Israeli tactics in Lebanon revealed in satellite images
When Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on March 2, two days after Israel and the United States launched a war on Iran, the resulting Israeli operation to destroy the group quickly became a mission to flatten swathes of southern Lebanon.
As Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes across the country, soldiers seized more territory in the south. Ground operations began to take on the appearance of those seen in Gaza: bulldozers tearing down buildings and demolitions razing whole villages to the ground.
Even after last week’s ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, those ground operations have continued.
A CNN review of satellite imagery reveals the scale of the destruction.
Hundreds of buildings – most of which appear to be homes – have been either completely flattened or rendered uninhabitable.
Satellite imagery and videos from after the April 16 ceasefire announcement show demolitions continuing apace, with excavators and armored vehicles clearly visible.
Rights groups have sounded the alarm, warning that Israel’s military offensive is mirroring tactics used in Gaza – from heavy strikes on critical infrastructure and healthcare facilities, to the targeting of journalists and psychological warfare.
Israeli officials have outlined plans for a long-term “security zone” inside the border – though the preferred terminology now is a “forward defense line area” – with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying his forces will expand their positions 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep inside Lebanon.
Israel is exporting its Gaza playbook of destruction to southern Lebanon
Senior Israeli government figures have been clear about what that means.
Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed to destroy all homes in villages near the border, in line with what he called “the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model.”
Rafah and Beit Hanoun are cities at, respectively, the southern and northern ends of Gaza, which have been laid to waste by Israeli forces over the last two and a half years.
After the ceasefire was announced last week, Katz doubled down, saying the “destruction of houses in the Lebanese contact-line villages” will continue, describing them as “terrorist outposts.”
The Israeli military says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure across the country in response to the launch of thousands of rockets, drones and anti-tank missiles towards Israel since 2023.
It says Hezbollah embeds and stores weapons in civilian homes, releasing images of arms and ammunition it says its soldiers have uncovered during searches, as well as what it said was an underground command center hidden under a clothes shop.
Senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials say Israel will impose what it calls a “yellow line” in Lebanon, barring residents from returning to areas occupied by the Israeli military.
It is a tactic lifted straight from Israel’s renewed occupation of Gaza’s territory.
There, it started out as a temporary yellow line on a map – demarcating an area occupied by the Israeli military following the Trump-brokered ceasefire last October.
But after a few weeks, concrete blocks painted yellow started appearing on the ground, lending it a sense of permanence, which has only deepened. Crossing the line remains forbidden to residents, hundreds of whom have been shot dead for coming too close, Palestinian officials say.
Israel’s new yellow line in southern Lebanon appears similarly divisive, separating 55 towns and villages from the rest of the country.
The IDF has told residents not to return, firing on people it said were approaching the yellow line on multiple occasions, and adding that it is “authorized to continue destroying terrorist infrastructures even during the ceasefire.”
Much of Lebanon’s south – a largely Shiite-Muslim area with a strong Hezbollah presence – had already been left damaged and depopulated after more than two years of war with Israel. But the destruction intensified after the latest offensive began on March 2.
CNN analyzed satellite imagery provided by Airbus to assess the growing scale of the damage as hostilities resumed.
In the first 10 days of Israel’s March offensive, CNN counted 523 buildings destroyed across 22 communities. As well as homes, CNN’s analysis indicates Israeli forces have destroyed mosques, pharmacies, cafes and auto repair shops.
Videos filmed by residents show controlled demolitions being carried out, while satellite imagery reveals a pattern of Israeli bulldozers and excavators operating in already heavily damaged areas, indicating ground forces moving into areas previously struck from the air.
For residents of southern Lebanon, this latest war represents another chapter of displacement.
Nearly 1.3 million Lebanese have been displaced, according to the International Rescue Committee. Most are from Shiite communities, many of whom who had already been forced from their homes in 2024.
Hassan Rammal is one of those people.
His village of Adaisseh is located right on the Israel-Lebanon border. Many of its residents, like Rammal himself, support Hezbollah.
The 62-year-old businessman fled with his wife and three sons to Beirut at the beginning of 2024, hoping he would be back once the war calmed down.
“Displacement has a sense of tragedy. To leave your memories, your home, to leave everything you have planted; everything you have built and grown with your own hands,” he told CNN.
Shortly after the family fled, Rammal said he got word that their home had been destroyed, likely by an airstrike.
“I felt like someone stripped my soul and life of my memories,” he said.
Rammal also owned a multi-story commercial and residential building nearby that was partially damaged by the strike. There were shops on the bottom floor, and four apartments on the top floor. After Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cessation of hostilities in November 2024, he returned to Adaisseh to rebuild the complex, hoping to live in one of the apartments with his family.
Construction began in February this year, only to be halted a few weeks later when war returned. Along with his family, Rammal left Adaisseh again.
A short while later, he received a video filmed from a drone, showing apocalyptic images of his village. Almost every building was reduced to rubble, including the one he was seeking to renovate.
A satellite image captured days earlier, on March 18, showed two excavators just meters away from his property, at that point still standing, indicating it was likely demolished through Israeli bulldozing.
It’s a similar story elsewhere. In Khiam, about 5 kilometers north of the border, swathes of green have turned brown after Israeli earthwork. Satellite imagery from April 22 shows bulldozers and diggers at work in the area.
Twenty-year-old Ali Al-Abbani has only ever known Khiam and is too young to have lived through Lebanon’s previous wars with Israel. “This is the first war I’ve experienced, and I can’t begin to describe how terrifying it is,” he told CNN from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where he finds himself displaced, along with his parents and brother.
Whenever an Israeli drone or fighter jet flies overhead, he told CNN, his body goes into shock, and he often runs for his mother’s embrace. When he saw a satellite image of his home village, sent on a WhatsApp group earlier this month, it showed his home razed to the ground.
“My mother spent the entire evening crying. I started crying…all my memories are in that house, every corner,” he said.
The current ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is the second since war broke out in October 2023. After the first, in November 2024, Israel maintained a military presence in southern Lebanon, operating five Forward Operating Bases, confirmed by the IDF. What appear to be a further four Israeli positions were also established between October 2025 and January 2026, according to CNN’s review of satellite imagery, though the Israeli military has not publicly confirmed these bases.
Jeremy Binnie, Middle East defense specialist at Janes, a London-based defense intelligence firm, told CNN the IDF was likely expanding its presence in order “to provide better visibility of Lebanese territory than existing Israeli positions on the border.”
He said this lined up with Israeli plans to occupy the new security zone for the long term, but warned that building additional positions deeper inside the country could leave Israeli soldiers “manning isolated positions exposed to inevitable insurgent attacks.”
For its part, Hezbollah says it will not recognize the ceasefire unless Israel withdraws, vowing to “resist the occupation and expel it from our land.”
The future for 600,000 Lebanese in the south remains uncertain – both whether they will return home, and whether any homes will still be there to return to.
Rammal, the 62-year-old businessman, says Lebanon has “never had a day of peace” with its southern neighbor.
And he scoffs at Israel’s plans to occupy parts of Lebanon’s south.
“It says it wants to keep its country safe, while making other countries unsafe. It can say whatever it wants – there will be no buffer zone,” he says.
“Even if we only build a tent, I will return… this is my village, until my final breath.”
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