Empty Villages Are Not a Verdict: Who Decides Whether Return Is Possible in South Lebanon?
Hucen Sleiman, Visiting Fellow, Institute for Migration Studies
On a flattened plot in Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, southern Lebanon, Ghassan Fakih’s family building has been replaced by a prefabricated dwelling of about 25 square metres. The old building had four apartments for two generations, a veranda and olive trees. It took roughly ten years to complete and was destroyed during the renewed war of 2026. In the replacement unit, a kitchenette sits beside the toilet. Fakih expects to share its two bedrooms with his wife, son and daughter-in-law. “Like everyone else here, I lost my house,” he told L’Orient Today (Alameddine, 2026).
As an architect, I cannot see these as equivalent housing units. Four apartments allowed separate households to share a building and a plot without sharing every domestic routine. The prefab compresses those arrangements into two small rooms. It may provide urgently needed shelter; it cannot, simply by occupying the same land, restore the privacy, intergenerational relationships and ordinary uses of space that the demolished building accommodated. The difference between providing a roof and restoring a home is not sentimental. It can be read in the plan.
West Zawtar was chosen as the first test of a US-brokered security arrangement. Israeli troops withdrew in July and the Lebanese army deployed, under a plan linking further Israeli withdrawals to the army’s confiscation of Hezbollah weapons in designated areas (Reuters, 21 July 2026). But Israeli forces remained in nearby East Zawtar. By 8 October, around seventy families had returned to the western village, many occupying parts of damaged houses. The Council for the South had supplied sixteen prefabs, most still empty because electricity and running water were unavailable (Reuters, 8 October 2026).
The electricity problem reveals what a count of delivered houses conceals. West Zawtar’s former connection ran through East Zawtar, still occupied by Israeli forces. State workers were extending cables towards a different station instead. A network that once linked neighbouring villages could no longer function along its old route because the territory through which it passed had become a military boundary. On a drawing, rerouting a feeder is a line moved across a page. On the ground, it is new construction, access, labour and time. The prefab can arrive before the electricity that would make it usable. Mayor Abed Ezzedine judged the pilot unsuccessful against what residents had been promised. Housing had been delivered, but the conditions of residence had not followed (Reuters, 8 October 2026).
It is tempting to judge a village by how many people have come back. The seventy families counted in West Zawtar tell us who was there, not how many others might return with working water, a reliable electricity connection and safe access to their land. No household can restore those conditions on its own. In Amartya Sen’s terms, this resembles an assurance problem: people may want a shared outcome but hesitate to act until they have reason to believe that neighbours and public authorities can act too (Sen, 1967).
The sequencing of public investment can reinforce that uncertainty. Lebanon’s World Bank-supported Emergency Assistance Project (LEAP), with an initial US$250 million for damage from the 2023–24 conflict, prioritises districts for rapid service restoration according to lower damage intensity, larger pre-conflict winter populations and stronger pre-conflict economic activity. The winter figure excludes secondary residences; it is not a count of those currently present during displacement. The document also gives urgency to places where people have remained or returned. This is a defensible way to restore services quickly, but it may put the hardest-hit districts later in the queue for rapid repairs. Major reconstruction works have a separate component, with no allocation for those works in LEAP’s initial financing envelope (World Bank, 2025, pp. 9–12). LEAP did not supply West Zawtar’s prefabs, and its original assessment does not cover the renewed destruction in 2026. There is no evidence that it rejected this village. The policy question remains: how should a programme weigh the ease of restoring a service against the need to make return possible in the first place?
The answer requires naming responsibilities rather than invoking “reconstruction” as though one institution controlled it all. West Zawtar’s municipality and the Council for the South could document the needs of households considering return, including whether the temporary dwellings fit their family arrangements. The Council for Development and Reconstruction, which implements LEAP, together with the relevant ministries and funding partners, should publish which network repairs fall within funded programmes, where new routes are proposed and what services remain unfunded. In West Zawtar, that means making the replacement electricity connection and interim water arrangements publicly legible. Military access restrictions, however, cannot be resolved by engineers or municipal officials.
Displaced residents could then be asked a more useful question than whether they are back already: would they return if the electricity feeder worked, if water was available, or if a temporary home accommodated the people who would live in it? Such answers would not be binding promises to return. Nor should assistance be withdrawn from families who decide to settle elsewhere. The IASC Framework on Durable Solutions recognises that durable solutions must allow voluntary, informed choices, including local integration or settlement elsewhere. Repair should preserve these options, not predetermine them.
Some villages will remain unsafe; some families will make permanent lives elsewhere. No plausible reconstruction policy can promise to restore every building or service immediately. But before an authority uses a small returnee population to argue that a water network, road or school is no longer worth repairing, it should explain what practical possibility of return residents were offered. The prefab on Fakih’s plot and the electricity line rerouted around East Zawtar make the stakes visible. An empty village is a poor measure of what its residents want—and a still poorer excuse for deciding what they deserve.
Hucen Sleiman is an architect and researcher working on displacement, reconstruction and the politics of return in South Lebanon.