Israel is ‘disrupting entire ecosystems’, including Lebanon’s wheat crop

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Lebanese wheat production hit by war as farmlands face severe destruction in the south and Bekaa Valley.

Israel’s war on Lebanon has damaged the country’s wheat production and harmed the lives of farmers, experts told Al Jazeera.

For the last three years, Israel has been waging a war on Lebanon, where it has occupied large parts of the south and destroyed homes and infrastructure, in what some experts have said is a deliberate effort to make the land uninhabitable.

Repeated Israeli attacks have created havoc on the country’s wheat production, particularly in the south and in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where lands abandoned due to the impacts of war have increased to around 24 percent.

“They’re disrupting entire ecosystems,” Munira Khayyat, author of A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “[Israel is] advancing the possibilities of drought and desertification, basically weakening the capacity of this land to hold life.”

Since 2023, Israel has been attacking large swaths of southern Lebanon, including using chemicals like white phosphorus, in what analysts and locals said was an effort to make the ground sterile or uninhabitable. A ceasefire was brokered in 2024 by France and the United States, but Israel never stopped attacking targets in Lebanon.

On March 2, Israel escalated its war on Lebanon for the second time in under two years. Hezbollah had attacked Israel following Israel’s assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei two days earlier. The group also said it was in response to near-daily ceasefire violations by Israel.

Since then, Israel has reinvaded southern Lebanon, taking land up to 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) inside the country. Beirut and Tel Aviv signed a US-brokered framework agreement in June, which was supposed to put into motion so-called “pilot zones”. Under these pilot zones, Israeli troops would withdraw to be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces, who would also work to disarm Hezbollah.

Instead, Israeli troops have continued to level destruction in southern Lebanon, detonating…

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