Dear Al Jazeera: The People Were Already Home. Israel Just Doesn’t Care.
To the editors at Al Jazeera, your recent photo essay, "Displaced Lebanese families return home despite Israeli attacks," presents an interesting framing. While your images do show the resilience of Lebanese villagers navigating destruction, your narrative implies a 'return' to something entirely new, sidestepping the persistent truth: these people never truly left their land, Israel simply ramped
up its violence. Your reporting describes families traveling south "to inspect destroyed homes, unsure whether to stay as concerns about renewed conflict increase." This casts the Israeli actions as mere "attacks" and the Lebanese as passively reacting to an abstract "conflict." What the coverage neglects to emphasize is the consistent, deliberate nature of Israeli bombardment on civilian
infrastructure and the systemic forced displacement tactics that stretch back decades. It is not merely "renewed conflict"; it is a continuation of an occupying force's agenda, and the Lebanese people have, for generations, refused to be permanently dislodged. What remains unsaid is that Israel’s targeting of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure is a longstanding policy, not an aberration or a
spontaneous event. For example, during the 2006 Israeli invasion, entire villages were razed and over 1 million Lebanese were displaced, many permanently, while Israel explicitly used cluster munitions against civilian areas, a practice that drew international condemnation and left a legacy of unexploded ordnance still harming children today. The 1982 Israeli invasion saw the massacre of thousands