Israel’s campaign to raze huge swaths of southern Lebanon may destroy not only people’s homes, but also their ability to even show they owned the properties, according to locals and officials from the Lebanese government — potentially leaving as many as a quarter million Lebanese unable to prove that they have property or homes at all.

Aerial imagery from Bint Jbeil, the seat of a municipality by the same name, shows what residents describe as burn marks at sites where official records were kept: civil registration files, land deeds, the paper infrastructure of a city’s legal existence.

With the notary gone, civil administration buildings bulldozed, and widespread destruction of homes that contained important personal documents, residents of the 36 villages of the Bint Jbeil district fear Israel’s total war has meant the destruction of all their records could permanently untether them from the homes they left behind when they fled under Israel’s evacuation orders.

That could make reconstruction after the war a nightmare. Bint Jbeil is Lebanon’s most southwestern district and the site of an Israeli campaign to evacuate entire populations before flattening their villages.

Some Lebanese even see it as an intentional tactic, part of Israel’s plan to empty out southern Lebanon and establish a buffer zone south of the Litani River Israeli leaders hope will put northern Israel out of the reach of Hezbollah’s rockets.

A mukhtar, or local official, confirmed to The Intercept that civil registry records had been digitized up to 2020 only, which offers limited reassurance. Much, however, remains unaccounted for. There are the last six years of records along with countless others that were not officially registered thanks to Lebanon’s notoriously chaotic bureaucracies and lax enforcement of registration rules, which are at times flouted to avoid paying taxes.

At the center of the crisis is Bint Jbeil’s Grand Serail, the old administrative building that houses land deeds for thousands of families across more than 20 villages in the district. Since Israeli forces moved in, Lebanese authorities have not been able to reach it, despite making efforts through the International Committee of the Red Cross with requests to the so-called Mechanism Committee that administers the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

“The Ministry of Interior has not yet been able to obtain the civil registry records for Bint Jbeil district, because the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) has not received approval from the Mechanism Committee, which includes Israel, to enter the area, despite submitting a request to do so, in order to retrieve the records and transfer them to the Interior Ministry in Beirut,” a ministry spokesperson told The Intercept.

In a statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the ICRC request and said the Lebanese group Hezbollah installs military assets in civilian areas.

“IDF directives permit the execution of clearing operations of structures used for military purposes, or when there is an essential operational necessity that justifies the full or partial demolition of a structure, in accordance with international law,” the statement said.

Destruction of civilian infrastructure in war is permissible by the laws of armed conflict only under narrow conditions, including that there be a military purpose and that the destruction be incidental to that military purpose.

Israel has flattened entire border towns in Lebanon. Experts have said the actions could constitute war crimes. Israel’s defense minister has previously said, “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed.”

The Grand Serail

Lebanese Finance Minister Yassine Jaber has been monitoring the Grand Serail by satellite.

“The walls are still standing mostly,” he told The Intercept, “but satellites don’t have keys to doors. We don’t know what happened inside. Were the records destroyed? Were they confiscated? The truth is still behind the front lines.”

For four weeks, Jaber ran what amounted to a crisis operations room: calls to Lebanese army command, coordination with military intelligence, repeated attempts to reach the Mechanism Committee — the multilateral body, including Israel, that monitors the its mid-April ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah — and appeals to UNIFIL, a United Nations force in Lebanon.

Their goal was to establish a corridor for a single journey to Bint Jbeil to recover the records.

“We tried everything,” Jaber said. “But Bint Jbeil today is a forbidden zone.”

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to reach the records.

“The ICRC supported the Ministry of Interior in the evacuation of some civil registries in southern Lebanon at the beginning of the escalation,” said Sally Aoun, a spokesperson for ICRC Lebanon. “It was not possible to support the evacuation in Bint Jbeil because of ongoing hostilities.”

Jaber has had some successes in other areas where recovering records proved a challenge. When fighting reached Marjayoun, in Lebanon’s south, a team of civil servants went in under bombardment to get the civil records. The same thing happened in the Hasbaya distrcit.

Records from the southern city of Tyre are now held further up the coast in Sidon. The ministry also managed to evacuate files from Meiss El Jabal, Tibnine, Jbaa, Jouaya, and Nabatieh to Beirut. The Ministry of Interior in Beirut designated one day each week for each of the district registries to process civil documentation requests from displaced southerners.

Bint Jbeil remains the missing piece.

A Legal Trap

Lebanon does have a partial digital backup. The Finance Ministry holds electronic records for most registered properties in the south — a safety net for deeds that were formally logged. Thousands of transactions, however, were never registered.

Take the case of Ali Khreizat, known by the honorific Abu Hassan, who was displaced from his home in the village of Aitaroun in Bint Jbeil district. When the village faced Israeli bombardment, Abu Hassan left — but he left behind, in a drawer in the corner, a worn leather bag holding the bill of sale for the land he had lived on for five years.

Abu Hassan has made peace with the destruction of his house, but his far more profound worry is that he will never be able to prove he ever owned the property.

“The house I built stone by stone is dust now,” he said. “And the paper that says it was mine has gone to God.”

Even five years after moving in, his bill of sale never reached the land registry. Like many in Lebanon, Abu Hassan felt no particular rush to make bureaucratic deadlines — with the legendary inefficiencies of the Lebanese state offering little encouragement to do so. Now, he has heard from locals still in the area that even the notary’s office was destroyed, leaving diminishing hopes that a copy of his bill of sale exists anywhere.

With little enforcement of registration rules — whether the failure to do so is born of a lackadaisical ethos around bureaucratic paperwork or another reason, like wanting to dodge taxes — the problem of unregistered homes could leave people with no way to show they ever bought properties.

“This will create a major legal problem in proving ownership,” Jaber said. “Who owns what? Who protects the buyer’s right if the paper contract has disappeared?”

When Jaber took office in February 2025, he said, he found a registry system unfit for our modern, online era. He is now overseeing a full overhaul to digitize documents, a project he estimates will take six months to complete.

“A digital vault,” he said, “that no shell can reach and no fire can erase.”

Erasing the Map

The damage to land records in Bint Jbeil may run deeper than any individual document.

A key concern is the fate of Bint Jbeil’s land survey division. The technical unit holds the measurement records tying property lines to fixed geographic reference points, some dating to the French Mandate. Those points are connected, through a chain of historic surveys, to a reference coordinate in Homs, Syria, which has served as an anchor for Lebanon’s national cadastral map since the 1920s.

If those physical survey markers have been destroyed, said Riyad Al-Asaad, a civil engineer from the south, the question becomes: Who holds the GPS data that defines the boundaries? Lebanon or Israel?

The risk, Al-Asaad said, is that properties could be redrawn using Israeli measurements, a new geographic reality imposed on top of the old one.

Retired Lebanese Gen. Yaarab Sakhir sees this as part of a deliberate pattern — pointing to the Dahiya Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy named for the Beirut suburb where it was first implemented. The strategy calls for disproportionate attacks and targeting civilian infrastructure to create a high cost for Israel’s enemies, thereby creating a strong deterrent.

“Israel, when it applies the Dahiya Doctrine, as it did in Gaza, dividing it into a 55/45 split between an Israeli corridor and a Palestinian zone — it is doing the same thing now south of the Litani,” he said. “First, displacement and depopulation. Second, repeated strikes. Third, when areas fall militarily — Bint Jbeil first — they mine, demolish, bulldoze, and erase every feature to make these areas uninhabitable and prevent residents from returning.”

Official buildings, Sakhir said, become specific Israeli targets under this program.

“Israel focuses on civil registry offices and government serails,” he said. “The archive in Bint Jbeil’s serail covers not just the city but all the villages in the district.”

In its statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, the Israeli military denied targeting civilian infrastructure as such.

“The IDF,” the spokesperson said, “does not operate against the institutions of the State of Lebanon, the Lebanese Armed Forces, or Lebanese civilians, and rejects allegations of intentional harm to population registries, civil documents, land registry records, or administrative institutions, or any intent to disconnect residents from their land or harm their property rights.”

Ghosts in Their Own Country

The Interior Ministry’s internal figures name 190,000 people registered on the 2025 voter rolls for Bint Jbeil district. Add the generation of young people and children not yet on those rolls, and the number approaches a quarter million — all of them, in varying degrees, affected by the disappearance of their district’s official records.

Mohamed Sarhan, the mukhtar, or local leader, of Kfarkela, a village north of Bint Jbeil district, told The Intercept that residents and civil servants from the area reported that Israeli forces confiscated land registry records belonging to Bint Jbeil district. The fate of the civil registration records remains unclear. No one can say with certainty whether they were burned in the bombardment, taken, or simply lost in the chaos.

Dalia Boussi left Bint Jbeil under the sound of shelling. Like everyone else who fled last fall, she grabbed what she could. Boussi, a local video producer, is not in a panic; she brought her documents with her. She worries, however, about those who left without papers and about what the state must do when people return.

“There is complete destruction in the city center, as we can see in satellite images. When we return, we’ll have to redraw the borders of properties from scratch and determine what public land is and what’s private before reconstruction can begin,” Boussi said. “It’s important that the state and the relevant ministries show flexibility to ease things for citizens. Within each town and city, a crisis cell should be established specifically to follow up on property files and civil registration records, and to ensure every person has their official papers.”

She paused, then added: “Whatever happens, no one is going to lose their identity and no one is going to shave years off their age.” It was a lighthearted joke that belies an underlying reality: The people of Bint Jbeil still exist. The records may be gone, but the local residents know who they are and know what was theirs.

As Abu Hassan, the Aitaroun resident whose bill of sale was likely destroyed with his home, said, “Tomorrow’s battle won’t only be reconstruction. It will be a battle to prove we exist, with an archive that has been looted or set on fire.”