‘We just want to stay home’: A Lebanese village under Israeli occupation

KFAR CHOUBA, Lebanon — The fear is always there, but it’s worst at night.

That’s when Israeli troops stationed a few hundred meters down the road arrive at this mountain village, less than a mile from Lebanon’s border with Israel, searching homes and arbitrarily detaining its residents.

“When it gets dark, fear begins,” said Walid Nasser, a retired police officer and city board member.

He stood up and pointed to a place hidden in the gray clouds surrounding the mountains overlooking Kfar Chouba.

“If it wasn’t for the fog, you would have seen the Israelis there,” he said. “They’re always watching us… You think, ‘Now they’re going to knock on the door, now they’re going to break into the house’.”

Hussein Abdul-Aal has similar fears. His house at the eastern edge of Kfar Chouba was one of the closest houses to the Israeli position. Abdul-Aal said that they searched three houses nearby in recent days and asked the owners to leave the house. Currently, the last residents of the neighborhood are Abdul-Aal, his wife, their two cats and the abandoned dogs they feed.

“It is now my dream to completely surrender to sleep, relax and sleep peacefully at night,” Abdul-Aal said.

Such is life in Kfar Chouba since the conflict between Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah and Israel escalated last month, triggered by the US and Israel’s war against Iran.

With a casual smile, Abdul-Aal, a 72-year-old retired high school sociology teacher, compared the behavior of residents around Israeli troops to that of a lazy student hoping they won’t be called on in class.

“You try to make yourself smaller to avoid your teacher’s gaze. We do the same; we stay inside, stay away from the windows so the Israelis don’t come to us,” he said.

“The night they came to our neighborhood, we held our breath and did not move for three hours,” said Afaf Awadhah, Abdul-Aal’s wife.

Here, the music of a war that no one wants (the bass noise of warplanes, the trumpet sound of machine guns) grows louder every day. Israeli military leaders have repeatedly vowed to occupy all of South Lebanon (an area slightly smaller than Los Angeles) and to expel hundreds of thousands of Shiite residents they view as Hezbollah supporters and occupy what they call a “defense buffer zone.”

While much of southern Lebanon is predominantly Shiite, Kfar Chouba and its neighbors consist of Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim communities. Despite the threat that conflict will engulf towns and villages, these residents insist on neutrality and refuse to leave.

In recent weeks, Israeli military officials have contacted the area’s mayors to tell them that displaced Shiites can remain in the buffer zone, provided they do not allow them to remain in their villages or allow them to be used as staging areas for Hezbollah attacks.

“On Wednesday they called me from the Israeli Ministry of Defense and said that if we do not keep Hezbollah and the displaced out, they will order us to leave the village and raze it to the ground,” said Qasim al-Qadri, the mayor of Kfar Chouba. Like the others, he felt he had no choice but to comply.

Israeli soldiers patrol the rural area of ​​Kfar Chouba, a town in southern Lebanon, on February 17, 2025.

(Ramiz Dallah / Anadolu / Getty Images)

However, this neutrality did not save Kfar Chouba and neighboring villages from attacks.

In the first weeks of the war, Israeli shelling killed three people: a police officer and two shepherds. Village residents said that during one of the midnight raids on the village, Israeli soldiers entered the houses of three village residents, interrogated them and detained one of them at the police station overnight and did not allow him to leave.

In another attack on the nearby village of Halta a few days later, they shot and killed 15-year-old Mohammed Abdul-Aal (a distant relative of Hussein) as he came out of his house to check the noise, the mayor said.

Residents say the Israelis are denying residents, many of whom work in agriculture, access to farmland near the border; Other areas were bombarded with white phosphorus, destroying vegetation and thousands of trees, Lebanese officials said.

“We are all here, just waiting: waiting for the Israelis to come and kill us, waiting to see where they will attack or where they will enter,” al-Qadri said.

He added that the Lebanese army withdrew from its position above the village at the beginning of the battle, despite calls from the public to stay.

“We even offered the army soldiers places to stay in the village and provide them with food, but they were ordered to leave,” he said. “We need the Lebanese state here.”

Fighting returned to Kfar Chouba and Lebanon on March 2, after Hezbollah killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and launched rockets and drones at Israel in response to near-constant attacks despite a ceasefire that ended the last conflict in 2024.

The effects of the earlier fight can still be seen in the bomb-detonated houses and mosque in Kfar Chouba. A local resident says that when a cloud of dust rose from the road, it was another Israeli tank passing by.

The Lebanese government says more than 1,300 people have been killed and more than 1 million people have been displaced in Lebanon so far. Israel’s buffer zone plans have raised fears of a longer period of displacement that would amount to ethnic cleansing, mainly in southern Lebanon.

On a cold morning, Kfar Chouba, Al-Qadri, Nasser, and the few others who remained met in the village’s main town hall. It was a relatively quiet moment, in sharp contrast to the day before when F-16 fighter jets pierced the clouds as they launched bombing raids over southern Lebanon.

Sitting around wood stoves drinking cups of coffee and tea, residents reflected on the turmoil that had become a regular part of their lives.

Afaf Awadhah (left) and her husband Hussein Abdul-Aal give treats to their adopted dogs. They are the last remaining residents of their neighborhood in Kfar Chouba.

(Nebih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

Al-Qadri, 81, has seen Israel’s idyllic mountains turn into a battlefield since its founding in 1948. After Syria lost the Golan Heights in 1967, Israel carved out pieces of Lebanese and Syrian territory by cutting off land where Kfar Chouba residents would grow wheat and olives.

In 1969, Palestinian fighters used the area here – with Lebanese approval – to launch attacks on Israel, causing Israeli soldiers to blow up 17 houses in Kfar Chouba with dynamite. The village was nearly destroyed during Lebanon’s devastating war in 1975, when Israeli-backed militias seized southern Lebanon, trying to coerce the residents of Kfar Chouba into their ranks.

“I refused and they imprisoned me for a year. And then I left,” Nasser said.

Residents in the area rebuilt their homes, but the Israeli invasion of 1982, which later triggered the rise of Hezbollah, forced them to flee the country once again until Hezbollah overthrew Israel in 2000. Only after this did people like Abdul-Aal and Nasser return.

Later, in the clashes with Hezbollah in 2006, Kfar Chouba was completely destroyed. The villagers rebuilt it. However, in the war in 2023, 27 people died and three-quarters of the village fled.

“I’ve spent more than half my life being forced to leave my home,” Abdul-Aal said.

Now there are just over 500 people left; It’s a tiny fraction of the 2,000 people who will be here before 2023. Young people no longer stay in Beirut or outside Lebanon looking for opportunities. Many houses have the neglected appearance of sparse settlement.

“We used to have big dreams to liberate Palestine and we were ready to help,” Al-Qadri said, adding that there were many Hezbollah positions in the mountains around Kfar Chouba in the past.

“Then our dreams became even more modest, to liberate our own land. Now it is even less. We do not want to liberate anything. We just want to stay at home and not leave our home,” he said.

As elsewhere in Lebanon these days, the conversation has inevitably turned towards Israel’s long-term plan for a new occupation of southern Lebanon.

Seventy-year-old resident Nazih Yahya, in the weary tone of someone long accustomed to conflict, expected the Israeli army to treat residents of non-Shiite villages differently than those in areas he considered to be bastions of Hezbollah support.

“We have two models, Gaza and the West Bank,” he said. He explained that in Gaza, the Israeli army had destroyed cities and prevented the return of residents; In the West Bank, the pace of destruction was slower; The Palestinians were still in place but under constant threat of attack.

“What they did to Gaza, they will do to much of Southern Lebanon,” he said. Kfar Chouba “will be like the West Bank”.

The only form of resistance still open to Abdul-Aal was to stay in his home no matter what.

“What is nationalism? Is it a political idea? Or is it a house, a land, a memory of a place?” he asked.

“No matter who comes and manages this place, they can’t take away from me being Lebanese as long as we stay here.”