Israel is ‘disrupting entire ecosystems’, including Lebanon’s wheat crop

Israel’s war on Lebanon has damaged the country’s wheat production and harmed the lives of farmers, experts told Al Jazeera. Repeated Israeli attacks have created havoc on the country’s wheat production, particularly in the south and in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where lands abandoned due to the impacts of war have increased to around 24 percent.

“They’re disrupting entire ecosystems,” Munira Khayyat, author of A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “[Israel is] advancing the possibilities of drought and desertification, basically weakening the capacity of this land to hold life.” Since 2023, Israel has been attacking large swaths of southern Lebanon, including using chemicals like white phosphorus, in what analysts and locals said was an effort to make the ground sterile or uninhabitable .

A ceasefire was brokered in 2024 by France and the United States, but Israel never stopped attacking targets in Lebanon. On March 2, Israel escalated its war on Lebanon for the second time in under two years.