Nov 5, 2026 5:00 AM
Israeli strikes on construction equipment and water infrastructure in South Lebanon have blocked recovery efforts, keeping displaced families away from their homes.
Residents of Southern Lebanon are figuring out how to rebuild when the tools needed for that are being targeted.Photograph: Getty Images
They had bulldozers and excavators, the machines needed to clear the rubble, but they were afraid to use them. Instead, locals began clearing the debris by hand after Israeli strikes hit southern Lebanon throughout 2025. These weren’t just people’s homes; they were also businesses that had construction equipment—the kind that could have made recovering far less arduous—but the machines’ owners feared that bringing them out would invite another attack.
“They felt that just the presence of this heavy machinery that was typically used in reconstruction was a threat,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher in Lebanon.
Reconstruction depends on more than replacing buildings that have been lost. Roadways need to be cleared, water networks must be restored, and there need to be factories that can supply construction materials and equipment. However, reports from HRW, aid workers, and UN peacekeepers have documented how Israeli attacks have been damaging those systems and how the fear of further strikes has obstructed their repair.
“We did see incidents in which construction equipment was unfortunately targeted, which made it difficult,” said Kandice Ardiel, a spokesperson for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). “Not just for these repairs and the removal of rubble to happen, but again, for people to return to their lives.”
A view of destruction in Yaroun municipality in the Caza of Bint Jbeil in the Nabatieh Governorate in southern Lebanon.Photograph: Houssam Shbaro/Getty Images.
Many residents did return after the 2024 fighting, “and they did rebuild,” said Ardiel. But afterward, “we’ve seen things just destroyed again.”
In a December 2025 investigation, HRW examined four Israeli attacks on heavy-machinery showrooms and maintenance facilities as well as a factory that produced cement and asphalt. The strikes took place between August and October 2025, after the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Human Rights Watch reported that the attacks destroyed more than 360 pieces of construction equipment and classified the strikes as apparent war crimes.
Each of these targets had large supplies of necessary resources. Kaiss visited four of these sites, across which she saw a massive scale of destruction: “These are hundreds and hundreds of heavy machinery used in reconstruction-related processes.”
The Israeli military said on Telegram that the equipment and materials supported, or were intended to support, Hezbollah’s reconstruction of its infrastructure. HRW said it found no evidence of military targets at or around the sites. Though the organization could not establish the intended use of every attacked machine or store of materials, it did not find any evidence that these supplies were intended for military use. HRW did, however, verify civilian uses for some equipment.
And though reconstruction has stalled, the destruction has continued. By Israeli defense minister Israel Katz’s own count, 23,000 homes and more than 60 villages have been destroyed as of October. A New York Times analysis found that Israeli forces have largely leveled 48 of the roughly 60 villages and towns in the area they occupy, most of them after the renewed ceasefire in April. The Israeli military told the Times it had received no directive to carry out widespread damage to structures or to demolish villages. (WIRED Middle East contacted the Israel Defense Forces for comment but received no response at the time of publication.)
Beyond the buildings themselves, damage to critical infrastructure, such as water sources, has also halted people’s ability to return home. Doctors Without Borders stated in September that attacks on already weakened water systems continued despite the April ceasefire.
During UN consultations, local officials in Jabal Amel reported that around 6,500 displaced families could not return to a dozen villages inside the zone. These were inside the Israeli-declared “Yellow Line,” which marks a military zone in southern Lebanon, and restrictions in this area have obstructed efforts to restore essential services.
Charlene Silvin, a Doctors Without Borders project coordinator, led a team that visited about 20 towns in the Bint Jbeil area to document damage to water supplies. “There was not one village on the road that was not hit in some capacity,” she said.
Silvin created an account tracing damages from water sources to people’s homes. In this region, the boreholes—deep vertical shafts used as wells—that supply the villages with water lie in a valley held by Israeli troops. Not only is access difficult, but many components of the water infrastructure were damaged. There were storage tanks that could no longer hold water, and pump and filtration units were offline. These were supposed to be powered by solar energy, but nearly every panel Silvin and her team surveyed had been damaged.
Mohammed Rizk holds up his mobile phone showing a before-and-after photo of his destroyed home in the southern Lebanese village of Houla.Photograph: JOSEPH EID/Getty Images
In the municipality of Yater, Doctors Without Borders installed less ideal plastic tanks, because the main water tank was deemed irreparable. In Froun, the organization took a different approach, repairing the filtration unit and connecting it directly to the water source, bypassing the damaged tank. This is just a small sample of the needed repairs. The group noted in its September 2026 statement that it had documented damage to wells, pumps, generators, filtration units, and pipelines across southern Lebanon.
The attacks on heavy machinery and water resources collide in multiple ways, including the fact that construction vehicles are sometimes necessary to even reach broken pumps. In a 2026 account of repairs, UNIFIL described surveying a 280-meter access route for a maintenance crane. Most of the route was damaged and blocked by berms—mounds of compacted dirt sometimes used as barriers in military conflicts. Peacekeepers had to clear these before they could bring in equipment to repair the well.
Some are relying on trucked-in water, like the 90 families who returned to Zawtar Al-Gharbiyeh, which once had 500 households. This, however, isn’t a long-term solution but an expensive and limited substitute. “It’s not a system,” Silvin said. “It’s a drop.”
The threat of another attack also shapes what gets repaired. “Anyone that would be investing in repairing the infrastructure would be doing so with the fear that the intervention is damaged again in a very short while,” Silvin added.
For her team, that means often opting for temporary fixes rather than the lasting infrastructure residents need. An October UN report also described municipalities struggling to pay staff, fuel pumps, and maintain vehicles, and some local water authorities and civil servants told Silvin that Israeli forces had intimidated them when they tried to reach damaged sites near the Yellow Line.
Approximately 330,000 people remain internally displaced in Lebanon, according to UN estimates as of September 29. But documenting the obstructions people in this region face will also soon change. UNIFIL, which monitors and reports violations in southern Lebanon, is approaching the end of its mandate on 31 December 2026. In an October statement, the organization said discussions were continuing over the UN’s role after this deadline passes.
Ardiel describes the peacekeepers as “the impartial record keepers of what’s happening on the ground.” Their departure raises questions about how that work will continue, alongside the immediate challenge of restoring homes and services.
Hala Ghanem’s parents in Lebanon survived a bombing near their home on April 8, during an Israeli bombing campaign. Ghanem holds a photo (left) showing a before-and-after of the family’s home in southern Lebanon and (right) a photo of herself at the home in 2018.Photograph: Reuters
For one 27-year-old woman from Rshaf in the Bint Jbeil district—who requested anonymity for safety reasons—the destruction is visible only from a distance. She was in Spain when someone sent her a satellite image showing her family home reduced to rubble.
"I don’t even know if the cemetery is still there,” she says. “We have no way to access it, and with satellite imagery I can’t tell, because everything is rubble and it’s very pixelated.”
The loss will outlast any ceasefire. Ardiel, who has lived on a UNIFIL base since March, has watched olive trees “hundreds or even thousands of years old” be destroyed. “There’s a legacy here that’s being wiped out,” she said. “Even if the conflict were to end today, the recovery process is going to be intense.”
Yet the desire to return persists. Displaced families repeatedly tell Kaiss: “We don’t need anything but for them to allow us to return. We’ll pitch tents on the rubble of our homes, and we’ll live there.” That’s something Silvin has seen in the most damaged villages already, families “restarting their lives on the rubble.”
“I don’t believe this land will ever be ours again,” said the woman from Rshaf, but she added that if her family could return to their land, they would rebuild. “It’s not even a question.”
This story was originally published on WIRED Middle East.
Instagram Engineering
Shopify Engineering