Israel’s war on Lebanon targets the deceased, buried in their graves, in cemeteries all over the villages of southern Lebanon.
Violence against the dead, termed “necro-violence” by anthropologist Jason de León, is the intentional infliction of harm against human corpses. This method is adopted by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon’s cemeteries, demonstrating Israel’s scorched earth principle in Lebanon.
Since the launch of its military assault on Lebanon in October 2023, Israel has indiscriminately attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Legal Agenda, a Legal journalism platform, documented attacks on cemeteries in border villages committed in October 2024 during the 66-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. Cemeteries in border villages like Mhaibib, Blida, Ainata, Odeisseh, Aita el Shaab, and Kfarkila were leveled by strikes or bulldozed by the Israeli military upon its invasion and positioning in these villages. A striking video circulated on social media in October 2024, showing the complete decimation of Mhaibib by booby-trapping its infrastructure and remotely detonating it, destroying it fully, and with it, its cemetery. An extensive report was also published detailing the destruction of graves in Chamaa’s historic cemetery.
During the March 2026 escalation, the Israeli army advanced and positioned further in southern Lebanon. It now occupies more than 46 villages, establishing a buffer zone with a new Yellow Line as its border, at 10 kilometers from the UN-recognized Blue Line, covering approximately 600 square kilometers. Since then, more reports have emerged of damaged cemeteries in various villages such as Marjaaoun, Kfar Roummane, Yohmor and Sohmor, Srifa, and various areas in the city of Nabatieh.
Scorching the earth’s infrastructure and people
“Scorched earth”, a military strategy, means causing physical damage that empties the earth, through systematic destruction of its vital resources, such as agricultural lands, water infrastructure, healthcare and education facilities, and historical and religious sites. The aim of scorching is to cause long-term damage to life-sustaining infrastructure and systems, and largely undermine its livability.
A scorched-earth strategy extends beyond the destruction of infrastructure. The aim is to fracture the relationship between communities and the physical spaces to which they belong, through which identity, history and everyday life are reproduced.
Many of southern Lebanon’s villages and cities were largely devastated and almost entirely emptied of their residents. Most recently, Nabatieh, the largest inland city in southern Lebanon, was declared “disaster-striken” by its mayor, in a televised statement where he described the extent of the damage that took place within 48-hours before the declaration of the 19 June ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah. The mayor called for residents to postpone their return because most of the city’s vital infrastructure has been rendered dysfunctional.
Along with its material manifestation, scorching materializes socially. As physical spaces and infrastructure face military assault, people’s relationship to them is affected and the interhuman attachments that are born through them are destabilized. Evidently, the elements of psychological warfare are a core aspect of military warfare, with the objective of causing moral injury and social fragmentation by separating residents from what binds them and from their land. Such military tactics employ excessive force, like aerial strikes, surface-to-surface missiles, internationally-banned incendiary weapons like white phosphorus, and glyphosate, a highly potent industrial-grade herbicide, that Israel was accused of spraying over agricultural land in southern villages.
The land has been scorched of its people, alive and dead. Large-scale evacuation warnings covering entire villages and cities, have been the main method of displacement adopted by the Israeli army. International rights-group, Amnesty International, considers the “everybody leave” and “don’t come back” orders issued by the Israeli military to residents of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, Dahieh, to be unlawful mass population transfers that constitute war crimes.
Cemeteries as Sites of Memory and Belonging
By preventing access and return, and through the destruction of cemeteries, people are prevented from burying their dead, and the cemeteries are no longer visited and maintained. Cemeteries are sacred sites that are usually taken care of by the village’s residents, and the surviving family often visits their deceased, and burial rituals are a regular practice.
With no access to cemeteries, traditional burial practices for the deceased in southern Lebanon, most of whom belong to the Shia Muslim sect, are disrupted. Families have therefore adopted alternative ways to preserve the sacredness of their dead and the spiritual meaning of burying rituals and cemetery conservation. Many have established temporary burial sites in areas considered safe, and are waiting for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli forces, to return, so that they can offer their loved ones a dignified burial. During this process, bodies are wrapped in a shroud bag, placed in a sealed coffin and lowered into the ground until it is possible to move them to their final resting place, which is the cemetery of the village they are from. Cemeteries that were spared from destruction, like Rawdat al-Shahidain cemetery in Beirut’s southern suburbs, had no space left, so vacant graves cradled up to 4 martyrs. These alternative practices are dictated by the Muslim religion and permitted during times of war. They became more observed as the death toll increased. The war has so far killed at least 8,500 people across its three phases. Between 8 October 2023 and the end of the 66-day war in November 2024 3,961 people were killed, and more than 335 people were killed during the 15-month truce, and since the beginning of the second escalation in March 2026, at least 4,106 people perished.
A land that houses the deceased is considered sacred, preserving the honor of their bodies and commemorating their life. For communities in southern Lebanon who witnessed many Israeli attacks and invasions since 1978, being killed by Israel is to become a martyr, dying for an honorable purpose. Martyrdom is celebrated as a high virtue and duty and it is mourned and grieved by the martyrs’ families and loved ones. With people displaced, and land emptied and occupied, cemeteries lose their role as a space that holds mourning, allows grief and venerates martyrdom.
Erasing Memory Through the Destruction of Cemeteries
Cemeteries are evidence of historic land ownership, and the proclamation that this territory belongs to the ones who live in it and the ones before them who are buried in it. Through cemeteries, the bond between people and land, and among people, is strengthened, and by scorching them, these attachments are dissolved. The people of southern Lebanon have been systematically dispossessed of their land and homes by the Israeli military that seeks to rid them of their lineage, by razing the space that harbors it. Cemeteries also offer the deceased a kind of immortalization of their history and memory, maintaining the generational and historical continuity of southern Lebanon that shapes its culture. The displacement of bodies and remains into an unknown location tampers with the collective history of border villages.
The destruction of cemeteries, whether by direct bombardment or as collateral damage from nearby strikes, is part of a wider process of erasure that brings violence against the living to the dead. Such attacks undermine memory, sever historical continuity, and weaken the relationship between communities and the land they inhabit by rendering these spaces unrecognizable. Cemeteries are not just burial grounds; they are places where memory, identity, and a sense of belonging are continually reinforced through burial rituals, mourning, and remembrance. For many Muslim communities in southern Lebanon, for example, caring for graves and visiting deceased relatives are enduring religious and social practices that preserve the bond between generations. Honoring the dead through dignified burial is both a religious obligation and an expression of communal identity. Attacks on cemeteries are about more than destroying physical sites. They violate the dignity of the deceased and cause great moral and emotional injury to the living.