BEIRUT: Footage verified by AFP on Monday showed massive detonations in a southern Lebanese border village, where a local official said hundreds of houses have been wiped out by Zionist entity since last year. The video, shared widely online on Monday, showed more than a dozen simultaneous detonations that ripped through Mais Al-Jabal and razed homes to dust. Similar aerial scenes have been captured from several border villages, including Mhaibib and Odaisseh, since Zionist entity sent ground troops into southern Lebanon in late September.

Houses covering lush hills are seen crumpling in a cloud of grey dust in the videos circulating widely online. Zionist entity says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the frontier in a bid to push the Iran-backed group away from the border and allow for its residents to return to northern Zionist entity. Monday’s video from Mais Al-Jabal showed large detonations near a vacated hospital in the village, said mayor Abdul-Monhem Choukair. The area has been repeatedly struck since Zionist entity and Hezbollah started trading cross-border fire in October last year.

“Seventy percent of Mais Al-Jabal is destroyed,” the mayor said, adding that the “Zionist entity enemy’s goal is systematic destruction”. Choukair said four people, aged between 85 and 90, are trapped in Mais Al-Jabal pending their rescue.

According to Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA), Zionist entity troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month. Zionist entity’s Channel 12 last month broadcast footage appearing to show one of its presenters blow up a building while embedded with soldiers in the village of Aita Al-Shaab. Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission has said “the ongoing destruction campaign carried out by the Zionist entity army in southern Lebanon is a war crime”.

Between October 2023 and October 2024, locations “were wantonly and systematically destroyed in at least eight Lebanese villages”, it said, basing its findings on satellite images and videos shared on social media by Zionist entity soldiers. — AFP