Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project
Even before a deadly rocket strike and a round of assassinations renewed fears of a wider war across the Mideast, the steady, simmering conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon proved devastating.
For almost a year, both sides have been carefully calibrating their tit-for-tat attacks to avoid a larger conflict. But the near-daily exchanges of fire have added up.
Satellite imagery makes clear just how profound the toll has been on both sides of the border. This is what one Lebanese town, Aita al-Shaab, looked like before and after it came under attack.
Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants, who are backed by Iran, have been fighting off and on for years. But the conflict intensified last October after another Iranian ally, Hamas, led an attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, setting off the war there.
In the cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the most widespread structural destruction has been in Lebanon, where thousands of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The thousands of Israeli attacks since October have far outnumbered Hezbollah attacks into Israel, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that studies world conflicts.
Around a quarter of the structures are damaged in some villages, according to an analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY graduate center.
Israeli airstrikes and shelling in Lebanon have killed nearly 500 people, at least 100 of them civilians, according to the U.N. and Lebanon’s health ministry.
Hezbollah has launched 7,500 rockets, missiles and drones since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office, killing 43 people in Israel, more than half of them civilians, and setting swaths of farmland ablaze. Northern Israel has seen more than 700 wildfires, according to the prime minister’s office, which Israel has blamed on the Hezbollah barrages.
This satellite imagery shows what happened to large areas of dry brush surrounding the Malkiya kibbutz after it was ignited.
Sources: Planet Labs, OpenStreetMap
It is not only Israel that is burning.
The fighting has caused significant fires on both sides of the border, and many fear they may cause long-lasting damage to land that plays an important role in food production.
Many villages near the border on both sides are ghost towns. Roughly 60,000 people in northern Israel and 100,000 in southern Lebanon have been displaced by the fighting along the border since October, with no clear timeline for returning home.
Where fires have broken out
Sources: Ororatech, OpenStreetMap
Note: Fire boundaries are rough estimates of thermal activity based on satellite detections. Detections since the war began are from Oct. 7, 2023 to Aug. 6, 2024, and those before the war are from the same period a year earlier.
Now, there is fear that like the wildfires, the conflict itself may spread. In the past three weeks, attacks have escalated, threatening a larger regional war.
In July, a rocket from Lebanon killed 12 civilians in a town in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. It was the deadliest attack on Israeli-controlled territory since the Oct. 7 attacks led by Hamas.
Israel responded with a strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing a Hezbollah leader along with five civilians, according to Lebanese authorities. A senior Hamas figure was assassinated hours later in the capital of Iran. Both Hezbollah and Iran vowed vengeance.
Lebanon’s border towns with Israel, made up mainly of Shiite Muslims, are a bastion of support for Hezbollah. But there are also Christian and Sunni Muslim enclaves.
Some of those border towns that have borne much of the destruction in the current attacks were the scene of heavy ground fighting in 2006, when Israel and Lebanon fought their last war.
A U.N. peacekeeper inspecting a house destroyed by an Israeli attack in the southern Lebanese village of Yarine.
Diego Ibarra Sánchez for The New York Times
Now, with hostilities heating up, some Israelis want their country to mount a full-scale invasion again. Others fear that an all-out response from Hezbollah could be devastating. The militants’ arsenal of sophisticated precision-guided missiles is considered capable of striking cities across Israel, along with critical infrastructure like power plants and ports.
Israeli military commanders have their own concerns. They are still prosecuting one major war — against Hamas in Gaza — and do not relish the prospect of a second. And with munitions stockpiles dwindling, it is unclear how intense a battle the military could wage in Lebanon.