After Israel’s invasion, many in southern Lebanon worry they’ll never go home

VPM | By Lauren Frayer, Jawad Rizkallah and Claire Harbage

Published April 1, 2026 at 3:15 PM EDT

Joseph Elias Issa, 56, was displaced from Kfar Houneh where he lived with his family in southern Lebanon following the Israeli invasion. A farmer, he took two mules and is now staying in a a shepherd's hut in Jezzine, about 5 miles away from his home.

JEZZINE, Lebanon — Joseph Elias Issa worries he might never return to his land.

He’s from a long line of shepherds and farmers in the town of Kfar Houneh, in southern Lebanon. In his 56 years, he has stayed put — in these rocky olive and citrus groves of his ancestors — through nearly every war Israel has fought with its neighbors. But this time feels different, he says.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon — aimed at ousting Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants from these same rocky hills — has triggered one of the biggest and fastest displacements in Lebanon’s history, affecting more than a million people, or about a fifth of the population. Israel has ordered residents to move north of the Zahrani River, below which Israeli airstrikes have destroyed bridges, homes, highways and gas stations. That evacuation zone comprises 15% to 20% of Lebanon’s territory.

A view of southern Lebanon from a hill in Jezzine, which is outside the evacuation zone. Waves of displaced people are arriving and staying or passing through the town as they leave their homes behind. Claire Harbage / NPR

Across the country, schools have been converted into shelters. People are also camping out in tents at a soccer stadium in the capital Beirut. Issa has taken refuge in a shepherd’s hut in the forest, near a waterfall. It’s on the outskirts of Jezzine, about 5 miles north of Kfar Houneh. Both are outside the evacuation zone, but their outskirts have still been hit by Israeli airstrikes.

“Airstrikes, warplanes, you hear it, you see it all around you,” Issa recalls of his harrowing drive north, in a truck carrying his mules.

What Israel is doing in southern Lebanon

First aid responders arrive at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Roummane on March 26. Abbas Fakih / AFP via Getty Images

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz says Israel’s military is “accelerating the destruction of Lebanese homes” in accordance with tactics used in Gaza, where residential areas were razed, to prevent militants from returning. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the military is creating a “security zone” designed to push anti-tank missile fire away from Israel’s northern border.

Katz says once hostilities cease, Israel will “maintain security control” over a smaller border area, up to the Litani River, encompassing about half of the larger evacuation zone, or roughly 8% to 15% of Lebanese territory. He said more than 600,000 residents who evacuated northward will be “completely prohibited south of the Litani, until the safety and security of northern Israeli residents are guaranteed.”

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Israeli officials have not said how long that might be. Hezbollah retains support among many in southern Lebanon, and is still firing rockets at northern Israel.

“You get displaced, and you leave your house, and maybe you never come back,” Issa says. “We are besieged.”

Human rights groups say forced displacement is a possible war crime

Mustafa Alloush walks between tents at a stadium where thousands of displaced people are sleeping in Beirut after fleeing their homes during the invasion. Claire Harbage / NPR

Israel is complying with international law when it warns civilians before bombing their towns. But when those warnings are so broad, covering huge swaths of the country, they “threaten to cause panic,” says Ramzi Kaiss, a Beirut-based researcher with Human Rights Watch. And when they’re open-ended, lasting indefinitely, they may amount to a war crime, he says.

“You cannot tie people’s return to their homes to some vague safety guarantee that you decide,” Kaiss says. “People must be allowed to return to their homes, once the hostilities cease.”

If people think they might never be allowed into their homes, that could influence their decision about whether or not to leave — even if in real danger, he says.

On the main shopping street in Jezzine, a mountain town just north of the evacuation zone, Haddad Cutlery has been in business since 1770. The manager, Grace Rizk, 65, prides herself on staying open “seven days a week, through every war.”

Grace Rizk, 65, works at a shop selling locally made cutlery in downtown Jezzine. After living here for 15 years she says the war will never make her leave. Claire Harbage / NPR

“We’re used to war. Right now, if an airstrike comes, I won’t budge. God will protect us,” Risk says. “In the end, we are steadfast. We will not leave.”

Lebanon has been through this before

The mayor of Jezzine, David El Helou, recalls how Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. Israeli soldiers set up a checkpoint near his house.

Back then, Israel was battling Palestinian militants. Now it’s Hezbollah.

David El Helou, the mayor of Jezzine, stands in his office overlooking the town. Claire Harbage / NPR

El Helou says this war feels “more serious” than past ones. Israel has said it wants oust militants from the area south of the Litani once and for all. It’s a task Lebanon’s own army was supposed to do, according to terms of a November 2024 ceasefire after a previous war with Israel. But it has not done so.

“We are in an uncertain situation,” El Helou says. “You can never be sure when it’s going to end, which direction it’s going to take, what’s going to happen. The fear is always there.”

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Lauren Frayer

Lauren Frayer covers South Asia for NPR News. In 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.

She has covered the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the aftermath of Sri Lanka's civil war and the power of a 19^th century short story to combat racism against Afghan refugees. In 2019, she met the Dalai Lama at his monastery in northern India, and reported on the sticky geopolitics of who decides his successor. On Mahatma Gandhi's 150^th birthday, Frayer examined how his legacy has changed.

When a 6-year-old Indian girl died of heat stroke on the U.S.-Mexico border, Frayer traced her path back to the Punjab, met her grieving grandparents – and uncovered a smuggling ring responsible for a 10,000% spike in the number of Indians detained on that border. For a year, Frayer followed an interfaith couple whose wedding plans were upended by 'Love Jihad' – an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that's now law in several Indian states.

In 2022, Frayer was awarded the Overseas Press Club of America's Lowell Thomas Award for her coverage of India's COVID-19 outbreak, and a Gracie Award for coverage of India's farmer protests.

Frayer reported on caste discrimination for a 2020 episode of NPR's Rough Translation podcast, and is working on a new podcast about love marriage in India.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Frayer was in the first batch of NPR reporters to cross from Poland into the embattled country. She chronicled the flow of Ukrainian refugees out, and military volunteers in. She also reported on the surprisingly long history of Ukrainian women in combat, a spiritual revolt among Orthodox Christians and how Ukrainian rock stars are turning their trauma into art.

Before moving to India, Frayer was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.

In Europe, Frayer profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. In the fall of 2015, Frayer spent two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.

Farther afield, she has introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.

Frayer has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.

Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

On a break from journalism, Frayer drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.

Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Frayer holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.

See stories by Lauren Frayer