‘It’s the West Bank’: Lebanese villagers describe life inside Israel’s ‘yellow line’

Residents live in fear of nightly raids and daytime bombings from the Israeli military occupying their land For hours, Hussein Abdel al-El and his wife, Um Alaa, did not move. They sat in the bathroom in the dark, not daring to touch their phones; the faint glow of the screen might give them away to the Israeli soldiers outside. It was 1am, the Israelis were raiding their neighbours’ house, and the septuagenarian couple did not want their door knocked on next. In the next house over, Israeli soldiers had forced residents against the wall at gunpoint, zip-tying their hands. They searched the home and interrogated its occupants before putting a black bag over the head of a shepherd, Qassem al-Qadari, taking him to an Israeli military base across the border for further questioning. The Israeli soldiers were gone by daylight. And so were the elderly couple’s neighbours. All the other houses on the outskirts of Kfarchouba, a mountain-side town on the Lebanon-Israel border, had been abandoned after the raids. Kfarchouba is one of a handful of non-Shia-majority villages where the Israeli military has allowed people to stay in their homes, despite being within the “yellow line”, a