a relentless onslaught. Israel has issued displacement orders covering around 15% of Lebanese territory and more than 1.1 million people—about a fifth of the country’s population—have been forced from their homes. Emergency workers have also been increasingly targeted, with over 50 killed over the past four weeks.

Despite a ceasefire agreement in November 2024, Israel continued to carry out near daily attacks and occupied five hilltop positions on Lebanese territory. When Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel on March 2 in solidarity with Iran after the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Tehran, Israel launched a full scale aerial assault and ground invasion on Lebanon.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Tuesday that the Israeli military plans to occupy the entire area south of the Litani River and will not allow hundreds of thousands of residents to return to their homes, making a reference to areas in Gaza that have been completely razed in the genocide. “The return of over 600,000 residents of the area south of the Litani River will be completely prohibited until the safety and security of residents of the north is ensured, similar to the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip,” Katz said.

The Israeli military also appears to be engaged in a campaign to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon of its Shia residents. Around three weeks ago, Israeli military officials called the heads of a cluster of majority Christian villages in southeastern Lebanon and ordered them to force out any “displaced people” that had taken refuge there, according to a municipal official in one of the villages, who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “Displaced people” was a thinly-veiled reference to Shia residents who had been forced to flee nearby towns like Khiam.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa used explicitly sectarian language two weeks ago in referencing Israel’s military campaign in the south. “We asked the Israelis to leave the Christian villages in southern Lebanon and requested that the army keep a unit stationed there,” Issa said in a meeting with Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Mar Bechara Boutros Rah.

Over the past week, the Israeli military made a new round of phone calls to leaders in majority Sunni villages Chebaa and Kfarchouba, warning them to not accept any non-locals into their village. Mohammad Hammoud, a spokesperson for the town of Chebaa, confirmed the authenticity of a video circulating online showing a call received on Tuesday by local leader Ibrahim Nabaa. Over the phone, an Israeli soldier warned that the village would be targeted if officials failed to keep resistance fighters out. Hammoud said that the municipality had organized a small police force to conduct patrols at night and make sure no outsiders entered—measures that, he hoped, would spare residents their homes and land.

As part of its invasion of southern Lebanon, the Israeli military is in the midst of a scorched earth campaign, systematically destroying homes and civilian infrastructure in border villages. Louqa, the former mayor of Debel, said he fielded frantic calls on Wednesday from village residents who told him that occupation forces had begun to blow up homes on the village periphery. The homes were empty, he explained, because in times of war, residents often move closer to the village center for safety.

“These homes are in Debel—not on the outskirts, not kilometers away,” Boutros al-Rai, a local official told Drop Site, adding that at least 10 houses had been demolished on Wednesday alone. “They’re blowing them up one by one. We don’t know why or how.”Around 1,700 people remain in Debel, according to al-Rai, down from 2,500 before the war. Once the escalation began on March 2, residents started making trips to the nearby village of Rmeich to buy essential goods. But after the killing of George and Elie Saeed last week, and without any support from UNIFIL or the withdrawn Lebanese army, that route was no longer considered safe.

“People have supplies for a week or two,” al-Rai said. “They rely on each other. But it’s not enough for much longer.”

Access to medical care is also severely limited. In Rmeich, where about 6,000 people remain, there is no hospital. Residents depend on coordinated evacuations, typically requiring approval from the Lebanese Army as well as UNIFIL, which then communicates with Israeli occupation forces.

Elie Shoufani, a local official and Red Cross volunteer, said the process is inconsistent. “Sometimes we get permission quickly, sometimes we don’t.”Earlier this week, a 48-year-old man, Paul Mu’awwad, went into cardiac arrest and died before he could get treatment. “We didn’t get permission to take him for emergency care,” Shoufani said, adding that Mu’awwad had left behind a wife and six children. “If we had been able to reach a hospital, he might have lived.

”Over the past month, residents in Debel, Rmeich, and nearby Ein Ebl have relied largely on aid convoys from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which in the past have been accompanied by the Lebanese army.

“Now that the army has left, we don’t know what will happen,” Shoufani said.UNIFIL troops have also limited their movement after Israeli airstrikes killed three Indonesian peacekeepers in southern Lebanon over a 24 hour period last week. Residents say this has further reduced their options.

“All we ask is for a way to move the injured or reach medical care,” Louqa said. “A mechanism to respond when we call. God will take care of the rest.”Al-Rai described the difficulty and humiliation of displacement in a state with overburdened shelters and skyrocketing rents. More than anything, he worried that if he abandoned his home, it would be destroyed by Israeli occupation forces. He, like the others in his village, was determined to stay put.

“These are our homes, our livelihoods, our villages, the homes of our parents and grandparents,” he said. “These are not places that can be left behind.” Drop Site

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Features News

Israel Killed Raghad on The Way to School

CrossFireArabia
June 22, 2026

17-year-old Raghad Hussein Ashour left her home, Monday morning, carrying her books and dreams, heading to an educational center in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City. She was preparing for her secondary school exams and clinging to her right to education despite the war, displacement, and destruction that has affected schools and all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip.

But her path to knowledge was cut short. Raghad was killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a vehicle in the Rimal neighborhood as she was passing near the site of the attack on her way to the educational center. Her academic dreams turned into a new tragedy reflecting the reality for thousands of students in Gaza.

According to her mother, Raghad was an outstanding student and one of the top performers in her studies. She refused to let the war sever her connection to education.

After the destruction of schools and the disruption of the educational process, she had become accustomed to moving between the streets of Gaza and cafes in search of electricity and internet access to continue her studies and complete her assignments.

From Beit Hanoun to Displacement

Raghad comes from the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, but she and her mother were forced to flee to Gaza City to escape the relentless bombardment there. They settled in a displacement camp near the Saraya area in the Rimal neighborhood, where the young woman continued her studies amidst extremely difficult humanitarian conditions.

Raghad’s suffering wasn’t solely due to the war; she had been orphaned since childhood, losing her father when she was just two years old. She was raised by her mother, who dedicated her life to her upbringing and care.

As the years passed, the only daughter became her mother’s support and companion in facing life’s burdens and losses.

“Who will replace her?”

Standing before her daughter’s body, the grieving mother was unable to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy. Her words, heavy with anguish, uttered, “My daughter was my only child… my rose was taken from me in an instant. Who will ever replace her?”

She added bitterly, “I used to move her from place to place during the war so she wouldn’t be taken from me. We slept together on the same pillow.”

The mother recounted years of fear for her only daughter, how she tried to protect her from death during repeated displacements and the harsh days of war, before losing her on her way to school.

In poignant scenes captured in widely circulated videos, the mother embraced her daughter’s body, weeping for dreams unfulfilled. She spoke of the joy of success that awaited her, and the future she had envisioned for her despite all the hardships, before those dreams were extinguished by the bombing.

Her death sparked widespread grief and reactions on social media, where many saw in her story a poignant illustration of the suffering of Gaza’s students who cling to education despite displacement, destruction, and the lack of basic necessities. For some, their books have become the final testament to dreams that were never meant to be fulfilled.

The Israeli occupation forces continue to violate the ceasefire agreement and the end of the war of aggression on the Gaza Strip for the 256th consecutive day. This agreement was signed on October 10, 2015, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, under Arab and American mediation. Sanad news agency

Culture Features

Meet Karimeh Abbud – First ‘Lady Photographer’ of Palestine

CrossFireArabia
June 22, 2026

Ahmad Mrowat’s collection

Late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir once unashamedly said the Palestinians don’t exist and Israel was established on empty lands.

It was a view repeated time and again to justify the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and their subsequent grab of more Arab territories.

The photographs of Karimeh Abbud (1893-1940), the first Palestinian woman photographer, debunks that view and makes Israelis like Meir eat their words.

Google honoured her legacy by celebrating Abbud’s 123rd birthday with a Google doodle in 2016 two years before this article was first published.

“Abbud captured vast landscapes, many of which don’t exist today. Through her art, we’re able to experience the beauty of these regions as she saw them nearly 100 years ago,” said Google on November 18, 2016. “Thank you, Karimeh, for making art that endures.”

Only upon closer inspection it is clear that the tree is in fact painted on the negative, curving around her head and through her hands

Google also dwelled on her “photographs of family, friends and the surrounding landscape of Bethlehem, Palestine.”

Darat Al Funun of the Khaled Shoman Foundation in Amman presented the first comprehensive exhibition of photographs by Karimeh Abbud in late 2018 to continue January 11, 2019.

Documentary

The exhibition also included a short documentary on Karimeh’s life and work by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin.

Many art critics have commented on the impressive nature of her photography. In a tribute to Abbud Palestinian art critic Tammam Al Akhal said “she is friend of the light and sun… there is an artistic sense of the equilibrium inside her pictures. She was a true artist when taking a photograph.”

Al Akhal was giving a short presentation on the artistic poise in Abbud’s photographs as the Karimeh Abbud Photography Competition Prize was being launched by Dar Al Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem, Palestine, in 2016. The competition has since become an annual event designed to encourage young talent in art, culture and photography.

The Lady Photographer of Palestine

In her time, she established herself amongst the great photographers of the time with Al Akhal referring to her as standing as “tall as the skyscraper.”

Abbud was born in Bethlehem on November 18, 1893, in a Christian family which had settled in Palestine in the latter half of the 19th century. Her father was Said Abbud, an Anglican-Lutheran priest, who used to travel all over Palestine and take Abbud with him wherever he went.

Ivana Peric wrote that when Abbud was little she would accompany her father on his travels to distant places to serve his congregations in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa and Nazareth “and this constant travel to Palestinian cities and villages allowed [Abbud] to see the diverse landscape of her homeland first-hand. She wanted to see more and capture the beauty she encountered.”

Reverend Mitri Al Raheb — who became a sort of unofficial biographer of Karimeh Abbud and her family — said when he came to Palestine, her father travelled to many places from Gaza in the south to Shaffa Amer in the north and then finally settled in Bethlehem in 1890. However, the family finally put down roots in Nazareth and this is where Abbud grew up, going to primary school there, then to Jerusalem and later to the American University in Beirut where she studied Arabic literature.

However her true passion was photography. She was merely 17 when her father gave her a camera and she started clicking there and then and didn’t stop until her death. She was buried in the Bethlehem Church where her father preached from the early 1900s until 1947 when he retired and left Palestine in January 1948 because of the troubles in Palestine and returned to Marj Ayoun in southern Lebanon where he originally came from.

During this period, however, the second of his six children quickly established herself by becoming a highly competent photographer, competing in a man’s world alongside such old hacks as Khalil Raad, Hanna Safieh and Fadil Saba and a handful of Armenian photographers who dominated the profession.

Ahmad Mrowat, the director of the Nazareth Archive Project devoted to collecting the works of the “Lady Photographer”, said Saba, the local photographer, moved to Haifa in the early 1930s and this made the emerging photographer a household name. He was invited to cover events all over Palestine, including one celebration in Hebron.

Social revolution

Abbud created a social revolution in photography. Unlike the male photographers who worked out of their own studios, Abbud did much more. She had two studios, one in Nazareth where she also had a laboratory for processing the photos and keeping the negatives in a safe place and adding colour to some of them, and a studio in Haifa. However, she visited homes to take photographs of women and children which male photographers could not do.

Abbud went into the homes of well-to-do and middle class families as Al Raheb points out. Increasingly, these people wanted her to come to their homes because of prevailing social constraints that made it inappropriate for them to venture outside their houses, especially to be photographed in studios.

So Abbud photographed women and children at different social occasions, during parties and marriage ceremonies. Her reputation was quickly cemented in the 1920s and 1930s when she took up the profession full time. In Al Carmel, a local newspaper, she advertised herself as “the only national photographer in Palestine [who] learned this beautiful art by well-known photographic personalities and is specialist in the service of women at reasonable prices…”

There are two points here to consider that could actually be inter-related. Jinan Abdo stresses the national element in this advertisement. She states in a 2012 documentary on Abbud made by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: “when she calls herself a national photographer that feeds into the national context that was present at the time. In the 1920s, after the British Mandate began, Muslim and Christian associations started to counter the idea that we are sectarian groups and not a nation and to support the idea of the unification of our nation, so the rational element was essential and I think we can look at Karimeh through this national context,” Abdo says.

Dr Issam Nassar, an academic at Illinois State University who teaches Middle East history, focuses on the “micro” element in her photography. “Taking portraits in studios at that time required preparations” whilst “in the clients’ homes… it was more relaxing because people felt at ease in their natural sorroundings.”

Hani Hourani, a social science researcher who studied art and photography, says: “If we look at the family and group photos [taken by Karimeh Abbud] the viewer doesn’t see the traditional style of the setting, the background décor and the fixed distribution of light but the onlooker sees such marked diversity in all these elements.

“The home was an opportunity for more improvisation and diversity in the styles captured by the photo leading many to suggest Karimeh Abbud was a non-traditional photographer calling for change in the way she clicked photos.”

Abbud’s photographs on show at Darat Al Funun were recently acquired accidentally after much cajoling.

Mrowat answered an advertisement placed in an Arab newspaper by an antiquarian Jewish collector named Boki Boazz calling for more information about Karimeh Abbud. That was in 2006.

Mrowat says at first the collector was not willing to divulge any information but after being pressed, it turned out that he had 4,000 photographs which he got hold of in one of the houses in the Qatamon district in Jerusalem after their owners fled in 1948; the photographs, he adds were of Karimeh Abbud because her name was initialled on each of the photographs — the first signed picture postcard belonging to her was dated October 1919.

Mrowat says his heart was set on obtaining the collection which he felt were a very important part of Palestinian heritage, finally persuading Boazz to give up his collection by offering him an old edition of the Torah printed in the Palestinian city of Safad in 1860.

The photos on show form only a part of the collection at Darat Al Funun and are only a fraction of the huge number of photographs said to number 9,000 still believed to be in the possession of the Israeli army as an article in the Haaretz newspaper stated.

The photos present a narrative of the Palestinian society and travel before 1948. Abbud took photos of cities and villages that flourished in the early part of the 20th century.

It was easy for Abbud to get around, Mrowat says, as she was probably the first woman to have an automobile and a driving licence in Palestine and the Arab world. She used to travel frequently to photograph Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Haifa. Many photos were taken of beaches, markets, mosques and churches, providing a unique glimpse of Palestinian life.

Mrowat, Dr Nassar and others suggest she would act, at times, as a tour guide, accompanying visitors to many tourist locations including the Jordan River and Yarmouk River as well as many other places. In between these, she was interested also in photographing the daily lives of Palestinian women, the different stitches they would make as they embroidered their garments which represented different villages, farming, women carrying water and wood as well as other scenes in both the countryside and in towns and cities.

Nassar puts it in another way when he says that Abbud was able to bring out the human aspects of the personalities she was photographing and this added value to her work and individuality because she succeeded in preserving the modesty and humanity of the Palestinian existence “through what professional photographers call the “aura” of the photograph and its phantasmical imagination.”

Al Akhal agrees, saying this is why Abbud’s photographs surpassed time. It was the “professionalism”, “creativity” and “high quality” that produced good negatives and in turn excellent photographs that “allowed her work to continue to be seen long after,” she says. “Through these pictures she [Karimeh Abbud] talks to us in silence, we build a dialogue with her, become friendly with her and construct strong relations with her.”

Through her images, Abbud provided a pictorial documentation of Palestinian life.

Nasser-Eldin, also coordinator of the the Karimeh Abbud Photograph Competition Prize, says “Abbud started what we can call ‘documentary photography’ documenting the lives of people through her studios and through her movement in the country carrying her bulky tripod and her camera wherever she went.

“Through her lens we got to know the forms of Palestinians living in Palestine before 1948. Her photos give us a change concept, a new picture of windows and images of Palestine and Palestinians, totally different from the pictures of orientalists who showed our country [Palestine] was empty of people and/or showed images of people spread out and not as an integrated community with civilisation and culture living in towns and cities and in modernity at that time,” Nasser Eldin added.

Her photos were well-taken and are a vital part of history, so at various times Israel has sought to adopt her as one of its own. This is what one book, published in 2011, titled Karimeh Abbud: Israeli Portrait and Wedding Photography by Monica Millian tried to do. Many have questioned its credibility as it is primarily sourced from Wikipedia and other online resources.

It can easily be understood why Israel would want to “cash in” on such an historic cultural figure, but Abbud is a Palestinian through and through as judged by historical evidence.

Marwan Asmar is a commentator based in Amman. He has long worked in journalism and has a Phd in Political Science from Leeds University in the UK. This article originally written for and appeared in Gulf News and is now reprinted in crossfirearabia.com.