KFAR CHOUBA, Lebanon — The fear is always there, but it’s worst at night.
That’s when the Israeli troops stationed a few hundred yards down the road come into this mountain village less than a mile from Lebanon’s border with Israel, searching houses and detaining residents at will.
“When it gets dark, the horror starts,” said Walid Nasser, a retired police officer and a municipal board member.
He got up and pointed out the window to somewhere hidden in the gray clouds wreathing the mountains overlooking Kfar Chouba.
“If there wasn’t fog, you’d see the Israelis up there,” he said. “They’re watching us all the time. … You keep thinking, ‘Now they’ll knock on the door, now they’ll barge into the house.’”
Hussein Abdul-Aal has similar fears. His house on Kfar Chouba’s eastern edge was one of the closest to the Israelis’ position. In recent days, Abdul-Aal said, they searched the three houses near him, prompting their owners to leave. The last residents still in the neighborhood are Abdul-Aal, his wife, their two cats and the abandoned dogs they feed.
“It’s my dream now to surrender fully to sleep, to be relaxed and sleep calmly at night,” Abdul-Aal said.
This is life now in Kfar Chouba since fighting between the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah and Israel escalated last month, triggered by the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran.
Abdul-Aal, a 72-year-old retired high school sociology teacher with an avuncular smile, likened residents’ behavior around Israeli troops to a lazy student hoping they’re not called on in class.
“You try to make yourself small, to avoid your teacher’s gaze. We do the same — staying indoors, keeping away from the windows, so the Israelis don’t come to us,” he said.
“The night they came in to our neighborhood, we held our breath for three hours and didn’t move,” said Afaf Awadhah, Abdul-Aal’s wife.
Every day, the soundtrack of a war no one here wanted — the bass rumble of warplanes, the snare drum of machine guns — grows louder. Israeli military leaders repeatedly vow to invade all of south Lebanon (an area slightly smaller than Los Angeles) and to expel hundreds of thousands of Shiite residents they consider Hezbollah supporters and occupy what they call a “defensive buffer zone.”
Though much of southern Lebanon is predominantly Shiite, Kfar Chouba and its neighbors comprise a pocket of Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim communities. These residents insist they are neutral and refuse to leave, even as the fighting threatens to engulf their towns and villages.
In recent weeks, Israeli military officials contacted area mayors, telling them they could remain in the buffer zone on the condition they didn’t let displaced Shiites stay in their villages, or allow them to be used as staging grounds for Hezbollah attacks.
“They called me from the Israeli Defense Ministry on Wednesday, and told me that if we didn’t keep Hezbollah and the displaced out, they would order us to leave and raze the village,” said Qassem Al-Qadri, Kfar Chouba’s mayor. Like others, he felt he had little choice but to acquiesce.
Yet that neutrality has not spared Kfar Chouba and neighboring villages from attack.
In the first weeks of the war, Israeli bombardment killed three people — a police officer and two shepherds. During one of their midnight incursions in the village, residents said, Israeli soldiers broke into the houses of three residents, interrogated them and detained one of them overnight in their outpost before letting him go.
A few days later, the mayor said, another incursion into the nearby village of Halta saw them shoot and kill 15-year-old Mohammad Abdul-Aal (a distant relation of Hussein’s) when he walked out of his house to check on the noise.
Residents say the Israelis have prevented residents — most of whom work in agriculture — from accessing their farmland near the border; other fields were bombed with white phosphorous, Lebanese authorities said, destroying vegetation and thousands of trees.
“All of us here, we’re just waiting: Waiting for when the Israelis will come and kill us, waiting to see where they hit, or where they’re entering,” Al-Qadri said.
He added that the Lebanese army withdrew from its position above the village at the beginning of the war, despite entreaties by residents for it to remain.
“We even offered the army soldiers places to stay in the village and provide food for them, but they were ordered to leave,” he said. “We need the Lebanese state here.”
War returned to Kfar Chouba and Lebanon on March 2, after Hezbollah lobbed rockets and drones on Israel in response to its killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and near-constant attacks despite a ceasefire that ended their last conflict in 2024.
The aftereffects of that earlier fight can still be seen in Kfar Chouba in the bomb-eviscerated houses and mosque. And when a trail of dust rises from a road, resident say, it’s another Israeli tank moving through.
So far, more than 1,300 people have been killed in Lebanon, with more than 1 million people displaced, the Lebanese government says. Israel’s plans for a buffer zone have prompted fears of a longer displacement that would essentially amount to an ethnic cleansing of Lebanon’s south.
One cold morning in Kfar Chouba, Al-Qadri, Nasser and a few others who remained met in the village’s main municipal building. It was a relatively quiet moment, a sharp contrast from the day before, when F-16 warplanes pierced the clouds above as they went on bombing sorties over south Lebanon.
Sitting around a wood stove and drinking cups of coffee and tea, the residents reflected on the upheavals that had become a regular feature of their lives.
Al-Qadri, 81, had seen the bucolic mountains here turn into a battlefield since Israel’s creation in 1948. After Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, Israel chomped off bits of Lebanese and Syrian territory, cutting off lands where Kfar Chouba residents would grow wheat and olives.
In 1969, Palestinian fighters used the area here — with Lebanon’s blessing — to wage attacks on Israel, prompting Israeli soldiers to dynamite 17 houses in Kfar Chouba. The village was almost destroyed during Lebanon’s hugely destructive war in 1975, when south Lebanon was taken over by an Israeli-backed militia, which tried to forcibly recruit Kfar Chouba residents into its ranks.
“I refused, and they put me for a year in jail. I left after that,” Nasser said.
Residents rebuilt their homes, but then Israel’s occupation in 1982 — which triggered Hezbollah’s rise — forced them to leave yet again until Hezbollah ousted Israel in 2000. Only then did people such as Abdul-Aal and Nasser return.
Later confrontations with Hezbollah in 2006 saw Kfar Chouba completely destroyed. Villagers rebuilt. But more war in 2023 killed 27 people here, and three-quarters of the village fled.
“I’ve spent more than half my life forced out of my home,” Abdul-Aal said.
Now a little more than 500 people remain, a fraction of the 2,000 who were here before 2023. The young no longer stay, seeking opportunities in Beirut or out of Lebanon. Many houses have the neglected look of infrequent habitation.
“We had big dreams back in the day to liberate Palestine, and we were willing to help,” Al-Qadri said, adding that in the past there were a number of Hezbollah positions in the mountains around Kfar Chouba.
“Then our dreams became humbler, to liberate our own lands. Now it’s even less. We don’t want to liberate anything. We just want to stay home and not leave our homes,” he said.
Like elsewhere in Lebanon these days, the conversation inevitably veered toward Israel’s plan for a new long-term occupation of south Lebanon.
Nazih Yahya, a septuagenarian resident with the wearied tone of someone long accustomed to conflict, expected the Israeli military to treat residents in non-Shiite villages differently from areas it counts as bastions of Hezbollah support.
“We have two models, Gaza and the West Bank,” he said. In Gaza, he explained, the Israeli military razed cities and prevented residents’ return; in the West Bank, the pace of destruction was less, with Palestinians still in place but under constant threat of attack.
“What they did to Gaza they’ll do to most of south Lebanon,” he said. Kfar Chouba, will “be like the West Bank.”
For Abdul-Aal, the only form of resistance still open to him was to stay in his home, no matter what.
“What is nationalism? Is it a political idea? Or is it a house, a land, a memory of a place?” he asked.
“No matter who comes and rules this place, so as long as we stay here, they can’t take being Lebanese from me.”
The post ‘We just want to stay home’: A Lebanese village under Israeli occupation appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
