NPR reports:

The center of the village lies in ruins. A row of single-story shops blown out, goods scattered on the ground, glass shattered along the sidewalk. Homes and buildings are crumpled into themselves, unrecognizable. The mosque is blackened and burned, the minaret split in two. A Lebanese civil defense emergency vehicle is crushed next to the rubble, its windshield smashed.

Mansouri, a small village in the undulating hills of Lebanon’s south is about six miles from the country’s ‘s border with Israel, but it now lies less than a mile from what Israel has called the “yellow line” in the south — marking the large swath of land now occupied by Israeli troops.

Thirty-five-year-old Abed Ammar stands on the main street, looking at the destruction. He works as an emergency responder and returned to Mansouri on the first day of the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah earlier this month, with his family, to their house up on the hill, which he says was only lightly damaged.

He says they hear controlled demolitions happening in the neighboring villages now occupied by Israel.

“The demolitions are louder than airstrikes,” he says. “We can hear them very clearly from here.”

Israel has been very public about the controlled demolitions its military has been carrying out in many of the 55 Lebanese towns and villages it now occupies in the south. The Israeli military has been publishing videos on social media and in releases to the press showing entire neighborhoods eviscerated in seconds, the concrete homes and shops erupting into clouds of dust at the push of a detonator. [Continue reading…]