(CNN) — Maysa Moghnie’s childhood home in south Lebanon was the culmination of decades of work. She recounts how her father spent most of his life building the palatial family compound in the village of Burj Rahal, room after room. “All the memories we have are of him building this house,” said Moghnie, an American-Lebanese dual citizen. She now lives in Irvine, California, where she is raising her own children.
Video footage of her twin sister’s engagement party two years ago, filled with joy and music, shows what a grand home it had been. A three-story compound of traditional stone walls, it featured ornate stone-column balconies with slanted red-brick roofs. The piece de resistance was a grand split staircase that landed on a spacious terrace. In the video, the family and their guests are dancing.
All of it is gone now, destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on May 9. On paper, there was a ceasefire in place, but in reality, it was a period of sustained Israeli military assaults, and Hezbollah rocket fire. The images her sister captured after the strike show the trajectory of the projectile, which ripped through floor after floor, and left a gaping hole covered in a thick layer of white dust.
By chance, her parents and her sister had left the house just three days before the strike, because her mother couldn’t sleep. “My mom couldn’t take the drones and the airplanes and all those really harsh sounds anymore,” she said. They learned of the strike through neighbors.
Moghnie is one of several American citizens who told CNN that their family homes have been destroyed in Israel’s war against Hezbollah, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says is targeting enemy positions. Since the fighting resumed in March this year, after Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel following US-Israeli strikes on Iran, almost 18,000 homes have been destroyed, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) assessment published in June.
Even after the nominal ceasefire went into effect in April, Israeli forces pushed deeper into Lebanese territory. Most US citizens have now left southern Lebanon; the few that remain have stayed behind to work, to protect their business or because they are simply attached to their land. Moghnie’s mother-in-law is still there, for instance, her home still standing, despite damaged walls and shattered windows from nearby bombings.
So is Anwar Ghaida, an American business owner whose property was hit twice – once in 2024, and again earlier this year.
The first time made headlines. The strike killed three journalists who had been sleeping in one of Ghaida’s bungalows, which he rents out alongside a wedding venue in the village of Hasbaya. Ghaida thinks the strike was deliberate. The journalists were reporting for Al Manar, a Hezbollah-owned news channel, and Al Mayadeen, a pro-Iranian news network. They were among 18 journalists from various news outlets staying there while reporting on the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that raged between September and November 2024.
The second time, Ghaida thinks the Israelis may have made a mistake. “They hit the wedding venue, mainly the kitchen area but it was empty at the time,” he said of the late evening attack. The destruction was consequential nonetheless. “My business is ruined financially. I could do weddings for 500 people, now all my kitchen equipment and furniture is gone.”
By the time of the second attack, on March 25 this year, his business had already dwindled. With the conflict raging, “nobody was getting married” and the guesthouse was no longer popular with journalists. “When they go online and they see that it has been bombed, I think they think twice before making reservations,” he said.
Two of his children live in the US, but he doesn’t have the heart to join them. “I have my brother here with his children, my mom, my sister… I’m not going to leave them,” the 60-year-old told CNN, in a phone conversation from his home in Hasbaya. Besides, he doesn’t think he could start again at his age.
At night, Ghaida hears Israeli drones overhead, despite the ceasefire. “Last night was really bad,” he said. “You could hear shelling and big explosions in different towns.”
Homes demolished
A common refrain among Lebanese-Americans is that the situation in southern Lebanon has never been so bad. Some lived through the 2006 conflict. Others remember the last time Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. Their family homes had survived it all.
But this time, Israeli tactics have been far more aggressive in the South, soldiers have razed whole villages to the ground as they seized territory.
CNN analysis of satellite imagery this spring showed that Israeli forces have destroyed civilian architecture, including mosques, pharmacies, cafes and auto repair shops. Videos filmed by residents show controlled demolitions being carried out, while satellite imagery reveals a pattern of Israeli bulldozers and excavators demolishing homes.
The destruction is taking place behind the so-called “yellow line” drawn by Israel, which marks out a six-mile-wide strip of Lebanese territory now occupied by Israeli troops, roughly covering the same land it occupied until 2000. Residents of dozens of villages have been forcibly displaced.
Israel’s defense minister has justified the destruction as a strategic decision to remove any threat of Hezbollah. Last week, the UN human rights chief Volker Türk called on Israel to end its occupation and halt the demolition of homes.
In the US, the Arab American Civil Rights League (ACRL) in Dearborn, Michigan, is preparing to file a civil lawsuit against the United States on behalf of Americans who lost homes and property in the conflict. “The American government has an obligation to protect American citizens and American property overseas,” said Nasser Beydoun, chairman of the ACRL and lead plaintiff. “A lot of these homes [in southern Lebanon that are owned by Americans] are being destroyed with our own tax dollars. So, somebody has to be held accountable.”
The suit seeks financial compensation and wants Congress to divest US aid from the Israeli military units involved in the destruction.
Behind the legal case are roughly 180 families whose ties to Lebanon span generations, like 70-year-old Mohamad Fayyad Reda, who moved back to his ancestral land after a long career with the Bank of New York on Wall Street.
“I had a decent life in the States but I was homesick. So I retired, took my pension with me and I built myself a nice home of local bricks and stones,” Reda said.
His village of Yaroun, a mixed Christian-Muslim village, sits on the border with Israel and is currently occupied by Israeli forces. No Lebanese are allowed in. With no one to bring news from home, like many refugees, Reda has been keeping tabs on his property through satellite imagery.
“After the first or the second ceasefire, that’s when they decided to demolish the house,” he said. “And they started a systematic demolition. They demolished the whole town. There are two or three homes left which they probably used as a base, but they destroyed every single house. It looked like they are trying to be there to stay.”
Reda has since moved in with his children in Winter Springs, Florida. “Even the cemetery, my mother’s bones… It is terrible, it is terrible,” Reda said over the phone.
“This time it’s much different,” confirmed Jihad Samhat, a US army veteran who fled Aynata, a village on the wrong side of the yellow line. “We’ve been occupied several times in south Lebanon,” he said, but “Lebanese people from my town maintained a presence there throughout the [previous] occupations.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Samhat served in the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division before moving to Lebanon, where he spent more than 15 years working in demining and unexploded ordnance clearance with the United Nations. Then he opened Radio Beirut, a popular music venue, which he ran for nine years before closing it down after the Beirut port explosion in 2020.
When the fighting started, he relocated to the US with his wife, newborn child, mother-in-law and their dog.
They watched from afar as the destruction reached their village. “One day, I can see my home, and it’s still standing. It’s still there,” he explained. “But then a week after, I get another satellite image of the village and the house is not there anymore. It’s dust.”
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