Israeli forces employed an urbicidal strategy, destroying entire neighborhoods through bombardment and the placement of explosives.
Ali Hammoud Chit straddles the rubble of his pre-war life. His multi-storey home in Kfar Kila - near the border with Israel - has been ravaged by Israeli bombing. "No, we can't live anywhere else," explains the father. "Will there be another war? Maybe, we're used to it."
According to the authorities, 90 per cent of his village was destroyed during the war - and even afterwards, when the area was occupied by the Israeli army and a total of 57 people died here between October 8, 2023 and March 25, 2025.
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At the root of this war was the support of the Lebanese Hezbollah, a Shiite political party with a powerful militia, for Hamas. In the wake of the 7 October 2023 massacre, which left at least 1,200 soldiers and civilians dead in Israel, Hezbollah opened a front against Israel in Lebanon.
Withdraw
Months of fighting ensued, with bombardments confined to the south and west of Lebanon, and a few strikes in the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut.
In mid-September, Israel carried out a large-scale attack using booby-trapped walkie-talkies, killing and injuring dozens of people.
The Israeli army then stepped up its strikes on southern Lebanon - from 23 September - and on the southern suburbs of Beirut, plunging the country into all-out war.
A ceasefire finally came into force on 27 November, but this truce was violated more than 1,300 times by Israel, according to a count by the independent Lebanese media Megaphone.
The truce ended in mid-February, with Israeli troops indicating their “official” withdrawal from Lebanon. But, in reality, the soldiers did not withdraw entirely: they remained in five positions along the border on the Lebanese side.
Buzzes
In all, since 8 October 2023, this war has claimed more than 4,000 lives and wounded 16,000: 127 people have been killed in Lebanon since the ceasefire came into effect on November 27, according to a count by the daily L'Orient-le-Jour.
The man looks across the road: a hill overlooks Kfar Kila. A long, imposing concrete wall, built by the Hebrew army, separates the village from the rest of occupied Palestine.
Ali Hammoud Chit climbs down from what will soon be his terrace, over a mass of scrap metal, wood and concrete. The resident is well aware of how dangerous this debris is. “We're doing what we can to protect ourselves,” he says, disillusioned.
Israeli forces employed an urbicidal strategy, destroying entire neighborhoods through bombardment and the placement of explosives.
Hadi Awada, an organic farmer in Kfar Kila, is also worried: "People are already selling materials like iron and aluminium. But for other waste like stones, we're afraid it will be polluted with toxic materials."
Behind Ali's house, horses graze in a green meadow, spotted with small yellow flowers. The road running through the middle of town has been completely cleared. Near a gas station, a group of men chat. An Israeli drone buzzes by the ruined buildings.
Landfills
"We plan to store the rubble in designated areas for later recycling. We have to follow strict environmental standards laid down by the Ministry of the Environment", says the mayor of Kfar Kila, Hassan Chit, who explains that he fears pollution from bombing and white phosphorus.
He hopes that analyses of the rubble will soon be carried out to assess the exact level of pollution. While here the mayor asserts that the waste from the war will be transported and managed in a responsible manner, elsewhere the fear of seeing it stored without any respect for the environment is very present.
"I think our biggest challenge is to avoid previous disasters, like in 2006." That year, a war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah that lasted 33 days.
"The vast majority of the debris was dumped in two piles near the airport and remained there for at least ten years, leaking into the ground and the Mediterranean Sea," explains Issam Srour, a professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and a specialist in construction and demolition waste management.
At the beginning of December, the former Minister of Public Works, Ali Hamiyé, had indicated that he wanted to dispose of war debris in landfills or on the public domain, and use some of it for coastal embankment, as had already been done after the civil war and the 2006 war, which generated six million tons of debris.
Outskirts
The debris to date since fighting began in October 2023 totals some 32 million tons, Tamara Elzein, Lebanon’s new environment minister, told the magazine NewLines. According to a World Bank estimate from November 2024, the war from 2023 to 2024 generated between 50 and 100 million tons of waste.
The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) estimates that between two and four million tons of rubble were left in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were bombed on an ad hoc basis between 8 October 2023 and September 2024 - then almost daily between September and November 2024.
“Israeli forces employed an urbicidal strategy, destroying entire neighborhoods through bombardment and the placement of explosives,” say the authors of the CNRS report.
"Geographically, too, it's different. In 2006, most of the waste was concentrated in the suburbs of Beirut. Now it's also in the south, where around a hundred villages have been crushed. The situation is much more serious," continues the waste management specialist.
For the time being, according to L'Orient-le-Jour, waste from the southern suburbs and southern Mount Lebanon is being sent temporarily to the Jdeidé landfill on the outskirts of Beirut.
Recycling
It will be transported to the Costa Brava landfill, located on the south coast of Beirut, when expansion work on this site is completed. Our requests for interviews with the government on this subject have gone unanswered.
For several months now, activists and scientists have been documenting the environmental impact of the war in Lebanon.
They underline the lack of preparation and political vision to come to the aid of the inhabitants and set in motion a process of reconstruction and sustainable rehabilitation.
The circulars issued by the government for the management of rubble specify that it must be carried out in compliance with environmental standards.
“We're not sure that companies will comply with these standards, as there is no clear monitoring mechanism to guarantee effective sorting and recycling,” posits Yara Khalek, urban planning researcher for the organisation Public works studio.
Debris
"The principles of sorting and recycling may be a good starting point, but the real problem is the lack of a clear national strategy. All we have are old ministerial circulars, and their implementation is taking place without a clear framework or division of responsibilities."
Environmental organizations and scientists have launched a petition to demand clear and effective management of the rubble and propose solutions: waste analysis, sorting, temporary disposal in places where it will not be harmful to either health or the environment, creation of local jobs and development of new technologies, among others.
In the southern suburbs of Beirut, as in the villages of southern Lebanon, everyone is trying to get organized to clear away the debris and erase the traces of this new war.
“Recycling and reusing this waste can support sustainable reconstruction, as local communities, government authorities and experts work to restore both the environment and the economy,” stresses Hisham Younes, president of the Green southerners association.
This is also the approach advocated by Riad Al-Assaad, engineer and director of South for Construction. "We need to recycle debris locally, give it value and involve local people in the process.
Toxic
"To bring life back to a village, it's not enough just to bring in cardboard boxes: you have to think about all the other aspects, such as activities, agriculture," insists the entrepreneur.
The latter has launched a rubble recycling project, in partnership with AUB. “We're going to crush it all and see what percentage we can reuse, for example, in the cement industry”, he adds.
According to Mohamad Abiad, researcher and director of the Laboratories for the Environment, Agriculture and Food at AUB, the most worrying threat is the pollution linked to heavy metals, which are found in bombs or in what has been destroyed.
"If not managed properly, solar panel and battery waste could lead to a long-term toxic crisis. Heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and lithium can persist for centuries, contaminating water, soil and air," explains the researcher.
Bombardments
Rebuilding will take time, and money. In the ruins, residents are trying to recapture their former lives, amidst fallen walls, torn lives, uprooted trees and traces left by the Israeli military.
In Kfar Kila, Ali Hammoud Chit continues to build his future, brick by brick. As he walks through the earth scarred by bulldozer tracks, the man sighs.
“Here, there were great olive trees, a hundred years old or more: they uprooted everything, broke it all”.
Next to him, Jamal, his grandparents' dromedary, chews on the little grass he has found in the upturned earth. Among Ali's animals, he is the only survivor of the Israeli bombardments.
This Author
Amélie David is a freelance journalist based in Lebanon covering environmental and climate change stories. This article has been published through the Ecologist Writers' Fund. We ask readers for donations to pay some authors £250 for their work. Please make a donation now. You can learn more about the fund, and make an application, on our website.
