How Israel’s ‘Yellow Line’ is reshaping southern Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon – Ali is from Khiam, a Lebanese village on the southern border with Israel, but for the last few months he has rented a house in Hasbaiyya, about a half-hour drive away to the northeast. He is one of tens of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from their homes in villages throughout the south of the country.

“Southerners are living a tragedy,” Ali, who did not wish to give his full name, told Al Jazeera. “This is all from flawed tragedies and failed politics.”

Despite a framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel signed in June – with the objective of securing Israel’s phased withdrawal from Lebanon – Israel has continued to occupy large parts of its neighbour’s south, where it has systematically demolished homes and infrastructure in dozens of villages.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has previously said that his country’s troops will not be withdrawn from Lebanon, suggesting an extended occupation similar to the last Israeli occupation, which lasted 22 years.

‘Hard boundary’

The Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on March 2, for the first time in more than a year. The Iranian-backed group said the attack was a response to daily Israeli violations of the November 2024 ceasefire and the assassination two days prior of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Israel responded by intensifying its war on Lebanon for a second time in under two years. Israeli attacks, as well as its reinvasion of southern Lebanon, displaced more than 1.2 million people. Since then, Beirut has entered into US-brokered direct negotiations with the Israeli government, despite the objections of Hezbollah, which has fought Israel since October 2023. The group traces its origins in the 1980s to resistance against Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

Yet the Lebanese government continued with the discussions, which eventually resulted in the framework agreement. One element of the agreement was the establishment of “pilot zones”, from which Israel would withdraw and be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces, who would then disarm any Hezbollah forces in the area.

Israel currently occupies a zone stretching up to 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) deep into southern Lebanon. Behind the “Yellow Line” that marks the end of that occupation zone, Israel continues to detonate homes. Israel uses the same “Yellow Line” term to refer to the areas it controls in Gaza.

“Israel’s primary goals were to empty, depopulate, and make those dozens of frontline villages and towns uninhabitable, and we’ve seen that now with the satellite imagery,” Mohamad Bazzi, a New York-based political analyst originally from Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “It was a way of applying that Gaza model to Lebanon.”

Around 50 frontline villages, including places like Khiam and Bint Jbeil, have been destroyed.

“Unlike previous occupations, the Israeli goal this time has been to empty those towns and villages of their residents, push them out, destroy as much of the housing and infrastructure as possible, and to make it extremely difficult if not impossible for people to return to their homes,” he said, adding that most of the destruction of the towns had occurred since April, despite several announcements of ceasefires.

“[The Yellow Line] is treated as a hard boundary, both in terms of troop presence and the controlled demolition of villages, which continues unabated despite the ceasefire,” Ahmad Baydoun, a Lebanese architect and open-source researcher based in the Netherlands, told Al Jazeera. “It is as if the ceasefire applies to the rest of Lebanon but not to this territory.”

On the northern side of the Yellow Line, residents have returned to devastated villages, including a couple of towns included in the “pilot zone” programme.

One of those towns is Froun, which the Israeli military destroyed via air and drone strikes, but which its troops did not enter.

“We were surprised that it was [included as a] pilot zone,” Hasan Bazzi, the president of Froun’s municipal office, told Al Jazeera.

Lines of all colours

The Yellow Line is not the only coloured line used in Lebanon to reference military demarcations. The Blue Line was established in 2000 in the wake of the end of Israel’s years-long occupation of southern Lebanon, with Israeli forces withdrawing behind it.

And there are now discussions in Israel about creating a “Grey Line”. Reports indicate that this line could extend 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) into Lebanese territory. The area behind the Grey Line would remain uninhabited, effectively serving as a buffer zone for Israel, which would not allow Lebanese civilians to rebuild their homes in the area.

“Part of the Israeli strategy here with the Grey Line, Blue Line, Yellow Line is to sow confusion and to hide or obfuscate the reality of what Israel has done on the ground [which is] to depopulate this vast Lebanese territory and to make it uninhabitable,” Bazzi, the analyst, said. “In the end, it doesn’t really matter what the definitions of these lines are because they are often shifting. We’ve seen that play out in Gaza, and the bottom line is Israel is illegally occupying and has illegally destroyed and ethnically cleansed a huge part of southern Lebanon, and the world sat silent while that happened for the most part.”

But even within the area on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line, some villagers remain, reflecting Israeli attempts to play on Lebanon’s sectarian divides. The majority of the population of southern Lebanon is Shia Muslim, but officials from non-Shia areas have said that they have received warnings not to host displaced people in their towns. Even those allowed to stay do not live in total freedom.

“The villages Israel has allowed to remain inhabited inside the Yellow Line are largely Christian and Sunni,” Baydoun explained. “But being allowed to stay is not the same as being free to live. In Kfarchouba, municipal workers were abducted while pumping the village’s water, and the mayor himself was detained. Even in Deir Mimas, a village outside the Yellow Line, the Lebanese army set up a post so farmers could reach their olive groves, and Israeli tanks came to the entrance of the village to confront it.”

Baydoun described the new reality of southern Lebanon as the “West Bankification of those who remained”, referring to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

“Residents are permitted to exist on their land but not to use it freely,” he said. “Access to fields depends on checkpoints, coordination and the mood of a patrol. Municipal officials are detained and questioned at will. It is a model of control that does not need to empty a village to govern it.”

Permanence of displacement

Analysts believe the occupation of southern Lebanon could extend into the foreseeable future. The Lebanese government has promised to erect prefabricated homes in some areas, but it may struggle to provide state services like water, electricity and sewage disposal to areas where infrastructure has been widely damaged or destroyed.

Even if the Israelis were to withdraw, much of the border area lies in complete ruin, collections of dust, rubble and ash lying where homes and agricultural lands once prospered.

“There are some towns where it might be possible to return with significant work, but in the 50 or so frontline towns or villages, I don’t think it will be possible in the short or medium term,” Bazzi said.

The subject is an open wound for many southerners, forced to continue their lives elsewhere while their homes and lands lie in ruins and under occupation. For them, Israel’s military occupation is reshaping southern Lebanon for the next generation.

“Khiam is destroyed, there’s nothing, it’s uninhabitable for the next 10, 15, 20 years,” Ali, the displaced man from Khiam, said. “They returned us to the Stone Age.”