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ZAWTAR AL-GHARBIYAH, Lebanon – When Abed Ezzedine was finally able to return to his village in southern Lebanon after five months of displacement, he stood, disoriented, in its main square, unable to work out which street led to his house. It was late July, days after Zawtar al-Gharbiyah became the first designated “pilot zone” for the deployment of the Lebanese Army as part of a U.S.-brokered framework agreement.
He had walked that street for 46 years, but now, he told The Key, “I couldn’t [distinguish] my house from the rubble.” The home he inherited from his father, where he had lived since 1980, stood a few hundred yards from the square.
“The things I would have navigated by — a tree, a particular arrangement of stones — were gone as well,” he said.
He had braced himself before returning to the village; he knew roughly where the strikes had landed. But what he saw was far worse than the picture he had conjured in his mind. “The way we saw it on the ground was horrible,” he said. “Disasters, really. Disasters.”
Before withdrawing on the night of July 20, Israeli forces had blown up, burned, and bulldozed homes at the village’s entrances and in its center. About half of Zawtar al-Gharbiyah’s 500 homes were leveled and some 80% were damaged, according to the municipality, and the electricity, water and phone networks were knocked out. Since then, residents, including Ezzedine, have come back during the day to pick through the rubble and leave again at night. Some sleep in the village’s church, which Israeli troops have also vandalized and badly damaged.
Inside the Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation in the village of Zawtar al-Gharbiyah, Lebanon, which has suffered extensive structural damage and shelling since Israel's war began. All photography by Zaynab Mayladan.
The village square was the center of life in Zawtar. It held the mosque, the shops, and the husseiniyya – the hall where the village’s Shia gather for religious commemorations. Around them stood homes a century and a half old, built by hand and further developed by each generation who inherited them. The square was where people ran into one another almost every day. Nearly all of it is now rubble.
