MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
There's a month-old ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, but Israel's military has been crossing the border and using bulldozers to demolish houses in southern Lebanon, including the homes of U.S. citizens. Residents barred from the area have resorted to searching satellite images to find out if their homes are gone. NPR's Jane Arraf and Jawad Rizkallah bring us this report.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: The images unfold slowly on Mazen Farah's phone - satellite views of the southern Lebanese village of Yaroun. A bit fuzzy, but still clear enough to see what's happening.
MAZEN FARAH: So this is what we saw from the satellite. So it shows that it has been destroyed.
ARRAF: He first downloaded the image three days ago. It showed the two-story stone house his father built after years of working in the Gulf was gone. Israel invaded south Lebanon in March amid renewed fighting with Hezbollah. It launched airstrikes and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents who are prevented from even visiting. After a ceasefire last month, it sent in bulldozers to demolish more buildings, saying it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.
M FARAH: This is the church. And this is the part that was completely destroyed a couple of days ago. Completely wiped out.
ARRAF: It's risky, even for people in neighboring villages, to take video of Yaroun. So residents have pooled their money to try to get high-resolution satellite images from commercial providers.
M FARAH: Either somebody - each time someone will buy it or we get to have the...
(SOUNDBITE OF CELLPHONE RINGING)
M FARAH: ...Funds in a certain account and try to buy.
ARRAF: Each image they obtain costs at least $112. In Mazen Farah's apartment in Beirut, his 75-year-old father, Hanna Farah, has only a photo of his former home, with its terracotta roof and roses in the garden.
HANNA FARAH: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: "We worked hard to build the house and raise our children," he says. Mazen Farah said he had security cameras running constantly around the house. None showed any fighters. Geryes Saloum, a municipality employee, built a three-bedroom home in Yaroun 10 years ago. On the day we meet him at Farah's house, his home was still standing, according to the images, but all the houses around it were destroyed.
GERYES SALOUM: (Through interpreter) Every day, I wait for a picture to arrive from Yaroun. I mean, when Mazen's house was destroyed three days ago, I didn't sleep.
ARRAF: Many of the properties in Yaroun and other villages are owned by American citizens, Lebanese who left during Israel's 18-year-long occupation of south Lebanon in the '80s and '90s. In upstate New York, Hanna Hanna saw from a satellite image that his 92-year-old mother's house had been razed.
HANNA HANNA: Oh, our house has gone because we saw it being demolished in the first satellite image. There's nothing there. It's just rubble.
ARRAF: He says they expected it to happen, but still...
H HANNA: You know, it's - you get this image. You see it for the first time, and your heart sinks, you know?
ARRAF: The next image they saw showed two more houses destroyed - and this...
H HANNA: We can still see the bulldozer in the image. On the left of the image, the last image we received, we can see the bulldozer still there.
ARRAF: He says the house he had just started building was also demolished, including a $30,000 stone wall. His brother Naoum Hanna, his partner in an upstate New York construction company, says he spent more than $470,000 he and his wife worked for years to earn on a house they plan to retire to.
NAOUM HANNA: We confirmed yesterday through a blurry image - satellite image - that we know it's gone.
ARRAF: His brother Hanna says, as an American, the use of tax dollars to fund the Israeli military is a bitter pill to swallow.
H HANNA: Those are properties of American taxpayers who are very active in America, who work hard, pay their dues. And American bombs and American bulldozers destroyed them.
ARRAF: He says no one spends money on their dream home and then uses it to store weapons. Some spent much more. We reached Qasem Fares in Panama.
QASEM FARES: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: He's 68. He left southern Lebanon, essentially penniless, at the age of 15, making a fortune in Central America. He spent more than $10 million on a house in Bint Jbeil, near Yaroun, where he spent summers with his children and grandchildren. Twelve bedrooms, a huge swimming pool, a cinema, gyms - proof he had made good. All of it gone.
FARES: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: "My son sent me the picture and told me what happened," he says. "I cried all day when I saw it."
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Beirut. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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