Chemical Damage Wipes Out 540 Hectares Of Lebanese Land In Cross-Border Attacks

A winter border is supposed to look dull: damp fields, bare trees, the odd plume of chimney smoke hanging low over villages that have learnt to live with tension as a kind of weather. Southern Lebanon did not get dull this week. It got sprayed.

Lebanon's President Joseph Aoun has accused Israel of committing an 'environmental and health crime' after Israeli forces dispersed an unidentified substance over towns near the Blue Line, the UN-demarcated withdrawal line that separates Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Aoun's language was unusually blunt, and not just for effect.

'I have instructed the relevant agencies to take all necessary diplomatic and legal measures to respond to this aggression,' he said, calling the incident a 'clear violation' of Lebanon's sovereignty.

The details are still being pieced together—what was sprayed, exactly, and what it will do to the soil—but the immediate consequence has already landed: fear. Not the cinematic kind, but the slow dread of farmers and residents staring at orchards and scrubland and wondering whether the ground has been quietly poisoned.

Chemical Damage Wipes Out 540 Hectares—And Aoun Calls It A Crime

The Agriculture Ministry estimates the attack affected 540 hectares, a vast patchwork of land that isn't simply 'green space' in a brochure but the basis of work, food, and staying put. Annahar quoted Agriculture Minister Dr Nizar Hani as saying the ministry had received one sample so far and was expecting three more, which would be sent to laboratories in Beirut for analysis.

Hani said there were several possibilities regarding the substance used, 'most notably that they are herbicides intended to completely destroy vegetation for military purposes, making border areas barren and devoid of any natural elements'.​

Based on preliminary data from relevant authorities, Hani estimated the substance is likely 'glyphosate,' a herbicide used to destroy grasses, trees and vegetation. Annahar reported that glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and EU countries and is only allowed under very limited conditions in the United States.

Those are not the sort of regulatory footnotes that can be shrugged off—if the estimate is correct, you are talking about an agent used to kill life, not merely 'mark' territory.​

Lebanon's Ministry of Environment, in the same report, said it had received reports from Ayta ash-Shaab and surrounding areas that Israeli planes had sprayed substances suspected to be pesticides. Environment Minister Dr Tamara el Zein contacted the army commander to request samples from the sprayed sites for analysis, an attempt to bring science to a situation that is, inevitably, political.​

If you're searching for what makes this episode so unsettling, it's that it isn't only about a single day's incident. It is about the precedent: the idea that landscapes can be treated as battlefields even when the people living on them are supposed to be protected.

Chemical Damage Wipes Out 540 Hectares While UNIFIL Is Forced Indoors

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reacted with unusual sharpness. In a statement dated 2 February, UNIFIL said the Israel Defense Forces told it in advance that they would carry out an aerial activity dropping what they described as a 'non-toxic chemical substance' near the Blue Line. UNIFIL said peacekeepers could not perform normal operations along about a third of the line and only resumed after more than nine hours, adding that it supported the Lebanese Armed Forces in collecting samples to be tested for toxicity.​

UNIFIL did not dress its concern up in diplomatic lace. It called the activity 'unacceptable and contrary to resolution 1701,' warning that Israel's planned actions potentially put the health of peacekeepers and civilians at risk and raised concerns about effects on local agricultural lands and the long-term return of civilians to homes and livelihoods. The UN's own news service echoed the same point, noting UNIFIL's wider concern about civilians, farmland and whether residents can return safely.

That last bit—return—hangs over everything. A ceasefire is supposed to be about de-escalation, yet Lebanon's leadership says attacks have continued almost daily even after a ceasefire took effect in November 2024. Add chemicals to that picture and you are no longer dealing only with the arithmetic of rockets and raids. You are dealing with the slow violence that lingers in soil and groundwater, the kind that doesn't make headlines until crops fail or sickness shows up later.​

For now, Lebanon says it is waiting for lab results before deciding next steps, including possible legal action domestically or internationally. That's the procedural path. The human path—farmers looking at damaged land and calculating how many seasons they can survive—doesn't wait for paperwork.​