From Gaza to Lebanon: A Scorched-Earth Strategy

ON THE MORNING of October 9, 2023, Oday Abousari, 31, was working on his land in Dhayra, a village in southern Lebanon, when several bombs struck nearby. The farmer’s eyesight quickly became blurred, and a suffocating smell spread around him. “I immediately ran home to take shelter and close the windows. I knew that what had just happened was unlike anything I had ever experienced,” he recalls. Hours later, when Abousari finally ventured outside, his family’s olive trees, hundreds of years old, were ablaze, as were all of his tobacco plantations. More than 15 years of labor put into growing tobacco had been destroyed. “My paradise was burning before my eyes,” he remembers.

Israeli forces bombed Dhayra on October 9, 13, and 16, injuring at least nine civilians and damaging many fields, homes, and other infrastructure. In this village where the majority of residents depend on farming, these kinds of bombardments are tantamount to a death sentence. In those bombings, Abousari lost 23 of his goats, all 3 cows, nearly 120 chickens, his tractors, and, most painfully, the fields that his family had been cultivating with devotion for over 100 years.

Today, the village of Dhayra lies in ruins. “I went back there during the ceasefire and didn’t recognize anything,” Abousari says. “The schools, the mosque, and the houses had vanished, completely destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The bodies of my relatives buried in the cemetery had been swept away by the Israeli’s bulldozers. I don’t know where they are.”

In the face of growing cross-border hostilities, Abousari has had to flee his home three times since March 2024. Every time he has tried to return to his land, but Dhayra is now under Israeli occupation, and the constant threat of Israeli drones that hover in the sky above his farm is now keeping him away. “They didn’t want us to return,” he says. “They were constantly harassing us.”

Abousari — who now lives with his wife, their two children, and his parents in the village of Al-Abbassieh, in southern Lebanon’s Tyre municipality — prays for the day he can return to his village but worries that the land might be irreparably poisoned. He is also concerned about some troubling physical symptoms he has been experiencing. “Since the attack, I can’t breathe as I used to. I get breathless very quickly, but I’m afraid to go and see the doctor,” he says, adding that he doesn’t want to face the reality of the potential diagnosis.

Abousari’s concerns are valid. Several independent investigations have found that the weapons used by the IDF during its attacks on Dhayra and other civilian areas in southern Lebanon during the current escalation of cross-border hostilities included United States-supplied munitions that contain white phosphorus — a toxic, highly combustible chemical whose use in war is restricted under international law due to its devastating, and often fatal, effects.

Lebanon has condemned the use of such weapons as a deliberate act of ecocide aimed at making southern Lebanon uninhabitable.

ACCORDING TO THE World Health Organization, white phosphorus is “harmful to humans by all routes of exposure.” This chemical substance ignites instantly upon contact with oxygen, and it can cause severe burns, respiratory issues, and death in humans and wildlife. It scorches any vegetation it touches.

“White phosphorus will continue to burn at 816°C [1500°F] until it is completely consumed or the oxygen supply is cut off,” explains Rami Zurayk, professor of ecosystem management and soil science at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Once ignited, white phosphorus is incredibly difficult to put out. The chemical can also lie hidden in the soil and spontaneously combust when uncovered, posing a continuing threat to the people living in a contaminated zone.

Long employed by militaries to generate smoke screens or illuminate battlefields, white phosphorus munitions are regulated under Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which restricts their use in and near civilian areas. While Israel has not ratified Protocol III, it is still bound by international humanitarian law and customary law, which both require the protection of civilians. More broadly, these laws mean that military attacks should be directed only at specific military targets of the opposing force.

Despite these regulations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the IDF violating such protocols during its invasions in Palestine and Lebanon following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, including through repeated use of white phosphorus weapons across Gaza and southern Lebanon between October 2023 and March 2026.

“We have verified footage and [have] documented a pattern of serious violations of the laws of war by Israel in Lebanon since October 2023,” says Ramzi Kaiss, researcher at Human Rights Watch, who cited the repeated use of white phosphorus over densely populated areas, alongside strikes that have targeted civilians, journalists, medical workers, and peacekeepers. In the absence of any credible accountability mechanism, Kaiss argues, these actions have continued with near-total impunity.

This isn’t the first time Israel has employed these weapons. The Israel Defense Forces has, in fact, been using white phosphorus munitions for several decades, notably during the wars in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. Human Rights Watch also previously documented the IDF’s widespread and unlawful use of white phosphorus in civilian spaces like markets and hospitals in Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, during the First Gaza War in 2008-2009.

British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sittah, who was working in an operating room in Gaza at the time, witnessed what these weapons can do. He remembers a 13-year-old boy brought in with burns that burrowed deep into his flesh, forming a narrow column of tissue necrosis. The burns had dug their way into the child’s abdomen, perforating his intestines from within, Abu Sittah recalls. “The boy’s back looked like Swiss cheese, but with black holes,” he says. It was the first time Abu Sittah and his colleagues had come across such injuries. “White phosphorus keeps burning as long as it finds oxygen and thus [it kept burning through his] flesh.”

When he returned to the United Kingdom, Abu Sittah tried to understand what he had encountered, looking for medical literature that might help him treat such burns. There was almost nothing apart from a few reports that included testimonies dating back to 1982 from morgue workers in Tyre, a town in southern Lebanon, describing bodies that couldn’t be kept inside because they continued to emit fumes.

More than a decade later, he encountered the same kind of wounds again. After Israel launched its offensive in October 2023, Abu Sittah spent 43 days volunteering in Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. During those first days, more than 40 patients were brought in with injuries caused by white phosphorus, he says. “When you see this kind of burn, you never forget it.”

Human Rights Watch analyzed footage recorded in Lebanon and Gaza on October 10 and 11, respectively, documenting multiple airburst detonations of white phosphorus munitions over the port of Gaza City and in two rural areas along the Israel-Lebanon border. Yet efforts to assess the full extent of contamination have been obstructed as Israel has prevented access and blocked the materials needed to conduct such analyses in Gaza, notes Azra Chang, a UK-based independent researcher and consultant in healthcare systems and strategy. As a result, the number of victims, as well as the broader scale of environmental poisoning, remains unknown.

“We are already seeing signs of toxicity, particularly in children, including congenital abnormalities and a rise in chronic illnesses, especially where water sources may be contaminated,” Chang says. Because proper laboratory testing are being prevented, many cases remain unconfirmed, she adds. But among children evacuated from Gaza with unexplained liver and kidney damage, Chang notes that “if they were tested [they] would have [shown] poisoning as a result of the toxic environment.” (A 2012 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that in 27 percent of the families with children who had birth defects, one or both parents had been exposed to white phosphorus during the First Gaza War.)

IN SOUTHERN LEBANON, the use of white phosphorus munitions and types of bombs during the current war has ignited fires across wide swaths of land, accelerating the destruction of agricultural areas and contributing to the gradual emptying of the region. According to Lebanese officials, the war has displaced more than 1 million people in the country, killed more than 4,300, and left the landscape littered with unexploded bombs.

Ahmad Beydoun, an architect and PhD researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has documented and mapped nearly 250 white phosphorus strikes by Israeli forces in south Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024. Beydoun found that 39 percent of uses were in residential areas, 17 percent in agricultural lands, and 44 percent in forested or open terrain. According to his findings, approximately 91 percent of all verified incidents occurred before Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon in October 2024.

“While the stated purpose of white phosphorus is battlefield concealment, its extensive use prior to the invasion of Israeli forces suggests that the weapon was deployed in contexts not directly linked to troop movement … 79 percent of strikes occurred during daylight hours, while 21 percent took place at night. The overwhelming daytime concentration contradicts claims that white phosphorus was deployed for illumination,” details Beydoun’s website, WhitePhosphorus.info.

In March 2026, an investigation by Human Rights Watch revealed that Israeli forces had, again, unlawfully used artillery-fired white phosphorus munitions over homes in the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor on March 3.

Since the start of the war, Israeli attacks have damaged 22 percent of Lebanon’s farmland, the country’s agriculture minister, Nizar Hani, told The New Arab. In the south of the country, agriculture structures daily life and sustains entire communities. Some 70 percent of Lebanon’s citrus fruit and 90 percent of its bananas are produced in this region.

The Lebanese government says IDF has been using other chemicals as well. It has accused the Israeli military of spraying glyphosate — an herbicide classified by the World Health Organization as “potentially carcinogenic” — along its borders with Lebanon and Syria in early February of this year. Laboratory analyses commissioned by the Lebanese government found that glyphosate concentrations in some samples were 20 and 30 times higher than the levels typically considered acceptable.

The findings were corroborated by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which said the Israeli military had informed it about planned aerial activity involving a “non-toxic chemical substance” over areas near the Blue Line, the UN-demarcated line separating Lebanon and Israel. In a statement following the incident, the UN mission said it was forced to suspend some of its regular patrols for more than nine hours and that the spraying constituted a violation of the peacekeeping framework agreed upon under the 2006 UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

The use of such a powerful herbicide, which threatens soil fertility and human health, could hinder the return of displaced communities to the area, says Kaiss of Human Rights Watch. “These areas are heavily dependent on agriculture, including olive groves, tobacco, and other crops, and this incident complicates people’s ability to return to their homes, maintain their livelihoods, and rebuild after extensive destruction,” he says.

UNIFIL also noted that this was not the first time Israeli aircraft had dropped unknown chemical substances over Lebanon. Similar incidents have been reported across the border in southern Syria. In late January and early February 2026, Israeli aircraft reportedly sprayed unknown substances over agricultural areas in Quneitra (a city that lies about 50 kilometers from Dhayra as the crow flies) on at least three occasions. Israel continues to occupy the Golan Heights as well as additional parts of the Syrian border region that were seized following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024.

For Ghassan Salamé, Lebanese minister of culture, the ongoing destruction marks a decisive shift. “Since the renewal of hostilities, more than 50 villages have disappeared from the map. Entirely leveled, bulldozed. Not only infrastructure and lands are being targeted. We have seen repeated cases of ancient olive trees being uprooted, some of them five or six hundred years old,” he said in a March interview over the phone.

What is unfolding, he suggests, resembles a systematic clearing in which homes, infrastructure, and agricultural lands are dismantled by the IDF.

In the foreword to a report examining the environmental damage caused during the 2023-2024 invasion, Lebanon’s environment minister, Tamara El Zein, accuses Israel’s military of committing “an act of ecocide.”

The report, released by the Lebanese Ministry of Environment and the National Council for Scientific Research in April, warns that contamination of soils by heavy metals and other conflict-related pollutants may have long-term environmental and agricultural consequences. It concludes that Israeli aggression has “reshaped both the physical and ecological landscape” of southern Lebanon. The scale of the damage is not only visible via satellites. It is measurable. According to the report, attacks by Israeli forces have damaged 5,000 hectares of forest cover, destroyed $118 million in agriculture assets, and contaminated soils with phosphorus concentrations up to 1,858 parts per million, with particular contamination hotspots in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east.

“What is being destroyed is not just what people have built but the environment that sustains them,” says Zurayk of the American University of Beirut, who also directs the university’s food security program and is a founding member of the Arab Network for Food Sovereignty. “The method is strikingly consistent,” he says. “Whether in Gaza, where the destruction is total, or in southern Lebanon, the same justification is invoked: The landscape is framed as a form of wild resistance that must be cleared. What follows is a process of transformation and Westernization of the land, reshaped to dispossess Indigenous populations and refit the territory to the needs and ways of the occupier.”

“When you destroy the habitat, people leave,” Zurayk adds. “That is the most basic principle of scorched earth and ecocide. Both are being implemented by Israel in Palestine and Lebanon.”