This article was published in collaboration with Egab.
The badly damaged shrine of Nabi Shamoun al-Safa in Shama‘, Sour district, south Lebanon. February 10, 2025. (Ibrahim Safieddine/The Public Source)
Destroying What it Cannot Claim: Why Israel Targets Sacred Sites
For centuries, the Grand Mosque has anchored the religious and social life of Bint Jbeil. For Mustafa Bazzi, it also evokes memories of his childhood in the late 1950s. “I am 78 years old,” Bazzi said, “and my connection to the mosque goes back 68 years, since I was 10, when I used to visit it every day.”
The Grand Mosque stood in Hakouret Nos el-Day‘a, or the village center’s garden, Bint Jbeil’s central square. Every Thursday, traders from Lebanon and Palestine gathered at Souk el-Khamis, the town’s historic weekly market, where they sold everything from Jaffa oranges, olive oil, and fabrics, to grain and livestock. The establishment of the Zionist settler-colony in 1948 and the borders erected under its occupation of Palestine severed this longstanding connection.
“Residents commemorated Ashoura inside the mosque for hundreds of years, and gathered there at sunset during Ramadan to pray,” Bazzi said. “The mosque drew prominent religious scholars, including Sheikh Moussa Sharara, Sheikh Abdul Karim Sharara, Sayed Hashem al-Hakim, Sayed Mohsen al-Hakim, and Sayed Abdul Raouf Fadlallah.”
The residents of Bint Jbeil believe the structure was built atop the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, according to an inscribed stone inside, though the date of its original construction remains unknown. According to Bazzi, a history professor at the Lebanese University, scholars consider it one of the oldest mosques in Jabal Amel. Another inscription inside the mosque recorded its renovation during the Ottoman era: “This blessed mosque was renovated in seeking the face of God by Hajj Ali, son of the late Hajj Ahmad al-Bazzi, may God reward him as He rewards the righteous.”
The inscription dates the restoration to 1134 AH (AD 1721–22 AD), making even the renovated mosque — let alone the original structure — older than both Israel and the United States.
The Ottoman-era sanctuary consisted of massive limestone blocks and four large foundation slabs. It witnessed Bint Jbeil’s triumphs and defeats, from the anti-French revolt of 1920 to the Palestinian resistance movements of the 1970s, the emergence of the Islamic Resistance during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s, and Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon.
Through it all, the mosque endured. Craftsmen from Safad expanded the mosque and added a large dome in 1883. In 1948, Bazzi’s father, a stonemason, worked alongside other local craftsmen to carve the stones for the mosque’s minaret. After Israeli attacks damaged the mosque during the 2006 war, the Qatari government funded its reconstruction.
But in mid-April 2026,, as Israeli forces encircled Bint Jbeil, residents learned from images circulating on their screens that their beloved Grand Mosque had been reduced to a pile of stones.
“This is the only war,” Bazzi said, “in which it has been completely destroyed.”
From the Ovens of Akka to the Ruins of Bint Jbeil
The Grand Mosque is just one of many sacred sites Israel has destroyed since launching its latest military offensive in southern Lebanon in March. In April, an Israeli soldier smashed a crucifix in a small Christian shrine in a family garden on the outskirts of Debel, a border village in the Bint Jbeil district currently under occupation. In May, Israeli forces used heavy machinery and explosives to demolish the Catholic Convent of the Sisters of the Holy Savior, a historic monastery, school, and social hub in the nearby village of Yaroun, also in the Bint Jbeil district.
Israeli occupation forces have also burned and demolished husseiniyas — communal gathering spaces central to village religious and social life — across southern Lebanon. “The husseiniya was where we played football as kids; we sat on its steps in summer; we gathered there for every occasion. It is the beating heart of the village,” Mohamad Najm of Sultaniyeh, in the Sour district, wrote on Facebook after learning that Israeli strikes had reduced his village’s husseiniya to rubble.
Southerners have endured repeated Israeli assaults and a brutal 22-year Zionist occupation. Each time, they have rebuilt, often right up to the barbed wire of the border fence.
But the scale of destruction in this war has led many Lebanese to believe that Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth policy intended to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon by severing its people from their land. Israel’s wholesale destruction of sacred spaces is part of a broader pattern of war crimes aimed not just at destroying cities and towns but also at dismantling the social worlds that sustain a people.
“The Israeli colonial pattern centers on spatial genocide; it is an inseparable part of their existence,” Diana Richani, a sociocultural anthropologist, told The Public Source. “Israel operates from a racist doctrine that claims Jewish supremacy, targeting every trace of the original inhabitants of the land, from homes, churches, mosques, ancient olive trees, to every detail of the lives that the people of this land have built upon it.”
Lebanon’s environment minister, Tamara el-Zein, has characterized Israel’s assault on the country’s built and natural environment as ecocide, urbicide, and domicide — the destruction of ecosystems, cities, and homes. Together, these forms of destruction threaten to devastate southern Lebanon’s natural landscape, dismantle its villages and towns, and drive people from their land — in effect, ethnically cleansing the southern population.
Israel’s targeting of Lebanon’s sacred sites also raises the question of cultural genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term genocide, regarded the “malicious destruction” of cultural heritage — works embodying the “unique genius” of a people — as a key component of the crime of genocide.
For Bazzi, Israel’s destruction of religious sites in southern Lebanon serves a clear objective: to erase the heritage embedded in the region’s collective memory and discourage its people from returning. He draws a parallel with the campaign of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, the Ottoman governor who ravaged Jabal Amel in 1781–1782.
According to decades-old oral accounts — documented in a 1910 article in the Lebanese journal al-‘Irfan and repeated by later Shiite writers, including Sheikh Suleiman Zaher — al-Jazzar’s forces destroyed libraries across Jabal Amel. “The ovens of Akka burned books for an entire week,” wrote Sheikh Ahmad Reda, the article’s author.
Richani connects the logic of Israel’s erasure of Jabal Amel’s cultural heritage to its strategy of environmental colonialism in occupied Palestine, where Zionist institutions, particularly the Jewish National Fund, planted millions of non-native pine trees to recreate European-style landscapes that conceal the ruins of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed during the Nakba.
In recent years, wildfires destroyed many of those trees — exposing the contours of historic vineyards and terraces that were cultivated by the land’s indigenous people. “The Israelis work to erase the land and its features, but the land carries within it a long history with its people,” Richani said. “It does not forget.”
The Disappearance of Home Coordinates
In southern Lebanon, the destruction of villages and their landmarks continued despite a nominal ceasefire signed between Lebanon and Israel on April 16 and repeatedly violated by Israel.
Following the June 16 agreement between Iran and the United States, thousands of displaced families flooded the highway from Beirut to the South before any formal return had even been announced.
Israeli forces have continued demolishing structures across southern Lebanon, including in 62 villages and farms that Israel has depopulated and partially or fully occupied.
After the June agreement, the more than one million displaced Lebanese tried to return to their villages in the South, even if just to assess what of their homes remained. As of October 29, 2026, at least 960,000 people have been able to return, while just over 304,500 have not been able to return. Those who were able to even briefly return often found mountains of rocks and debris instead of historic places of worship and cemeteries.
“The scale of destruction in this war is unlike anything before,” said Tarek Mazraani, founder of The Gathering of the Children of the Southern Border Towns. “The Israeli occupation made sure buildings were reduced to ash.”
Mazraani’s hometown of Houla, in the Marjeyoun district, is among the villages that Israeli forces have occupied and systematically demolished.
An architect and engineer, Mazraani supervised the construction of some 500 homes in Houla. He also built a museum to house the village’s heritage artifacts and designed two memorials: one commemorating the martyrs of the Houla Massacre of 1948, in which the Haganah militia-turned-IDF soldiers killed dozens of the village’s men, and another honoring its Communist Party martyrs.
Israel has “taken revenge” on these landmarks, said Mazraani, “as if it had an ancient score to settle. It’s reached the point that the town’s old quarter, built from stone, has been turned to rubble and ash.”
The Gathering of the Children of the Southern Border Towns garnered nationwide sympathy for its political independence, but its popularity ultimately made Mazraani Israel’s next target. One evening in October 2025, friends and relatives began sending Mazraani videos of an Israeli drone broadcasting his name, from the border villages all the way to nearly Saida, demanding townspeople “chase him” and “expel him.” After moving his family into hiding, Mazraani evacuated his home and relocated to Beirut alone.
For younger Lebanese who grew up in cities and visited their ancestral villages only occasionally, the destruction of familiar landmarks threatens a less immediate connection to those places. “The new generation's connection to the village is limited to the grandfather's house, the family cemetery, the old squares at its center, and similar landmarks,” Mazraani said. “When Israel destroys these, that connection weakens.”
Mazraani believes that Israel’s endgame is to establish settlements in southern Lebanon. “Israel’s attempt to erase religious identity and remove the landmarks of villages and towns is nothing new,” he said. “But its destructive capacity during previous wars was not at the same scale as it is today.”
What troubles Mazraani most is the destruction of sites that orient residents and visitors alike, a loss that will further complicate reconstruction. Some southern villages have no boundary surveys on record. Instead, people navigate using landmarks: the pond, the old mosque, the stone quarter. “These are the features that give a village its face. When a visitor comes, the first thing you do is take them to the old quarter, the old mosque,” he said. “When those are gone, something in the village’s legibility disappears.”
The Shrine That Survived Centuries
On April 13, Ali Jaber saw what he described as the “hardest image” of his life on someone else’s phone. He was shown a photo of the Shrine of Sham‘oun al-Safa, sacred in both Shia Islam and Christianity — Israeli occupiers had completely destroyed it using explosives.
The shrine is believed to mark the burial place of Simon Cephas, known to Christians as Saint Peter, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ. In Shia tradition, Sham‘oun al-Safa is also identified as the maternal great-grandfather of Imam Mahdi, the twelfth Imam. The shrine has been venerated for centuries by members of both faiths.
Jaber is a former administrator of the shrine, which, according to an inscription preserved inside it, was built under the Fatimids in the year AH 490 (AD 1096–1097). In 1116, Crusaders built a citadel around the shrine, enclosing the shrine within fortified stone walls.
“The shrine attracted people of all sects in southern Lebanon and northern Palestine,” Jaber said. “After the liberation of 2000, there was a donation box at the tomb dating back some 200 years, inscribed with more than ten texts written by visitors across generations. From that time until the beginning of the support war [in 2023], the shrine served as a meeting point for the people of the region, especially during religious holidays.”
During the 2006 war, the Israeli army partially destroyed the minaret of the Citadel of Shama‘ and damaged its northern facade. The shrine was damaged as well and later restored through a Qatari-funded program to rebuild places of worship. Restoration of the citadel, funded separately by Italy, was completed in 2021.
In 2024, Israel destroyed the minaret again, along with one of the shrine’s four rooms. After the assault, as they did after the 2006 war, Lebanese at home and abroad collected donations and set about restoring the shrine. In 2026, another Israeli strike destroyed it completely.
“My only concern — as it was for all the residents of Shama‘ and the neighboring villages — was never whether our homes would survive Israel’s machinery of destruction, but whether the Citadel of Shama‘ and the Shrine of Sham‘oun al-Safa would be spared,” Jaber told The Public Source. “But Israel does not only seek to uproot us from our land; it seeks to erase our memory and our civilization.”
The Limits of Reconstruction
For southerners, reconstruction has long been a form of civic and cultural resistance: a refusal to let destruction lead to uprooting. From Israel’s first invasion in 1978 to the many wars that followed, residents of the South have repeatedly returned to their villages and rebuilt.
In Bint Jbeil, however, Israel’s destruction extended well beyond the town’s buildings and historic landmarks, threatening residents’ ability to rebuild. Even before international organizations had finished assessing the damage from the 2023–2024 war — estimated by the World Bank at $8.5 billion in physical damage and economic losses across all of Lebanon — Israel had engineered another form of attempted erasure through the occupation of Bint Jbeil’s Grand Serail.
The Grand Serail, dating to 1839, housed land and property records for more than 20 villages in the Bint Jbeil district. With Lebanese authorities unable to access the building under Israeli occupation, the fate of those archives remains unknown. The digital registry dates back only to 2020. At stake, in other words, were not only the town’s historic buildings — including dozens of patrimonial structures — but also the legal records documenting land ownership, whose loss could hinder residents’ ability to establish their property rights and rebuild.
Following the destruction of the Grand Mosque, Bazzi contacted the town’s current and former mayors, proposing that the mosque be given priority for reconstruction once Israeli forces withdraw.
“We will rebuild it as it was,” said Bazzi, who co-published a book with archaeology professor Hassan Badawi titled “Bint Jbeil: Architectural Heritage” on the architectural heritage of Bint Jbeil, with particular attention to the mosque. “This mosque is etched in our memory in its historical form. I hope it returns exactly as I always knew it. We will choose the same tiles, the same stone.”
But rebuilding stone structures is one thing; restoring the life they once contained is another. “Reconstruction alone cannot restore the spirit of a place,” Richani said. “That depends on the return of the people themselves. Even if every stone is rebuilt, without the social life that animated those spaces — the daily interaction among people, and between people and the land, and its architectural and historical heritage — the places remain shells.”
She pointed to downtown Beirut, rebuilt after the civil war by Solidere, the private real estate company established by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Before the civil war, downtown Beirut was woven into the city’s daily life — a place where people gathered to shop, work, eat, and socialize.
“It was rebuilt, but its original residents and property owners were displaced, and the social fabric that had given it meaning came apart with them,” the anthropologist said. “Any reconstruction project that does not center the return of the people of the land, intentionally or not, aligns with the objectives of the assault on Lebanon.”
“Stone has a soul, like humans,” Jaber told The Public Source. “My family’s home was slightly damaged in 2006, and after minor repairs, it no longer felt like our old house.”
Jaber paused when considering what that might mean for the Shrine of Sham‘oun al-Safa. “It is impossible for our generation to look at it the same way, even rebuilt in its original form,” he said. “We will always carry the grief of what was lost. But no matter the scale of destruction, people will continue to visit. The collective memory holds this shrine in too much reverence for that to change.”
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