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Earlier this week, the Lebanese army announced its forces had withdrawn from southern border villages, leaving residents without even the semblance of protection.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

Happy Parents: Premature Babies Returned to Gaza

CrossFireArabia
April 2, 2026

“I am meeting my daughter for the first time. It’s as if today is the day of her birth. I can’t describe my feelings.”

By Abdel Qader Sabbah, Jawa Ahmad, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA—Ahmed Al-Harsh waited outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Monday to meet his son, a toddler and the only other survivor of his entire family.

“I’m waiting for my son Mahmoud. I haven’t seen him in two and a half years except once, before he was transferred to Egypt. I’ve been waiting for two and a half years,” Al-Harsh, 31, told Drop Site News.

Mahmoud is one of 28 Palestinian infants who were evacuated to Egypt as premature babies in November 2023 from the neonatal intensive care unit in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, as the Israeli military laid siege to the medical complex and raided it. Mahmoud and seven other children were returned to Gaza on Monday to be reunited with their families, or what was left of them.

On October 14, 2023, one week into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the Israeli military bombed the Al-Harsh’s family home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Al-Harsh’s entire family was killed in the attack—his four-year-old daughter, his father, mother, brother, sisters-in-law, nephews, and nieces. Al-Harsh initially thought his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time, had also been killed. He only later learned that she had been gravely injured and had given birth to their son, Mahmoud, in hospital before succumbing to her injuries.

(Left) Ahmed Al-Harsh outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis as he waits for his son, Mahmoud, to arrive after 2.5 years in Egypt. (Right) Ahmed Al-Harsh holds up a photo of his son Mahmoud on his phone. March 30, 2026. Screenshots of video provided by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

Al-Harsh was able to see Mahmoud only once before he was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit in Al-Shifa’s hospital for care. He had been staying in Beit Lahia, unable to move amid the escalating Israeli assault. In November, Israel laid siege to Al-Shifa hospital, surrounding the medical complex and cutting it off from the rest of Gaza City before raiding it on November 15. Doctors inside scrambled to keep their patients alive, including the nearly 40 premature babies in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, Mahmoud among them. There was no electricity and incubators were failing. The World Health Organization, which was able to coordinate a one-hour visit to Al-Shifa at the time, described the hospital as a “death zone.”

After much negotiation, 31 premature babies were evacuated from Al-Shifa on November 19 and taken to Rafah. UNICEF said the conditions of the babies had been “rapidly deteriorating” inside the besieged hospital. Five died before they could be evacuated. The next day, 28 of the babies were transported across the border to Egypt for treatment. None were accompanied by family members.

For the past two and a half years, Al-Harsh has seen his son only in photos or videos sent to him from Egypt—first as an infant, then a toddler. “The feeling is indescribable. What can I tell you about this feeling?” he said. “These two years felt like forty, even more—a lifetime. During this time, I was a body without a soul. I couldn’t work or do anything.”

Video of the convoy arriving at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis bringing eight children who were evacuated from Gaza to Egypt in November 2023. March 30, 2026. Video provided by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

By early afternoon on Monday, the convoy from Egypt finally arrived. A Red Crescent ambulance and UN vehicles escorted a large bus carrying the children. Families crowded around the doors as they pulled up outside Nasser Hospital. The children were passed into the waiting arms of family members, most of them meeting for the first time, in scenes of joy. Al-Harsh appeared overwhelmed with emotion as he held Mahmoud, chubby, bespectacled and crying, in his arms. When Mahmoud grabbed a bottle of water and drank thirstily, Al-Harsh broke down and wept.

“Every human being needs the love of a mother and father. I am 31, I lost my mother and father, and I’m still suffering,” Al-Harsh said. “This boy—where do I find him a mother? Where do I find him his mother? When he grows up and asks about his mother, what do I tell him?”

At least four of the babies who were evacuated to Egypt died while there, Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, the director of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital, told Drop Site. He added that the children who returned to Gaza, while healthy, would require additional medical and psychiatric evaluation.

Gaza’s health care system has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military since October 2023. Every single hospital was attacked and 25 were completely shut down while 13 remain partially functioning, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Despite a “ceasefire” that went into effect in October, Israel has continued near daily attacks in Gaza, killing over 700 Palestinians since then. Israel has also continued to severely restrict the amount of humanitarian aid, fuel, medicine and other essentials, allowing in an average of only 200 trucks daily instead of the 600 agreed upon in the deal.

At the onset of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran on February 28, Israel reinforced a total siege on Gaza, citing “security concerns.” The Kerem Shalom crossing was partially reopened three days later. The Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt—which had only opened in early February for medical evacuations and for Palestinians returning to Gaza—was also closed at the onset of the Iran war and only reopened on March 18. Roughly 20,000 people are on waiting lists for medical evacuation abroad, 4,000 of them children, according to the Health Ministry.

The Gaza Health Ministry this week warned of a severe shortage of generator fuel that threatened hospital operations. The Ministry said that remaining generators are “worn out and prone to repeated breakdowns,” placing critical departments such as intensive care, surgery, neonatal units, and dialysis at risk of shutting down. Israeli forces have allowed the entry of only 1,240 fuel trucks out of the 8,350 that were supposed to enter over the 167 days since the ceasefire agreement took effect—a compliance rate of just 14.8%—according to the latest statistics from officials in Gaza shared with mediators and obtained by Drop Site. The Health Ministry warned that 90 generators are already out of service, while 11 are running on limited supplies. All hospitals in Gaza remain fully dependent on emergency back-up generators, according to OCHA.

Regardless of the continued Israeli siege and daily military assaults, the families who were finally reunited with their children in Gaza on Monday after nearly two and a half years of separation, described the moment as nothing short of miraculous.

Sundus Al-Kurd was among them. She was badly wounded in an Israeli airstrike on her family home in Beit Lahia on October 22, 2023. Her daughter Habibat Al-Rahman was killed in the attack. Eight months pregnant, Al-Kurd was rushed to hospital where doctors operated on her to save her life and conducted an emergency delivery to save her unborn daughter, Bissan.

“On the day I gave birth to my daughter, I lost her only sister,” Al Kurd said.

“When I woke up, I asked, ‘Where is my daughter?’ They told me, ‘Your daughter is fine and doing well,’” she added. “They told me she was in an incubator and that due to my health condition I wouldn’t be able to care for her.”

Al-Kurd continued to recover from her injuries and was unable to see her daughter before the Israeli military attacked Al-Shifa in November 2023.

“I was evacuated from the hospital with difficulty and I asked to take my daughter with me, but they said I wouldn’t be able to care for her due to my medical condition,” she said.

Having lost her other daughter, parents, and two siblings during the war, Al-Kurd said she could not bear the thought of losing Bissan, whom she described as “a gift and compensation from God.” Al-Kurd did not know what had happened to her daughter until much later when she found out she had been among the 28 premature babies evacuated to Egypt.

Sundus Al-Kurd holds up a traditional Palestinian dress she brought for her daughter Bissan, who returned to Gaza after being evacuated to Egypt 2.5 years ago for medical treatment. Khan Younis. March 30, 2026. Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

“Today, after two and a half years, God willing, we will be reunited with our daughter,” Al-Kurd said. She brought a traditional Palestinian dress for Bissan to wear. When her daughter finally arrived in the convoy to Nasser hospital, Al-Kurd held her tightly before dressing her in the white and red dress as relatives took turns embracing her.

“I am meeting my daughter for the first time,” she said. “It’s as if today is the day of her birth. I can’t describe my feelings.” Drop Site

Features

Wounders of Arabic

CrossFireArabia
February 20, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote this article “On Arabic” in 2008 and posted on hackwriters.com. I am reprinting it here for relvance and archival use

Compared with English, Arabic is an easy read if it is written well. When you look at English, the perception of the language, written and oral, took centuries of development from archaic structures associated with the old English of Geoffrey Chaucer, passing to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow to George Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Wolfe as well as many others and not mentioning the new contemporaries.

With Arabic it’s different. Although there may have been stages of development through out the centuries, it seems the clarity of the Arabic language was a one-time affair, represented in the Holy Koran brought down from the skies through Angel Gabriel to Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century and passed on to the Muslim community.

The Koran represented a basis for the Arabic language as it is spoken and written today. Unlike English, back in the 7th century Arabic was written in a clear, transparent, effective tone that involved action, and designed from every member of the social community, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, a source of knowledge and speech and continued to be so as it passed down through the centuries.

With English it was different. First if all, the language itself was derivative from other linguistic structures like Germanic, Latin, and French, many of which have said this is what made it stronger; Secondly English was helped by the issue of economic development as new inventions, processes and way of doing things required the development of new words, terminologies and syntax which evolved from the 17th century onwards.

Today some have been known to criticize Arabic for failing to be innovative, or developing to meet the needs of modernization and even globalization, with its inability to produce new words and terminologies to pace with the development going on in the region and the world.

However, one of the points that has to be clarified is that as these inventions came from the western countries and as communicated in English, the language proved more flexible in coming up with new words and terms, as opposed to the Arabic language that adopted a reactive approach with linguists from the region acting haphazardly in their word formations rather than following a methodical pattern.

In the process as well, we tend to get used to hearing the words and terminologies in say the English language and when we hear their equivalents in other languages such as Arabic, as there is a sense of word creation even in translations, it becomes odd and foreign simply because our ears have got used to the English pronunciation.

But this is a different view related to globalization, how much are we as Arabs integrated into the international system, how much we take from it, what do we take, what do we buy, our consumer habits and trends and indeed, how much do we produce and contribute to world society.

While this in turn becomes related to our language, its use, how much we mix words, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, the fact of the matter is that the language itself, spoken by about 300 million people in 22 Arab countries and about a 1.5 billion in Muslim countries who read the Koran in Arabic, says a great deal.

Arabic is a cogent force, its simple, attractive and gets the point across in as a logical manner as possible. It’s easy to read and to understand. It’s structure is less complex as say French and German which are grammatically more demanding than the English language.

However, just like any other language, writing in Arabic has to be learnt, it’s a professional skill; that’s why today there is an endless beating about the bush were getting the idea across is deliberately pumped and inflated and there is much hankering because of political considerations relating to ruler, government, state, security apparatuses and so on.

These considerations are over-riding and smack directly with the professionalism of writing and the way the writing of Arabic should be as passed on and continued through out the holy Koran which is sometimes used as a source of criticism by western writers and pedagogics who claim the Arabic language lacks the basis for producing new words as do the other languages.

But when Arabic is spoken and written as part of the social community there is a sense of modernist continuum as expressed in its words, expressions, figures of speech and syntax found in the structure of the language.

Nowhere is this more emphasized than it is in the Koran. Written in the 7th century, the Koran is timeless in its spiritual message, a modernist document in its approach with words, phrases and expressions that apply as much today as when it was handed down, memorized and collectively written.

Words and expression apply as much then as they apply today. The word “car” for instance is used in one of its Suras (chapters) to signify a caravan route whereas its use today implies a vehicle, and striking the reader as if you are reading a modern document about social relations, economy, authority, and kinship.

The style of language appears to be modernist as well and not with case as it is say with the Bible that is written in old English, not as old as the language used by Chaucer, but is hard to fathom just the same.

That has proved problematic for the Koran. When translated into English translators often use the kind of language that is employed by the Bible, which does not reflect the actual modernist style of the Koran for the lucidness of the holy document becomes lost and replaced by an archaic and medieval structure once found in the language, although English has moved on tremendously.