When a Satellite Image Becomes a Form of Return

The most recent photo we saw of my grandfather’s house after the fragile ceasefire was not taken by a neighbor, a journalist, or someone returning to the village. It came from above.

Months into the Israeli war on Lebanon, families from border villages developed new ways of witnessing destruction from exile. In village group chats, people collect footage published by the Israeli military, drone videos, satellite images, and photographs taken from a distance from neighboring hills or towns. They pause videos to carefully inspect each frame. They zoom in, circle ruins, compare roads, and try to identify homes through rooftops, gates and water tanks, through a nearby tree or the curve of a road.

Southerners living abroad, those with the means to do so, buy commercial satellite images of their villages so their relatives can check on their homes. Some images cost only a few dollars per square kilometer; clearer, more recent ones can cost much more. Displaced residents who cannot afford them often wait for someone else to buy and share an image of their village.

In April, a satellite image of Aitaroun — purchased by a local living abroad — circulated through the same WhatsApp groups where displaced families exchange rumors, coordinates, drone footage, screenshots, and fragments of their villages and homes.

On April 15, the house was still standing. One week later, it was gone.

My family closely inspected the image, in search of the house my grandfather began building in 2009. He poured his life savings into that house. He spent decades working as a butcher in Beirut, rarely taking time off. Every morning, he opened the shop, and every evening, after locking up, he changed his clothes and drove straight to Aitaroun to check on the construction site. He would drive back to Beirut the same night.

Whenever visitors came, he would show off the house. He pointed out its size, the view, the plants, and all the work that had gone into it. It was not just a house. It was a personal victory — proof that after a lifetime of labor in the city, he had built something of his own in his own hometown.

It was also not the first home he had lost.

During the Lebanese civil war, my grandparents lived in a rented house in Bourj Hammoud. When fighting reached their neighborhood, they fled. Their Armenian neighbors helped them leave and protected their home from looting until they were able to return. Later on, they moved to a house in Burj al-Barajneh.

In 1982, after the Israeli invasion, that house was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. They fled again, this time to Haret Hreik. Then came the War of the Camps. My grandfather sold that house and bought another in Burj al-Barajneh, where they still live today.

Aitaroun was supposed to be different. It was the home that came after all the other houses that did not survive. 

Yet even before it was demolished by Israel in late April, the house had already been violated. Israeli soldiers occupied it during the previous escalation in late 2024. They slept in it, stole from it, vandalized it, wrote on the walls in Hebrew, drew the Star of David, destroyed furniture, and used it as a military position. They also destroyed a photo of my late aunt, who died from cancer. 

After the 2024 escalation ended, my grandfather gathered the mattresses the soldiers had slept on and burned them in the backyard. He refused to keep anything they had touched inside the house.

My aunt discovered the destruction of her home in Ainata the same way. She watched it disappear in a video showing a series of detonations carried out by the Israeli occupation forces. That video circulated among residents trying to identify whose homes had been blown up.

“When you watch your house being deliberately detonated, you feel helplessness and injustice,” she told me. “You ask why. Why did this happen? In the end, it is our house.”

My aunt, who spent much of her life between Canada and the United States, had already lost a house once before, in Kafa’at, in 2024. After Israel issued a forced displacement order, she and her family left. The house was later demolished and everything inside destroyed. At the time, she tried not to dwell on her own loss. People were dying, others had lost even more, and catastrophes were everywhere. It was only later, when she rented an apartment in Dahieh again and had to start over from scratch — furniture, appliances, even the smallest domestic objects — that the weight of her loss finally settled.

There is a particular violence in watching your home be destroyed through someone else’s lens. The image arrives after the event has already happened. You are late to your own loss. Too late to open a door, collect a photograph, check a drawer, save a plant, or even stand in the dust and process what took place. You receive the destruction as a file. A screenshot. A forwarded video. A satellite image. Proof without presence.

When my family realized my grandfather’s house in Aitaroun had been destroyed, they deliberated over whether to tell him. Do you tell an old man that the home he built after losing so many others is gone? Do you let him keep imagining it standing? Do you wait for a clearer image, a confirmed photo, a neighbor’s testimony?

They ended up telling him a few days later.

He did not react dramatically. He absorbed the news quietly, and said that if he could return, even though the house was gone, he would check on the plants. That was all that was left for him to ask about. 

I keep thinking about it. After a lifetime of displacement, labor, saving to rebuild, and war, he still wanted to know whether anything living had survived among the rubble of his home.

Now, like many families from Lebanon’s border villages, we search for home in images taken from the sky. We wait for someone to buy a clearer picture. We zoom in. We compare shadows. We ask each other: Is that our roof? Is that the neighbor’s house? Is that rubble? Is anything still there?

The war has turned image analysis into a form of return.

After a while, you start to wonder: Will we ever return to see it for ourselves? 

With every new discussion of a “buffer zone,” return feels less certain, and loss becomes more than just the destruction of walls. It is not only houses that are erased, but the people, memories, and culture attached to them. To be kept from your land is to be kept from the place that made you, from the place inhabited by your ancestors for centuries.

The last time I visited Aitaroun was just a week before the war escalated on March 2. Even then, the village was not really safe — the house is close to the border, and Israel was still targeting civilians. I could not go to it. I could only look from afar.

If I had known that would be my last time seeing home, even from a distance, I would have paid closer attention. I would have photographed every corner my lens could reach. I would have taken pictures of the road, the walls, the landscape, the plants, and the rooms I could not enter. I would have stayed a little longer.