Israel Hit the Bulldozers. Now South Lebanon Rebuilds by Hand

Human Rights Watch documented four Israeli attacks between August and October 2025 on heavy-machinery showrooms, maintenance facilities and a cement-and-asphalt factory in southern Lebanon. The December 2025 investigation found more than 360 pieces of construction equipment destroyed and classified the strikes as apparent war crimes. The Israeli military said on Telegram that the equipment and materials supported or were meant to support Hezbollah's reconstruction of its infrastructure. HRW said it found no evidence of military targets at or around the sites, though it verified civilian uses for some of the machines.

Back in southern Lebanon, the fear outlasted the rubble. Locals cleared debris by hand rather than risk rolling out the bulldozers and excavators sitting idle in their own yards. "They felt that just the presence of this heavy machinery that was typically used in reconstruction was a threat," said Ramzi Kaiss, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Lebanon. Kandice Ardiel, a spokesperson for UNIFIL, said repair crews and rubble removal alike were made difficult, and that people who returned after the 2024 fighting watched their rebuilt lives get wrecked a second time.

The water is in the same shape as the machinery. Doctors Without Borders said in September that attacks on already weakened water systems continued despite the April ceasefire. Charlene Silvin, who led a team surveying about 20 towns around Bint Jbeil, said there was not one village on the road that hadn't been hit. Boreholes sit in a valley held by Israeli troops, storage tanks can't hold water, pumps and filtration units are offline, and nearly every solar panel her team checked was damaged. In Zawtar Al-Gharbiyeh, 90 returning families now depend on trucked-in water — a stopgap Silvin dismissed bluntly: "It's not a system. It's a drop."

The wreckage stretches far past those four sites. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz has put the toll at 23,000 homes and more than 60 villages destroyed as of October. A New York Times analysis found Israeli forces had largely leveled 48 of roughly 60 villages and towns in the area they occupy, most of them after the ceasefire was renewed in April. The Israeli military told the Times it had received no directive to cause widespread damage or demolish villages. WIRED Middle East said the IDF did not respond to its request for comment.

Getting people home is its own puzzle. UN estimates from September 29 put roughly 330,000 people still internally displaced in Lebanon, and local officials told UN consultations that about 6,500 families can't return to a dozen villages inside the Israeli-declared Yellow Line. Even reaching broken pumps takes work: UNIFIL described clearing a 280-meter access route for a maintenance crane, most of it damaged and blocked by berms, before equipment could reach a well. Municipalities are also struggling to pay staff, fuel pumps and keep vehicles running, and some local water officials told Silvin Israeli forces intimidated them when they tried to approach damaged sites.

UNIFIL's mandate runs out on December 31, 2026, and the organization said in October that talks over the UN's post-deadline role are still going. Ardiel called the peacekeepers "the impartial record keepers of what's happening on the ground" — a job whose future is now up in the air. Meanwhile, anyone weighing real repairs is weighing the odds of another strike landing on them. That math keeps pushing crews toward temporary patches instead of the lasting infrastructure southern Lebanon actually needs.