Israel's toxic legacy: White phosphorus bombs on south Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon – Abbas Baalbaki, an environmental chemistry researcher at the American University in Beirut (AUB), has been looking at white phosphorous dropped by Israel onto Lebanese soil for nearly six months.

Then, one day, a sample he and a colleague were looking at burst into flames.

That should not have happened. The samples had been dropped over Kfar Kila on October 17 and collected on November 10 after it had rained in the area.

They had been “spent” for nearly a month by the time Baalbaki tested them.

He had read all the literature on white phosphorous and taken all the precautions – the samples should not have been active.

“[They] began emitting fumes,” Baalbaki recounted to Al Jazeera.

A few seconds of exposure to the fumes was enough to give Baalbaki brain fog, lack of concentration, extreme headaches, fatigue and stomach cramps for days.

“I called my colleague and asked him how he was feeling,” he said. “He had the same symptoms.

“I hadn’t understood how toxic it is.”

The white phosphorous dropped on Lebanon, Baalbaki believes, remains active, very toxic and flammable for much longer than information on the topic indicates.

He joins a chorus of Lebanese researchers and experts warning that Israel’s tactics are causing long-term and potentially irreversible damage to south Lebanon’s environment, agriculture and economy, potentially making it uninhabitable.

Baalbaki had to switch to studying “hazardous substances, foreign substances that entered our land, our water, our soil” since Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel began trading cross-border attacks in the wake of the latter’s war on Gaza.

The white phosphorus Baalbaki is testing is among the weapons Israel has attacked Lebanon’s southern villages and agricultural land with.

On October 7, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,139 people, and Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation, killing more than 32,000 people to date.

On October 8, Hezbollah launched attacks on the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, and Israel launched attacks on southern Lebanon.

By March 6, 117 phosphoric bombs had been dropped on southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). Attacks continue.

Israel claims it uses white phosphorus munitions to create a smokescreen on the battlefield. But in discussions about Israeli use of white phosphorus with experts in a range of domains in Lebanon, a common theory emerged: Israel is using it as part of a larger strategy to push out civilians and make south Lebanon uninhabitable, now and in the future.

Al Jazeera has reached out to Israeli authorities seeking comment on the researchers’ conclusions that their use of white phosphorous is deliberate but has received no response as of time of publication.

“White phosphorus isn’t like a bullet or targeted ammunition, it’s made to make land uninhabitable,” Antoine Kallab, associate director of the AUB Nature Conservation Center (AUB-NCC), said at a recent panel on white phosphorus, adding that images show its effects spread, they do not stay contained to “targeted locations”.

“[The Israeli military] knows well that white phosphorus is detrimental, that it reignites at much later instances, and the toxic effects [it has] on the environment,” Baalbaki said.

Before the war, Lebanese people could drive for a day out at Fatima’s Gate, a former border crossing close enough to Israel they could hear Hebrew being spoken on the other side. But that was not the only thing visitors noted.

“It’s very striking when you drive to the south,” Nadim Houry, the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, told Al Jazeera.

“The Lebanese side is completely barren land whereas the Israelis are cultivating down to the last inch before the border. The [Israelis] made it quasi-impossible [for the Lebanese] to plant [crops].”

Since the war began, more than 91,000 people have been forced to flee south Lebanon, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Another 60,000 are still in active conflict zones, according to the UN, many of whom cannot flee due to lack of resources or lack of mobility due to old age or disability.

Many of those people, Baalbaki told Al Jazeera, now recognise the smell of white phosphorous – which is similar to garlic.

White phosphorous – a waxy, white or yellowish solid that does not occur in nature – ignites when exposed to the oxygen in the air at temperatures above 30C (86F) and rains down streaks of dense white smoke mixed with phosphorus oxides. Photographs resemble gaseous white jellyfish flying over blazing farmlands or structures.

The fiery fragments continue to burn – on vegetation, buildings, or right through human flesh – until they are fully oxidised or deprived of oxygen.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says, “In the air, white phosphorus reacts rapidly with oxygen to produce relatively harmless chemicals within minutes,” while in the earth, it “may stick to particles and be changed within a few days to less harmful compounds”.

Those words have not been revised since 2014.

Lebanese researchers and academics who are studying the effects of white phosphorus now say there is little useful data available to determine how white phosphorus will impact soil, plants and animals in the long run.

The only groups to have conducted such studies are those who provide the white phosphorus, the US military, and some of its victims, researchers from Gaza in this case.

Israel’s use of white phosphorous in this war has been criticised by human rights organisations.

On March 19, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch released a memorandum that cited Israel’s use of white phosphorus on Gaza and south Lebanon as one in “a wide range of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law” and called on the Biden administration to “immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel”.

But when it comes to Lebanon, “this isn’t something new”, Mohammad Hussein, the head of South Lebanon’s Agricultural Union, told Al Jazeera.

“The Israeli army targeted civilians with white phosphorus in the 1982 invasion and since October 7 there has been a lot of white phosphorus used on forests, plantations, olive and fruit trees.

“Maybe they want to push civilians away by terrorising them.”

The use of white phosphorus has been described to Al Jazeera as “environmental terrorism” and “psychological warfare”.

Over the last 46 years or more, experts and officials say, a pattern has become clear.

“I would argue that they’ve been trying to do this since the late 1970s, with this idea of creating a buffer zone on Lebanese territory,” Houry said.

Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, its occupation from 1985 to 2000, and the wars between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and 2023-2024 have eroded the land on the Lebanese side of the border.

For more than a decade, Houry led HRW’s Beirut office, where he documented human rights violations by both Lebanese and Israeli parties and wrote the seminal 2007 HRW report, Why They Died, Civilian Casualties in Lebanon During the 2006 War.

Houry said history shows that Israel’s military has doctrines to “disproportionately harm not only combatants but the communities” these combatants come from.

“It’s been the southern Lebanese who have paid the heaviest price over four decades,” Houry said. “The clear example was the use of cluster munitions in 2006, which really sought to render southern Lebanon uninhabitable.”

In the final days of the 2006 war, Israel hit wide swathes of southern Lebanon with between 2.6 and 4 million cluster munitions, “particularly during the last three days of the conflict when both sides knew a settlement was imminent”, according to Why They Died.

In 2013, after rights groups accused it of war crimes in its 2008-2009 Gaza offensive, the Israeli military said it would start limiting its use of white phosphorus as smokescreen munitions in built-up areas, with unspecified exceptions.

Israel’s later use of white phosphorus in Gaza in 2012 “was likely used to harass and terrorise residents to clear neighbourhoods, rather than as a ‘smoke screen’, as the Israeli military had claimed”, Elizabeth Breiner, programme manager at Forensic Architecture, a research group investigating state violence and human rights violations, told Al Jazeera by email.

And that pattern of behaviour continues today, Houry said, with the use of white phosphorus “to create fires along the border” in south Lebanon.

More than a decade later, international rights groups and local monitors are documenting the Israeli military’s continued use of white phosphorus. In October 2023, human rights groups like HRW and Amnesty International documented Israel’s use of white phosphorus in dense civilian areas in Gaza and farmlands and residential zones in south Lebanon.

“This has been in their playbook for many years,” Houry continued. “I think it’s become clear over the years. It was crystal clear in 2006 and it’s crystal clear today.”

“Of course, this is not the result solely of white phosphorus, but it’s important to understand that white phosphorus is one of the tools that is being used for that aim,” Kallab said.

Data collected by local and international bodies, including Public Works Studio in Beirut and international crisis mapping organisation the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), and mapped by Public Works and AUB’s Urban Lab show that Israeli white phosphorus shells have struck at least 32 towns and villages since October – ACLED and the head of the south’s agricultural union counted 36 – spanning nearly the entirety of Lebanon’s 100km (62-mile) southern border.

Al Jazeera spoke to residents and officials from six different villages along the border by phone. All said they had seen or had direct family who had seen white phosphorus attacks on their towns first-hand.

A researcher from Public Works Studio said that early attacks had primarily targeted farmlands and forests, though residential areas in villages like al-Khiam and Kfar Kila had also been hit.

Among the locations hit, a few have been targeted repeatedly. Villages like Kfar Kila, Meiss el-Jabal and Hula have all been struck on seven or more occasions by white phosphorus munitions. An occasion may include multiple white phosphorus shells.

Diana Salloum, a researcher focused on Lebanon’s agricultural sector at the Beirut-based Synaps Network, told Al Jazeera that she was unsure of how systematic and intentional Israel’s use of white phosphorus is. “I can tell you that these are agricultural lands, and not small agricultural lands, [which] means a large supply of food.

“You displace people by cutting their access to resources. That’s what is happening.”

Tannous Mouawad, a security analyst and retired brigadier-general with the Lebanese Army, told Al Jazeera: “Israel is trying to create a buffer zone [that is] nonviable to humans and nature to make this land uninhabitable and impossible to cultivate.”

As of late March, no deaths have been publicly recorded from white phosphorus attacks. A lethal dose for humans needs to be between 50 to 100 milligrams.

“White phosphorus is causing respiratory damages, organ failures, life-changing injuries – including burns [that are] difficult to treat – and damage [to] crops and trees, mainly olive trees,” Mouawad said.

The injuries are severely painful and necrotic, with zombie-like wounds on parts of the body hit by phosphoric oxides – a scatter of deep circular red holes surrounded by jaundice-yellow skin. The oxides can reignite in the skin unless the burns are covered immediately and kept covered to prevent any exposure to oxygen.

A report by the Beirut-based research and advocacy group The Legal Agenda found that more than 100 people had been transferred to hospitals in south Lebanon with difficulty breathing or phosphoric burns as of November 21.

Other symptoms can include severe respiratory problems, acute lung injury, severe eye damage, second or third-degree burns, or even severe bone diseases, such as the necrotic “Lucifer’s jaw”.

Enough exposure would lead to a “slow and very painful death, whether it’s through trouble breathing, or through the burns,” Kallab told Al Jazeera.

The horrific impacts of white phosphorus wounds and symptoms have struck fear into many locals.

“We’ll go back and check the [agricultural] lands if there’s a truce,” Merhi Kassem, a resident who lives in the middle of the village Kfar Hamam in southeastern Lebanon, told Al Jazeera by phone. “Otherwise, I won’t leave my house.”

Ali Attieh, the head of Kfar Hamam’s Cooperative of Farmers, recalled when a white phosphorus shell hit near his village. “There was lots of smoke and you couldn’t breathe,” he said.

Attieh said that Israel not only wanted to drive out residents but to “remove the possibility” of return by destroying “the fruit and the people” of south Lebanon. Some residents, like Attieh, have remained defiant in the face of the destruction.

“This is our land,” Attieh told Al Jazeera. “You’ve got to hit me with all you’ve got.”

Be they steadfast or fortunate, not all of the south’s residents can carry on.

The damage done by white phosphorus and other weapons to south Lebanon’s environment is having a profound, and some fear irreversible, effect on local agriculture.

South Lebanon is a major agricultural region, accounting for a third of Lebanon’s olive oil production, much of that land straddles the border. Some of the olive trees there are thousands of years old.

“[The Israelis] hit us a lot. At first, it was all forests and olive trees,” Milad el-Alam, the municipal head of Rmeish, a majority-Christian border village, told Al Jazeera. “They’ve destroyed 15,000 olive trees and entire lands.”

To date, nearly 10 million square metres (108 million square feet) of land in south Lebanon has been burned by white phosphorus and other incendiary weapons, according to CNRS. But the fear among southerners is twofold. After surviving the initial attacks, there is concern over the potential impacts weapons like white phosphorus will have on the soil and local water sources.

Baalbaki said, despite the panic about white phosphorus in the soil, most of the oxides react within the first few hours and the area of impact is relatively limited per shell and food that has not come in direct contact with the oxides should be safe to consume if properly washed.

Locals told Al Jazeera that they fear eating or drinking from sources contaminated by white phosphorus and other incendiary weapons while farmers are concerned about selling potentially harmful produce.

“It’s a silent killer where the perception is that it doesn’t kill you on the spot, but it will infiltrate your food, it will infiltrate your water, it will infiltrate your air and damage you progressively over the years,” Kallab said. “It’s very much about making land unlivable for both humans, fauna and flora.”

“Is white phosphorus, in the quantities we’re seeing, harmful [if it stays] for a long time in the soils of this country? The answer is yes,” AUB agronomy professor Rami Zurayk said, referencing data from researchers in Gaza at a recent panel discussion on white phosphorus at AUB.

But until a ceasefire is put in place and further studies can be undertaken, the wider impacts on the soil are hard to determine.

“Who knows how toxic [the soil] is?” Baalbaki said. “It’s never been assessed before.”

Some farmers are fleeing the south for physical safety. Others are giving up after too many years of hardship, too many setbacks. The war has left south Lebanon’s entire agricultural sector in limbo.

Since the war started 63 percent of farmers in the south who have struggled to safely access their crops left their farms, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Many are “completely leaving their towns and leaving their lands behind”, Salloum said.

While the long-term effects of white phosphorus and other weapons on the land need to be studied, there is an immediate economic crisis for the people of south Lebanon where agriculture accounts for up to 80 percent of the local GDP, according to the UN.

Even before the war began, farmers were struggling to get by.

The currency began to freefall in 2019, as Lebanon suffered one of the worst economic crises in modern history, according to the World Bank. The lira lost more than 95 percent of its value, though recently it has stabilised at around 89,700 lira to $1 (the precrisis exchange rate was 15,000 to $1).

Before 2019, farmers could buy what they needed on credit and pay suppliers after the harvest. But today, farmers have to pay upfront, in cash, and everything has become more expensive as the economy has become dollarised. “The [old] system has died since the crisis,” Salloum said.

South Lebanon’s total exports are valued at around $94m a year, according to the Lebanese Central Bank. During the war of 2006, “the losses from agriculture was $280m”و Salloum said. “And in 2006, we didn’t have an economic crisis.”

“Economically speaking, we’re paralysed,” Hussein, the head of South Lebanon’s Agricultural Union, told Al Jazeera. “From the border to Sidon [about 62km or 38.5 miles from the border], people are very careful of their moves. There is no growth economically and everyone is afraid.”

Driving out civilians, burning down their agricultural lands, poisoning their soil and water, destroying their homes, dropping cluster munitions, and paralysing the local economy are part of what they say are efforts to make south Lebanon uninhabitable today, tomorrow and long into the future.

“The target is to create a wasteland in the south,” Baalbaki said.

“It’s to break the link between the people and their ties to the ground, their nature, their trees. The target is to tell them that this is an inhospitable area and to leave it.”