Lebanese find bones and memories of Israeli abuse in Khiam's ruins

Mountains of rubble and debris line the roads in Khiam, on Lebanon’s eastern border with Israel. Months of heavy fighting between Hezbollah and Israel have left most of the town unrecognisable. 

The buildings still standing are ridden with bullet holes. Some walls and doors have been entirely blasted off, revealing overturned furniture inside. Others bore traces of the presence of Israeli soldiers, who had occupied the area for around six weeks before withdrawing on 12 December. 

Trash left by Israeli forces is littered throughout homes, and walls have been vandalised with provocative graffiti.

In one three-storey house, past the military schedules scrawled into the stairwell, Israeli soldiers had scattered their faeces in bags around the rooftop. 

Despite the destruction, Khiam’s residents are still returning. Down one dusty lane, a group of neighbours were picnicking atop the rubble of their homes. 

They laughed as they passed plates of mujadara hamra, a traditional lentil dish from south Lebanon, sipped on hot coffee, and smoked from shisha pipes. 

“One’s soul has returned,” said 28-year-old Ali Awad, sitting next to his neighbour, Zainab Aqil. “This is my home and this is her home,” he told Middle East Eye, pointing to the pile of shattered cinder blocks behind him.

“This is our village, we are rebuilding it, and we are bringing it back to life,” he said.  

Awad and his neighbours have been staying in Nabatieh, about 24 kilometres west of Khiam, but have returned to their town every day since 26 January, the date originally set by the November ceasefire agreement for Israel and Hezbollah to withdraw from south Lebanon. 

However, Israel has accused Lebanon of not fully enforcing the agreement’s terms and it was extended until 18 February. 

A key battleground 

Perched on a hill overlooking the Israeli border, Khiam saw some of the fiercest battles in Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. After Israel invaded the country last year, the strategic town became one of its key targets. 

In late October, Israeli forces entered Khiam and began to shell residential neighbourhoods. Over 20 people from two families - farmers who had stayed to tend to their land - were trapped inside the town, and lost contact with the outside. 

For a week, the UN’s peacekeeping troops and the Lebanese Red Cross were prevented from rescuing the families, among them women and children. 

By the time the rescue workers entered, both families had been killed. 

Khiam’s mukhtar (a local official responsible for records), who asked to go by Mukhtar Qassem, told MEE that over 100 people, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, had been killed in the town. 

‘We’re here to pull out dad’

In many border towns, like Khiam, the search for the dead could only begin after the withdrawal of Israeli troops. After months of being left under the rubble, many of the bodies have disintegrated to skeletons. 

Hussein Fakih, the head of Lebanon’s civil defence in the Nabatieh governorate, told MEE that his teams were prevented from entering Khiam until the Israelis withdrew in December. 

He opened his phone to show haunting images of the bodies they had recovered recently from Khiam. One image showed a black bag filled with fragmented white bones. Another looked like a woman, her tattered dress still visible above her skeleton frame. 

A roughly 30-minute drive south from Khiam, in the border village of Taybeh, Fakih’s teams were also beginning to search for those killed. Israeli troops withdrew from Taybeh’s city centre on 26 January, although they still remain positioned on its outskirts and have hit the area with two air strikes since their withdrawal. 

When MEE visited on 29 January, a search operation was underway in the ruins of the al-Zahra health clinic in Taybeh. Taybeh’s mayor, Abbas Ali Diab, said that on 3 October an Israeli strike hit the clinic, killing eight people inside, among them a doctor, nurse and a medic. 

'One’s soul has returned. This is our village, we are rebuilding it, and we are bringing it back to life'

- Ali Awad, Khiam

A bulldozer was digging through another heap of rubble. A group of women sat nearby, wearing all black. Some had tears in their eyes. 

“We’re here to pull out dad because he is still under the rubble,” 19-year-old Fatima Hijazi said. 

She was waiting with her mother for rescue workers to uncover her father’s remains. Hijazi said her father was a member of Hezbollah, killed in an Israeli air strike on 3 October. Her brother also fought for the group, and was killed in 2015. 

Hijazi’s home in Taybeh was not far from where her father was killed. During the war, her home had escaped significant damage, she said, as she walked to retrieve some books from her bedroom. 

Hijazi stayed with her family in the village during the war. However, after 27 November - when the ceasefire went into effect - Israeli troops entered Taybeh and she was forced to leave with her siblings and mother. 

“I left during the ceasefire, because the strikes were very intense,” Hijazi said. 

Village left in ruins

While Hijazi was gone, an Israeli bulldozer had ploughed into one side of her home, for no apparent reason - the damage making it unlivable. “We can’t stay in our house, we are fixing it,” she said. 

“We are facing massive destruction. Unfortunately, this destruction took place over the past 10 days, even through a ceasefire that was supposed to be in place,” Taybeh’s mayor, Diab, said. 

“The Israeli enemy violated the truce and did not respect the international resolutions,” he added.  

Lebanon’s southern villagers confront Israeli soldiers as they fight to return

Read More »

Lebanon has recorded at least 823 Israeli ceasefire violations since the agreement took effect. Israel said its attacks targeted Hezbollah's military infrastructure and “threats” it said remained “unaddressed”. 

Diab noted that about 60 percent of the village had been destroyed, as well as its water and power infrastructure. 

Peering into the hills in the distance, he said that the Israeli troops stationed around the village were preventing the municipality from repairing a water pumping station, which provided drinking water to roughly 40 villages in the area. 

“There is neither water nor electricity, nor any means of livelihood,” he said. “The Israeli enemy has destroyed everything that made life possible here.” 

Even the village’s cemetery did not escape unscathed. For the first time in months, many residents of Taybeh returned to visit the gravestones of their loved ones. To their dismay, some gravestones were chipped while others were completely shattered. 

One young woman, Reem al-Shaar, said it had been over a year since she was able to visit her child’s grave.

“The Israelis stopped me from visiting my baby, for a year and a half,” she said. 

When she came, she was shocked to see that much of the cemetery was in ruins, although luckily, her child’s grave had not been damaged.  

Khiam’s notorious prison 

Back in Khiam, a few residents strolled around the notorious Khiam detention centre, checking on its damage. 

The prison was set up in 1985 by Israel’s local allies, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), during Israel’s 18-year occupation of the south. The guards inflicted various forms of torture on the prisoners, including beating them with electronic rods, hanging them by their wrists, or locking them in small cells that resembled “dog kennels”. 

'The Israeli enemy has destroyed everything that made life possible here'

- Abbas Ali Diab, Taybeh’s mayor

“Israel knows that here, people can see its crimes,” 24-year-old Hadi Awada told MEE at the detention centre. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli air strikes destroyed large parts of the prison compound. 

Again, in 2024, Israeli air strikes struck around the vicinity of the prison, causing minor damage. 

Two of Awada’s uncles were imprisoned at the centre. One was held for 12 years, locked away when he was only 17 years old.

“The time he spent in prison was time taken from him. He was still a child, he hadn’t seen anything, and he endured a lot of psychological trauma,” Awada said. 

Awada turned to a metal post at the centre.

“They would make the prisoners stand there, torture them… Many people died from the torture,” he said, recounting his uncles’ stories. 

The prison was recaptured by Hezbollah during the Battle of Khiam in 2000, shortly before the Israelis withdrew from the south. Videos were shared widely of people breaking into the prison and releasing the detainees, who were mostly members of political organisations and parties opposed to the Israeli occupation. 

Awada said that prison needs to remain intact “so that everyone can see what the Israelis have done, the extent of the atrocities, and the lack of humanity.” 

“The humanity they boast about, this shows the opposite,” he stated.