Israel's ongoing occupation of southern Lebanon has turned the annual olive harvest — a cornerstone of rural livelihood and cultural identity — into a lethal obstacle course. Farmers must petition their municipalities, which forward requests to the Lebanese Army, which coordinates through a mechanism established under the June Tripartite Framework Agreement between the US, Israel, and Lebanon. The bureaucratic chain alone signals who controls the land. Khaled Farhat, who tends 200 olive trees near Majdel Selm, was granted a two-week window to harvest. Drones circle overhead in groups of two or three. An Israeli shell landed near him an hour before he spoke to Al Jazeera. Warplanes strike nearby. The psychological toll is deliberate. The physical destruction is staggering. Lebanon's Environment Minister Tamara Elzein reported more than 16,000 hectares of land torched since October 2023, including through white phosphorus — a highly flammable incendiary. Israel continues to occupy nearly 630 square kilometers of southern Lebanon, encompassing swaths of farmland and dozens of villages. Israeli bulldozers have uprooted or burned olive groves. Ramy Zurayk, an American University of Beirut professor specializing in landscape design and ecosystem management, described the project bluntly: "The Israeli project is to eliminate humans and living organisms from the land." He called it an attempt to make the area "sterile" by destroying the habitat and the relationship between people and their territory. The explosive contamination layer compounds the agricultural crisis. Between 2.6 and four million cluster bomb submunitions were dumped in the area during the final days of the 2006 war, according to Human Rights Watch. A 2022 Lebanese Mine Action Center report stated that 5 million square meters of contaminated land remained — 18 percent of the original baseline. The Mines Advisory Group has now identified 444,000 square meters of confirmed hazardous areas for farmers since October 2023, a figure expected to rise significantly. At least two people were killed in olive groves in early October: a retired soldier in Yater village by Israeli artillery, and a young engineer in Froun village when ordnance exploded during harvest. A Lebanese police officer was killed the following day in Ain Ebel. Lebanon's economic collapse leaves farmers with no option but to return to dangerous land. Hiba Ghandour, MAG's Lebanon programme manager, described the bind: "When people are under pressure to earn a living, they often feel they have no choice but to return to their land before it has been made safe." Clearing agricultural land is especially slow because contamination hides in vegetation and beneath soil. Repeated bombardment has damaged the land itself and blocked clearance teams from reaching the most affected communities. The occupation's reach extends beyond the immediate military zone. In Kfarshouba, a predominantly Sunni border village, political analyst Bassel Doueik reported that approximately 200 Israeli soldiers entered the village on Monday, searching houses while at least three Merkava tanks and other military vehicles infiltrated the surrounding area. White phosphorus contamination has triggered consumer hesitancy about southern produce, though Zurayk stated publicly at an AUB panel on October 21 that there is no evidence the olives or other produce are dangerous to consume. The fear itself, however, functions as an economic weapon — cutting farmers off from markets even when their crops survive. The pattern here is not collateral damage. The permit system, the two-week harvest windows, the drone surveillance, the ordnance layering, the bulldozing of groves, and the white phosphorus deployment form a coherent strategy of territorial denial through ecological destruction. Farhat's 200 trees, left untended during displacement, are now choked with weeds that eat into his limited harvest time and may conceal cluster munitions. The land is being made uninhabitable not by a single act but by the accumulation of restrictions, dangers, and destruction that erode the economic and cultural rationale for return. Farhat, speaking from under the drones, holds to the language of resilience: "Hopefully, this is just a phase that will pass." The structural evidence suggests otherwise. Twenty years of this trajectory — already partially realized since 2006 — produces a depopulated buffer zone where the relationship between Lebanese communities and their ancestral farmland has been permanently severed.
