How Israel’s War on Southern Lebanon Targets Land and Environmental Defenders
- Environmental and land defenders in southern Lebanon are facing direct targeting amid an ongoing military campaign that has displaced over 1 million people and killed nearly 9,000 since...
- On April 26, 2025, 41-year-old farmer and volunteer Oussama Farhat was killed in his southern Lebanon village of Meiss el-Jabal.
- For the past three years, Israel has systematically erased life from southern Lebanon in what Lebanon's environment minister and other observers have deemed an ecocide.
Environmental and land defenders in southern Lebanon are facing direct targeting amid an ongoing military campaign that has displaced over 1 million people and killed nearly 9,000 since October 7, 2023, according to local organizations and researchers. The violence has devastated agricultural borderlands and systematically erased local livelihoods.
The Killing of Volunteer Oussama Farhat
On April 26, 2025, 41-year-old farmer and volunteer Oussama Farhat was killed in his southern Lebanon village of Meiss el-Jabal. Farhat, a field coordinator with the environmental organization Green Southerners, had survived an initial Israeli strike a day earlier on April 25 while checking for casualties alongside a fellow volunteer. That initial incident involved a double-tap strike, a tactic where an attack is followed by a second strike in the same location. Despite being hospitalized with two pieces of shrapnel in his body and urged by colleagues to rest further north in Nabatieh, Farhat returned to his village located just 700 yards from the UN-demarcated Blue Line.
Systematic Destruction of Southern Lebanon’s Agricultural Lands
For the past three years, Israel has systematically erased life from southern Lebanon in what Lebanon’s environment minister and other observers have deemed an ecocide. White phosphorus munitions, unexploded ordnance, and the pesticide glyphosate have transformed small-scale subsistence farms cultivating tobacco, olives, and goats into a scarred landscape set ablaze. According to Ghassan Makarem, an organizer with the Lebanese food sovereignty organization AgriMovement, approximately 70 percent of families in the region rely on farming, yet Israeli airstrikes, shelling, and bulldozers have destroyed about a quarter of the country’s cultivated land.
Targeting Environmental Stewards and Food Producers
Farmers, shepherds, fishers, and beekeepers have suffered immense losses as their lands and livelihoods are destroyed. Julia Choucair Vizoso, a senior fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative and researcher for The Public Source, notes that Israel has maintained a long-standing policy of attacking those who resist occupation by refusing to leave their land, effectively marking agricultural workers as threats due to their connection to the territory. Within this context, Green Southerners founder and president Hisham Younes highlighted Farhat’s extensive work, which included mapping bird habitats, documenting illegal logging, recording flora and fauna like the Palestine sunbird, and eventually tracking the frequency and impact of white phosphorus strikes.