Khaled Farhat, a school employee who tends about 200 olive trees in the southern village of Majdel Selm, said he had been granted only a two-week window to harvest. “Usually, there shouldn’t be any weeds. But since the time for tilling and clearing the land happened during our displacement, we weren’t able to clear it,” he told Al Jazeera by phone. Farhat’s grove lies just north of Israel’s “Yellow Line,” below which the Israeli military is demolishing homes and infrastructure. To reach his land, he had to request access from his local municipality, which forwarded the request to the Lebanese Army. The army then coordinates with a mechanism established after June’s Tripartite Framework Agreement between the United States, Israel and Lebanon.
“Drones are constantly in the sky. You look up and see one, two, three of them sometimes just moving back and forth,” Farhat said. “Warplanes sometimes pass by and carry out strikes nearby, taking a toll on us psychologically and emotionally.” An Israeli shell had landed near him an hour before his call.
Lebanon’s Environment Minister Tamara Elzein said more than 16,000 hectares (about 40,000 acres) of land have been torched since Israel began bombing, and later invading, Lebanon in October 2023, including through the use of white phosphorus. Israel continues to occupy nearly 630sq km (243sq miles) of southern Lebanon, which includes swaths of farmland and dozens of villages.
Ramy Zurayk, a professor at the American University of Beirut specialising in landscape design and ecosystem management, said the widespread damage to farms and buildings, along with restrictions on movement, is an attempt by Israel to make the area “sterile.” “The Israeli project is to eliminate humans and living organisms from the land,” Zurayk told Al Jazeera.
Farmers also face the risk of unexploded ordnance. In early October, at least two people were killed in olive groves in south Lebanon: a retired soldier in Yater village and a young engineer in Froun. A Lebanese police officer was killed the next day in Ain Ebel. Hiba Ghandour, Lebanon’s programme manager for the Mines Advisory Group, said the legacy of cluster bombs from the 2006 war has been compounded by new explosive hazards since October 2023. “Millions of submunitions were scattered across the region, including farmland, and many failed to explode on impact,” Ghandour said. She noted that MAG had identified 444,000sq metres of confirmed hazardous areas, a figure expected to rise.
Political analyst Bassel Doueik said many Lebanese citizens have been harassed by Israeli forces and barred from harvesting. He cited the border village of Kfarshouba, where about 200 Israeli soldiers entered and searched homes on Monday, with Merkava tanks and other vehicles infiltrating the area.
Despite the risks, Lebanon’s dire economic situation forces some farmers to return to their land before it has been made safe. Zurayk said there is no evidence that olives from the south are dangerous to consume, countering fears about white phosphorus contamination.