After the Lebanese government signed a ceasefire agreement with Israel in the fall of 2024, much of the country returned to business as usual. Sleek new restaurants and nightclubs opened in the capital, and Beirutis divided their summer days between the beaches and the mountains. Billboards heralding the promise of a post-Hezbollah era began to appear along the highway. One announced “We are with you” to the image of a Lebanese soldier saluting against a cerulean sky; another read “Make Lebanon great again.”
But just an hour from Beirut, in the battered towns and villages of the country’s south, residents encountered a vastly different reality. Far from over, the war had transformed into an anomalous, one-sided offensive wherein Israeli drones raked the skies overhead at all hours, carrying out daily assassinations and reconnaissance missions. Stories of talking drones and Israeli night incursions traveled the hills almost as folklore, remoulding southerners’ relationship with an enemy that had abruptly come to exist among them.
I wanted to document this false peace, powered by advanced military technology and sponsored by the U.S. government. Just as this issue of Lux was going to print, the Trump administration and its Israeli counterparts launched a violent offensive against Iran, targeting the upper echelons of the country’s military and political leadership and sparking a regional war. On the second evening of the fighting, Hezbollah fired a spate of rockets at Israeli military infrastructure, and the occupation responded with an escalated bombing campaign across Lebanon that has killed at least 120 people, including seven children, and wounded 600. By the time this issue reaches our readers, that figure will likely be much higher.
One encounters a range of reactions in Lebanon to Hezbollah’s decision to rejoin the fighting alongside Iran. Some have described it as a “suicide” mission that will drag the country down with the party. Others have expressed understandable weariness and dread at the long nights of bombing and displacement to come. But what I found during my trips to the South was a dam bound to break, an untenable situation that amounted to no less than the slow death of a people. The following text describes the recent past, but we can also anticipate it to reflect a not-so-distant future, so long as the Israeli government continues to enjoy U.S. backing for its insatiable war machine. When this renewed phase of fighting ends — or takes on new form — the people of southern Lebanon could find themselves once again attempting to rebuild beneath a sky full of drones controlled by a genocidal army with no regard for land or life. —Beirut, Lebanon. March 6, 2026
To dig a grave in the southern Lebanese village of Naqoura, you must first call the Lebanese Army and report the location of the digging. The army will put in a call to the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and a peacekeeper will enter the location into a mapping software to derive a pair of coordinate points. An officer in the Israeli military will receive the coordinates from the peacekeepers via email and forward them to a drone operator, specifically to the operator of a quadcopter equipped with surveillance cameras and GPS. The quadcopter will navigate to the specific place in the sky over Lebanon.
Down on the ground, the family performs the ritual washing, prepares the earth to receive the body. Lebanese soldiers show up to observe from a distance. The body is borne on the shoulders of men. The Lebanese soldiers watch the funeral procession, and the quadcopter transmits the scene in real time to the drone operator, who examines the footage to determine how deep a hole the men are carving into the earth. Just enough to cover a body.
It is worth noting the emptiness of the village. Few residents remain. Homes, schools, and mosques lie mangled on the ground, making it easier to see the sea, which splays out endlessly beneath the village. The burial site is in the back of a family home that sustained some damage from Israeli bombing last year but, miraculously, remained mostly intact. Mohammad Yazbek, the elderly man who lived there, did not. He died of heartbreak, his son informed the people who gathered to pay their respects on a warm afternoon in September 2025. He had grown tired and weak after waking each morning to the sight of his destroyed village and the drone’s unceasing buzz.
“We are under occupation. There’s no other way to explain it,” said Hassan Yazbek, a relative of the deceased, in an interview in mid-November. We were in his SUV heading to Naqoura from the city of Tyre, half an hour to the north. As we neared the southern border, the winding seaside road cut inland, and the remains of the village came into view. Looming above us on a forested hill in the village of Labbouneh was one of seven new military outposts that the Israeli military had established on Lebanese land over the previous year. “They can see everything now,” Yazbek told me.
It’s not just grave digging that requires permission from the army and UNIFIL, he added. Many other ordinary activities do as well — rebuilding a destroyed house, harvesting an olive grove, clearing a road — and even once permission is secured, the Israelis will often dispatch a drone to observe. If these details rattled Yazbek, he seemed determined to hide it. The villagers who’d returned after the war had gotten used to the new way of doing things, he said. Besides, he considered Naqoura lucky. The UNIFIL base there added a layer of protection for the villagers, or, at the very least, an international witness to the occupation’s daily violations. Other border villages, like nearby Aita al-Shaab or Mays al-Jabal, were on their own.
Despite the ceasefire agreement that Lebanon and Israel reached in November 2024, a shadow army of Israeli drones carries out near-daily strikes across southern Lebanon. They bomb equipment like bulldozers to block reconstruction efforts and target members of Hezbollah while they’re on the roads, often maiming or killing nearby civilians in the process. Videos circulate regularly of motorcycles and SUVs aflame. The carcasses of these vehicles are pushed onto the shoulders of the highway, the blackened metal a reminder of the daily violence that underlies life here.
Residents of the South have reported Israeli drones stalking them as they herd sheep, visit their relatives’ graves, and harvest their crops. The drones are equipped with microphones, allowing occupation soldiers to communicate directly with the individuals they follow. Southerners have reported quadcopters conducting property searches and even flying into homes and photographing people at close range. Drones carrying explosives are preventing villagers from entering their lands close to the Blue Line, a 120-kilometer-long “line of withdrawal” that the U.N. demarcated after Israel ended its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, Israeli attacks have killed more than 330 people and wounded over 945 others since the ceasefire. In November 2025, the occupation army began constructing a new border wall on the Lebanese side of the boundary.
Majed Tahini, one of four village heads in Aita al-Shaab, remembers the first drones deployed against Lebanon during the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. He would be playing football with his friends in the village when they would see a strange form of aircraft hovering overhead. It made a loud buzzing sound and looked like a lower-tech version of the reconnaissance drones used by the Israeli military today.
“They’ve developed them quite a bit since,” he said. “Every day, they surprise us with something new.”
Villagers learn not to gather, not to frequent certain areas, not to trust silence.
The drone Tahini remembers seeing as a child was most likely the IAI Scout, Israel’s first domestically produced drone. Over subsequent decades, the Israeli military would refine its drone technology by testing increasingly advanced models on Lebanese civilians. After Lebanon’s liberation in 2000, the occupation redirected those same technologies toward Gaza. Drones have since become a “staple of Israeli war-making and state-making,” according to B. Arneson of the World Peace Foundation, enabling Israel to “maintain political, economic, and military dominance in the region.”
Today, Israel is one of the world’s leading drone exporters, selling to countries such as Ethiopia, India, and Serbia, and, as scholar Tariq Dana argues, using these “battle-tested” systems to facilitate normalization with Arab states like the UAE, which seek tools for internal control. By 2021, drones accounted for roughly $1 billion of Israel’s $11.3 billion in arms exports, yet the Israeli military did not officially acknowledge using unmanned aircraft for lethal strikes until 2022.
Tahini shared his recollections of Israel’s 1980s-era drones from the inside of a destroyed mosque in Aita al-Shaab, during a tour that he and his wife, Umm Hassan, had offered to give me of the village. A bomb had sent the structure’s large dome tumbling forward, crushing much of the first floor. The portion of the second floor that remained intact had been swept clean and recarpeted; it was the only remaining public prayer space in the village. Outside, a light rain fell, and Tahini wondered aloud whether its veil of lowered visibility could explain the absence of the drone’s buzz at that hour.
Across Aita al-Shaab, Israeli bombing had reduced entire residential blocks to mounds of mangled rebar and crumbled stone. Artillery shelling had torn the facades off some structures, revealing a kitchen or a bedroom eerily intact against the ruin. Cars disfigured by the force of bombs lay on their sides. As we navigated the village’s badly damaged roads, Umm Hassan would point to a pile of rubble and name the relative who once resided there. I wondered how she could still tell the buildings apart.
“I grew up walking these streets,” she said, her eyes fixed on the hills that rose before us, cut across by the concrete separation wall. It seemed that no matter where we were in the village, the barrier’s cold geometry was visible in the distance.
Despite the threat of the drones, villagers had begun to move back to Aita al-Shaab, Tahini said. Some had been priced out of apartments they’d rented further north during the war. Others had simply tired of displacement and longed to return home. Among the first to show up was Mohammad Qassem, a village native who had filmed himself pitching a tent in front of his destroyed home.
“We decided that even if no houses are left in the village, we’re going to sleep here tonight,” he proclaimed, grinning into the camera. According to Tahini, Qassem had gotten permission from the Lebanese army to rebuild his house, but on August 22, 2025, while he was working on his property, an Israeli drone strike killed him.
The people of Aita al-Shaab have learned to distinguish between the different drones that Israel deploys. There are the smaller quadcopters used mostly for surveillance, which can drop sound bombs to issue warnings. The larger quadcopters are about a meter wide and make a louder buzz; those can carry out deadly strikes. Finally, there are the MKA reconnaissance drones, which fly much higher in the sky and are deployed as far north as Beirut. People across the South have dubbed these aircraft Umm Kamaal (the mother of Kamaal), a name allegedly inspired by a village woman who wore heavy bangles that clanged together when she walked.
Tahini wanted to visit the cemetery. On the way there, we passed a group of stray dogs huddled together, and he mentioned that the young man who used to feed them had been killed in a drone strike on his motorcycle several weeks back. When we pulled up, a group of women was sweeping clean one of the pavilions and pouring water over the gravestones. The sweet smell of bukhoor drifted towards us. This was where the recent dead had been buried, Tahini said. He shouted greetings at a middle-aged man with a black T-shirt that read “Old Habits Die Hard” across the front and waved him over.
“People here are living for the day,” said the man, whose name I learned was Naame Jaafar, when I asked how he’d been faring. Before the war, Jaafar had made a living from his wheat and tobacco fields near the Blue Line, but these days, he worked whatever odd jobs he could find to make ends meet. Had he been to his fields recently? “Oh no, they’re far away now,” he replied.
The border wall was visible from the back of the graveyard. We could have walked there from where we were standing in under an hour. That Jaafar’s tobacco crops were suddenly “far,” that land well into Lebanese territory was now “over there,” seemed to reflect the capacity of drone warfare to warp time and space, creating boundaries both real and psychological. A plot that was once a short drive away now sits at an impossible distance. A grove that used to be reachable in minutes could now take days or even weeks to access, between petitions to the army and UNIFIL, which might ultimately determine the trip too dangerous and decline to provide an escort.
A drone that artificially expands certain distances can just as easily narrow others. Listening to Jaafar, I recalled a story I’d recently heard from a friend who had witnessed a drone speak while visiting family in Adloun, a town further up the coast in southern Lebanon. The drone had broadcast a message in Arabic, warning residents not to work with a local engineer helping with reconstruction efforts, accusing him of being a member of Hezbollah. (The man, Tarek Mazraani, has since moved his family into hiding for their safety and went on the local news to condemn the occupation’s fabrications and fear-mongering.) Such an experience is somehow more terrifying than being near a bombing, my friend said. A missile strikes from some faraway place, but a drone addressing her in her own language closes the distance between herself and the source of imperial violence. Suddenly, the occupier is in her midst, and she cannot block out his voice.
Early justifications for drone warfare did not account for this kind of proximity. When drones broke into political consciousness during the war on terror, first under the Bush administration and more intensely under Barack Obama, public debate centered on civilian casualties and the touted precision of unmanned strikes. American drones were operating in countries with which the United States was not officially at war, and a handful of attacks broke through the fog of state secrecy: a 2006 strike on a religious school in Pakistan’s Bajaur District; a 2013 strike on a wedding procession in Yemen. In each case, the administration initially denied responsibility, only to later recast the killings as tragic errors borne of faulty intelligence.
The ethical questions that followed were framed almost exclusively around drones’ capacity to kill — whether unmanned strikes constituted extrajudicial assassinations, whether they could be justified under the laws of war or used against U.S. citizens, and how many civilian deaths could be weighed against the elimination of suspected terrorists. War itself was painted as inevitable, even necessary: Foreign militants were plotting against the U.S., and failing to act might constitute a dereliction of national security. Some early critics argued that drones might produce the opposite of their stated aims, multiplying the nation’s enemies and making Americans less safe. Others concerned themselves with what unmanned strikes could mean for the nature of warfare itself. (French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou asked whether it can meaningfully be called war when only one side has the power to kill, and the other can only die.)
Residents have reported Israeli drones stalking them as they herd sheep, visit their relatives’ graves, and harvest their crops.
Less present in these debates was an understanding of drones as technologies of presence, surveillance, and control abroad. But early testimony pointed to this reality. “The sound of the drone stays in my brain,” a man in Islamabad, Pakistan, told Stanford researchers in March 2012. The researchers noted that locals had begun to avoid gathering at funerals and tribal councils out of fear that they might draw the attention of drone operators. Parents kept children home; traumatized youth dropped out of school — life was redrawn around the possibility of being seen.
During this same period, Israel was sharpening the capacities of its drone fleet. By the mid-2010s, drones had become so pervasive in Gaza that they were dubbed zanana by locals, an Arabic word for buzz. As cell phones and computers proliferated across the Strip, Israeli surveillance infrastructure expanded in parallel, fed by an ever-increasing array of metadata. Communication became haunted by the specter of the occupation’s control, locking Palestinians into an agonizing paradox: The tools they had begun using to document the colonial violence enacted against them made them more legible to it, and more vulnerable.
The Israeli and American drone wars did not occur in isolation. All along, the two militaries were trading technologies and intelligence, refining their systems in tandem. One example: The first American drone assassination away from a conventional battlefield was carried out in 2002 with a Predator drone, designed by former Israeli soldier and aerospace engineer Abraham Karem. Though the American operator flying a Predator drone in Pakistan in 2009 and the Israeli soldier maneuvering a Hermes 450 over Gaza in 2014 (or a quadcopter across southern Lebanon in 2025) may have worked with different aims, the effects on the people below converge. In each case, the drone disciplines space. Villagers learn not to gather, not to frequent certain areas, not to trust silence. More than a lethal weapon, the drone transforms into something else: a sentinel hovering, watching, and collapsing distance until the occupier feels inescapably near.
Over the course of the day, other villagers I spoke to in Aita al-Shaab relayed the same story as Jaafar. They’d once grown tobacco, wheat, and olives. Some had tended fruit trees as well. For most of their lives, they’d lived off small plots of familial land that they don’t dare venture to now.
“And your livelihood?” I asked people after hearing their stories.
“Do people who lost their sons still worry about their livelihoods?” one man replied to my question. It was dusk then, and the villagers were starting to turn in for the night. “God is generous.”
At least twice a week, the Israeli military flies its reconnaissance drones over Beirut at a lower altitude, blanketing the city in an unmistakable noise that could be described as something between a lawnmower and a cicada. On some days when they hover particularly low, the sound becomes inescapable, and people on the streets, on balconies, and in cafes look up in unison. It’s sometimes possible to see the drones circling far overhead, scanning the city for information.
Beneath the drone’s eye, in the halls of the capital, politicians debate the country’s future. President Joseph Aoun, a former military commander, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, former head of the International Court of Justice, have declared their intent to disarm Hezbollah and confine all weapons in the hands of the state, but efforts in that direction quickly turn into a catch-22: Hezbollah insists that any serious discussion about a national defense strategy and disarmament can only occur after Israel ceases its military operations and fully withdraws from the South, and the Israelis say that they will only end the drone war after Hezbollah is completely disarmed. The sectarian geography and government structure in Lebanon further complicate things: Any attempt to take Hezbollah’s weapons by force risks dragging the country into another civil war.
Regardless of their feelings towards Hezbollah, most southerners are either wary of disarmament or outright opposed to it, for reasons both historic and recent. Since Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the South has existed on the margins of the state, receiving little economic and military assistance. During the Israeli occupation in the 1990s, it was resistance groups with a fledgling Hezbollah at the helm that fought and expelled the Zionists. Today, the Lebanese Army 一 under-resourced and largely funded by the U.S. 一 has proven unable to protect residents of the South from the drone war and Israel’s daily ground raids, which numbered over 1,200 in the past year alone, deepening residents’ long-standing mistrust in the state.
“We don’t want to end up like Syria,” Tahini told me during the tour of Aita al-Shaab, echoing a sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly on trips to the South.
Life was redrawn around the possibility of being seen.
After the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the Israeli military launched a massive bombing campaign across Syria, targeting the weapons stores of the former regime. Simultaneously, occupation soldiers swept into the country’s suddenly demilitarized south and began seizing new territory, including parts of the Golan Heights with critical water reserves. Ever since, a new Zionist ground occupation has entrenched itself in southern Syria. Occupation forces are erecting new barriers, blowing up homes, and cutting people off from their land. Despite the Trump administration’s favor for the new Syrian government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Israel appears unwilling to withdraw from the land it is newly occupying.
Last summer, U.S. envoys Tom Barrack and Morgan Ortagus occasionally flew into Beirut to put on a show of diplomacy. Their meetings with Lebanese officials had begun pleasantly enough in the spring, but as the months went by, things began to sour. The Israeli regime that they’d come to represent was demanding the impossible: for the Lebanese government to empty the border region and transform it into an “economic zone,” effectively ethnically cleansing dozens of villages. When Lebanese officials did not assent to this request, the envoys accused them of dragging their feet on disarmament. By the end of the summer, the Americans started distancing themselves from the Lebanese file, and the Israelis began to escalate their attacks. At the time of writing, the drone’s buzz over Beirut persists. The threat of an escalated Israeli bombing campaign hangs over the country.
Down on the border, UNIFIL troops carry out their regular patrols, searching for Hezbollah’s weapons stores and logging the Israeli military’s daily ceasefire violations. In mid-November, Israeli soldiers fired directly at a group of peacekeepers, an incident that they later blamed on poor weather conditions. On January 15, 2026, the Israeli military dropped a grenade 30 meters away from a UNIFIL patrol as peacekeepers inspected a house in the village of Adeisseh. After a U.S.-Israeli campaign of pressure, the U.N. voted unanimously to terminate the peacekeeping force’s presence in southern Lebanon by the end of 2026, after more than five decades.
“Lebanon, which has adhered to halting hostilities for nearly a year to date and has presented initiative after initiative, renews its call to the international community to assume its responsibility and intervene firmly and seriously to stop the attacks on Lebanon and its people,” President Aoun said on November 23, after Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut’s densely populated southern suburb without warning in broad daylight. He and the prime minister had recently indicated their willingness to engage in direct negotiations with the Israelis, an unprecedented move given that under Lebanese law, Israel is considered an enemy of the state.
But the Israeli government has no incentive to put away its drones. The cost of their continued deployment is minimal; the occasional aircraft may crash in a Lebanese town, thousands of dollars wasted, but no Israeli lives lost. More than two years since Hamas’ October 7 attack, Israel has emerged from the fighting emboldened, its enemy militias depleted, and its primary sponsor, the U.S., supportive of its territorial gains. This is how forever wars are seeded, how they lock communities into unending cycles of violence.
On the ground in the South, residents continue to trickle back into the border villages. They speak of drones as a thing to adapt to. They swear that they will not be forced out again.
Lylla Younes is a writer and editor based between Beirut and New York.
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