Lebanon Faces a Colossal Disposal Task: Clearing War Debris

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has left behind lots of rubble. Some experts fear that much of it will be dumped into the environment without controls.

For the past three months, Ahmad Mehdi has been living in half a home. In October, an Israeli airstrike on the building next to his in a neighborhood south of Beirut blew out most of the kitchen and living room of his fifth-floor apartment.

When he looks at what remains of the building next door, he is overwhelmed by the scale of destruction. “Eleven floors worth of rubble have collapsed into two,” he said. “All you see are rocks and dirt and steel and bits of iron.”

Like many Lebanese whose homes and businesses suffered damage during more than a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah, Mr. Mehdi, 20, and his family are eager to start repairs, but they cannot do much until the rubble is cleared. “That is our biggest problem: Where do we put the debris?” he said.

As Lebanon starts the slow process of rebuilding after a tenuous cease-fire between Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, and Israel, it is struggling to figure out how to clean up the vast amounts of rubble left scattered around Beirut, the capital. A report from the National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon said a preliminary estimate of damages showed that nearly 3,000 buildings in the Dahiya area south of the city had been destroyed, severely damaged or extensively damaged.

More than 3,700 people in Lebanon were killed during the war, which started when Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based militia, began firing on Israeli positions after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023. The conflict displaced about 1.3 million people in Lebanon, wiped out an estimated billions of dollars from the economy and devastated large portions of southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, as well as the densely populated areas south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway.

Tamara Elzein, an author of the report, said that initial assessments showed that Israeli attacks on buildings, houses, factories, roads and other infrastructure across the country had created an estimated 350 million cubic feet of rubble. Substantial reconstruction cannot begin until all of that is cleaned up. In Gaza, where Israel has been fighting a war to root out Hamas militants, nearly 60 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the besieged enclave. Hezbollah rocket attacks in Israel have also destroyed or damaged homes in border communities and caused wildfires in farmland.