Autumn 2023. That was when everything began. Two weeks after the first rounds of mutual shelling started on 8 October 2023, waves of forced displacement from the villages along Lebanon’s border strip intensified. The villages bled dry of their residents, and press reports documented thousands of displaced people every day. By the end of the year, dozens of Lebanese villages were deserted. And before the media began framing it as a “war,” more than 90,000 people had already been driven out of their homes and villages by Israeli attacks. Ruin spread, black as a cloud. Human displacement and environmental destruction It wasn’t until autumn of 2024 that the media began framing events as war. However, from the humanitarian and environmental standpoints, what local and international media had now begun describing as a war was, in fact, a massive expansion in the scale of destruction that had followed exchanges of fire on 8 October 2023. In practice, what this meant was that the border villages of South Lebanon were no longer alone in their tragedy. The rest of the villages in the governorates of the South, Nabatieh, and the Bekaa joined them, and soon the war reached the heart of the...