BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images unfold slowly on Mazen Farah's phone — satellite views of the Christian section of the southern Lebanese village of Yaroun. They are a bit fuzzy but still clear enough to see what is happening.

"This is what it shows from the satellite — it shows that it has been destroyed," says Farah, referring to the two-story stone house his father built after 25 years of working in the Gulf.

Mazen Farah points to location of the convent on his phone. — Jane Arraf/NPR
Mazen Farah points to the location of a convent in his hometown of Yaroun, southern Lebanon, that residents say was destroyed. Despite satellite images and video showing the damage. Israel has denied striking the convent, citing a different building as proof. Unable to return, Yaroun residents are relying on satellite and other imagery to document the destruction from afar.<br>

In March, amid renewed fighting with the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah, Israel launched airstrikes and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in more than 100 villages.

After an April 17 ceasefire, Israel sent in bulldozers to demolish more buildings in southern Lebanon. It says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure but rarely provides details or evidence to support those claims.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in March his country intended to depopulate all Lebanese villages near the border with Israel in order to permanently remove any threats to citizens in northern Israel and form what Israel calls a "buffer zone."

Israel prevents the displaced from returning, even to visit. And residents of neighboring villages fear Israeli retaliation for taking video or photos. So residents of Yaroun and other communities are pooling their money to buy commercial satellite images to determine if their houses are still standing.

Searching from space

"Either somebody each time will buy it or we have to get the funds in a certain account and buy it," Farah says of the images. Each image costs at least $112.

But more often than not, the satellite provider tells them it can't provide images for the specific locations they are seeking and eventually refunds their money. In April, some satellite companies declined to provide images of Lebanon and other countries at the request of the U.S. government.

Geryes Saloum, a municipal employee, built a three-bedroom home in Yaroun 10 years ago. All the houses around it have been destroyed.

"Every day, I wait for a picture to arrive from Yaroun," says Saloum, who works in the water department. "When Mazen's house was destroyed three days ago I didn't sleep."

He says after the November 2024 ceasefire, the U.N. and other aid groups spent millions of dollars to restore the water supply and electrical systems. "We thought it was over, that there wouldn't be more wars," he says. But in March, as the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, the conflict widened again, reaching southern Lebanon.

Mazen Farah
Saint George Church in Yaroun, one of the village's landmarks damaged during the fighting.

"They have erased it"

Yaroun Mayor Hafez Ghacham says 180 of the around 200 houses in the Christian and Muslim village have been destroyed by Israeli forces since the current conflict broke out in March.

The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment from NPR on the destruction in the village.

War broke out between Israel and Hezbollah in October 2023, a day after Hamas-led militants launched a deadly attack from Gaza on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza war. By the following year, when a ceasefire was agreed upon, Israeli airstrikes had destroyed most of Yaroun's infrastructure.

"In the village they destroyed the landmarks, they destroyed the convent, they destroyed the church, they destroyed three mosques," as well as another Shiite Muslim religious center, says Riad al-Ridha, another village official. "All the cultural landmarks in our village were destroyed — they have erased it."

After the Greek Catholic Saint George church was destroyed in an airstrike, leaving only two outer walls still standing, displaced villagers still returned to pray in a nearby church hall. They are no longer allowed back. In early May, Israel demolished a convent and a Catholic school that had educated Christians and Muslims for the last five decades.

Israel repeatedly denied the military had destroyed the convent, despite satellite images and video evidence, and provided images of another building it argued was the convent.

Yaroun is part of the geographic Galilee region, which stretches into present-day Israel. It was the land where Jesus is believed to have preached and performed miracles.

In a country filled with picturesque villages, Yaroun was considered one of the prettiest. Old and new stone houses dotted a hillside green with olive and citrus trees. An oak forest, now demolished, had stood for centuries.

Some of the houses are small structures dating back 200 years while others, also built in the traditional local stone with red-tiled roofs, are palatial. The village, which is 2,600 feet above sea level, looks down into collective farming settlements in northern Israel.

A village scattered across the world

Israel invaded south Lebanon in 1982, staying for 18 years until it was driven out by Hezbollah, a militant group backed by Iran and created to counter the Israeli occupation.

During those years, a generation of young men left the country to avoid compulsory military service in Israel's proxy Lebanese militia, known as the South Lebanon Army.

Many of them emigrated to the U.S., Canada and Australia but kept their ties to Yaroun — building homes there and returning in the summers with their families.

Mazen Farah
Mazen Farah's family home in Yaroun, southern Lebanon, which satellite images showed was destroyed during the conflict.

Farah's 75-year-old father, Hanna, missed seeing his home so much that Mazen mounted a photo of it on a stone plaque. A profusion of roses flourished in the garden, along with lemon and olive trees. The yard, like many in the Christian section, had a statue of the Virgin Mary. It too was razed, according to the satellite images.

"We exhausted ourselves building the house and raising our children," says the elder Farah, who worked as a construction company supervisor in the Gulf.

After Israel and Hezbollah reached a ceasefire in November 2024, Farah had the damage to his house repaired and came back to live there until the war restarted in March.

Villagers reject accusations that their homes were being used by Hezbollah.

Mazen Farah says he had eight security cameras operating around his property for almost a year before Israel cut off the internet this March. He says the only intruder alert the security system ever sent to his phone was of a wolf that stole his father's shoes from the porch.

"Provide one piece of proof one — piece — that this house was used in any manner," he says. "If there is even one bullet in our house … we will condemn ourselves and condemn Hezbollah or whoever is there," he says. "There is no proof because there is nothing there."

Farah's 75-year-old father missed seeing his home so much that Mazen mounted a photo of it on a stone plaque. — Jane Arraf / NPR
Mazen Farah mounted a photo of his family's home on a stone plaque for his 75-year-old father, who missed seeing the house after leaving Yaroun.

"There is nothing there — just rubble"

Many of the property owners in Yaroun and other villages are American citizens.

"Israel occupied that part of Lebanon for nearly 20 years," says Hanna, from his home in New York state, where he and his brother Nehmi have built up a construction firm.

He found out through a satellite photo that his 92-year-old mother's home had been razed. "They know everything about these properties, they know every home, who lives in the home, they know their phone numbers, they know their sons and daughters, they know what they eat for lunch."

"The house is gone because we saw it being destroyed in the first satellite image," he says, of the repaired home his mother had moved back into in February. "There is nothing there —just rubble."

The next satellite image they received showed two more houses destroyed.

"On the left of the image that we received, we can see the bulldozer is still there," says Hanna.

He says he had just spent $30,000 on a foundation and a stone wall for a small house of his own. The satellite image showed even the wall was leveled.

"You get this image and you see it for the first time and your heart sinks," he says. "You know there's always a dream of going back home and visiting more often and having your kids meet your land and see what made you who you are."

He and other Americans with property destroyed in south Lebanon say it's a bitter pill to swallow.

"These are the properties of American taxpayers who are active in America, work hard, pay their dues and American bombs and American bulldozers destroy them," he says. "No one builds their dream home and uses it to store weapons."

The U.S. provides an average of around $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hanna's brother Nehmi says he and his wife spent more than $470,0000 with money saved over 30 years on a house where they planned to retire. They were still finishing the interior.

Their home was still standing in the first satellite image they received three weeks ago.

But then Nehmi Hanna said they received a new image. "We confirmed through a very blurry satellite image that we know it's gone," he says. "I put my heart and soul into it. My wife and I worked so hard with every saved dollar to build. And it's just vanished."

Dream home for the family

Qasem Fares house says he spent more than $10 million building the four-story house and spent every summer there with his children and grandchildren. There was a swimming pool, a cinema, gyms and guest chalets - tangible proof in his home country that he had made good. It was all demolished. — Alex Fares
Qasem Fares' four-story home in Bint Jbeil, southern Lebanon, which he built after decades abroad and where he spent summers with his family before it was destroyed.

Qasem Fares, who lives in Panama, found out recently that his 12-bedroom home in the village of Bint Jbeil on the edge of Yaroun had been destroyed.

Fares, 68, has a rags-to-riches story not uncommon in Lebanon. He left southern Lebanon essentially penniless at the age of 15, eventually making a fortune in Central America in the clothing business.

He says he spent more than $10 million building the four-story house and spent every summer there with his children and grandchildren. There was a swimming pool, a cinema, gyms and guest chalets — tangible proof in his home country that he had made good. It was all demolished.

"No one wanted to tell me," he says. "My son sent me the picture and told me what happened. I said 'what can we do?' But I cried. I cried all day when I saw it."

Fares says he considers Yaroun sacred ground — land where prophets walked. "We hope to God that there will be peace and security for this side and that side and all of the countries in the world will live in peace."

Hanna Farah says his hope is that young people will be able to eventually return to the village.

His son Mazen, though, says his concern is for the older people, who made up the majority of the population and left when the war began.

"Most of the people who were there after the 2023 war are elderly. I'm not sure if they are going to see Yaroun or not in these coming years," he says.

Among Mazen Farah's photos is one of a desk drawer filled with sets of house keys. A cousin kept them for people in Yaroun.

They evoke the image of house keys still kept by Palestinians forced from their homes with the creation of Israel in 1948 and never allowed to return. Generations later, Palestinian refugees scattered through the region and around the world still keep the keys.

"That story there doesn't have a good ending," Farah says. But he says Lebanon is different. "It's a country, it has borders, there are international laws. We are hoping to go back and rebuild our houses."

In upstate New York, Hanna says he is torn.

"At times we wake up and we say 'We're gonna rebuild. We're gonna go back and we're gonna show that we're not gonna let go and life will not stop,'" he says.

"And then some days honestly we wake up and we say, 'It's done, it's finished.' I mean how do you build with a drone over your head? How do you build with the risk of it being destroyed again?"

Geoff Brumfiel contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

Tagged: satellite images

Lebanese displaced by war turn to satellites to check their homes