Bint Jbeil records risk vanishing amid Israel’s war

In Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil district, residents and officials say Israel’s campaign that flattened homes and bulldozed key buildings may have destroyed or confiscated civil registration files and land deeds, leaving hundreds of thousands of people potentially unab

For weeks, Lebanon’s Finance Minister Yassine Jaber has been trying to do something that sounds simple until you try it: recover civil records from Bint Jbeil. The satellite imagery may show the walls of the Grand Serail still standing, but Jaber said satellites “don’t have keys to doors.”

On the ground, those doors have remained out of reach. Residents of the 36 villages of the Bint Jbeil district describe burn marks at sites where official records were kept—civil registration files. land deeds. and the paper infrastructure that makes a city’s legal existence legible. In a place where people fled under Israel’s evacuation orders, the fear is not only losing homes. It is losing the proof that homes were ever theirs.

As the war rips through southern Lebanon. local officials and Lebanese government representatives warn that the destruction. confiscation. or loss of civil documents could permanently detach some families from the property they left behind. The Interior Ministry’s internal figures. as cited in the reporting. name 190. 000 people registered on the 2025 voter rolls for Bint Jbeil district. Adding young people and children not yet on those rolls brings the affected population close to a quarter million.

“The Ministry of Interior has not yet been able to obtain the civil registry records for Bint Jbeil district.”

The missing records trace back to the Grand Serail. the old administrative building that houses land deeds for thousands of families across more than 20 villages in the district. Since Israeli forces moved in, Lebanese authorities have not been able to reach it. They have made efforts through the International Committee of the Red Cross. with requests to the so-called Mechanism Committee that administers the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

A ministry spokesperson said the Interior Ministry could not retrieve the records because the ICRC has not received approval from the Mechanism Committee. which includes Israel. to enter the area. The request. the spokesperson said. was submitted in order to retrieve the records and transfer them to the Interior Ministry in Beirut.

In New York. an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson declined to comment on the ICRC request and said Hezbollah installs military assets in civilian areas. The IDF statement also said its “directives permit the execution of clearing operations of structures used for military purposes. or when there is an essential operational necessity that justifies the full or partial demolition of a structure. in accordance with international law.” It added that destruction of civilian infrastructure in war is permissible only under narrow conditions. including that there be a military purpose and that the destruction be incidental to that military purpose.

The statement did not address whether Bint Jbeil’s civil archive was targeted. But residents and officials describe the result as a looming legal severing—proof disappearing along with the buildings that stored it.

Jaber described how the effort unfolded for four weeks: calls to Lebanese army command. coordination with military intelligence. repeated attempts to reach the Mechanism Committee. and appeals to UNIFIL. the United Nations force in Lebanon. The goal was to establish a corridor for a single journey to Bint Jbeil to recover the records.

“We tried everything,” Jaber said. “But Bint Jbeil today is a forbidden zone.”

That effort has not yet succeeded. Even the ICRC, a crucial link in trying to retrieve documents without sending in other forces, has been blocked. An ICRC Lebanon spokesperson. Sally Aoun. said the ICRC supported the Ministry of Interior in the evacuation of some civil registries in southern Lebanon at the beginning of the escalation. but “it was not possible to support the evacuation in Bint Jbeil because of ongoing hostilities.”.

The concern extends beyond the civil registry itself to the way property boundaries are technically pinned to the map. A civil engineer from the south, Riyad Al-Asaad, raised a specific fear: the land survey division in Bint Jbeil. That unit holds measurement records tying property lines to fixed geographic reference points, including some dating to the French Mandate. Those points are connected through a chain of historic surveys to a reference coordinate in Homs. Syria. which has served as an anchor for Lebanon’s national cadastral map since the 1920s.

If physical survey markers have been destroyed, Al-Asaad said the question becomes who holds the GPS data that defines the boundaries—Lebanon or Israel. He warned that properties could be redrawn using Israeli measurements, with a new geographic reality imposed over the older map.

Retired Lebanese Gen. Yaarab Sakhir described the broader pattern he believes these record losses fit into. He pointed to the Dahiya Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy named for the Beirut suburb where it was first implemented. Under Sakhir’s description. it involves disproportionate attacks and targeting civilian infrastructure to raise the cost of the conflict for Israel’s enemies.

“Israel. when it applies the Dahiya Doctrine. as it did in Gaza. dividing it into a 55/45 split between an Israeli corridor and a Palestinian zone — it is doing the same thing now south of the Litani. ” Sakhir said. “First, displacement and depopulation. Second, repeated strikes. Third. when areas fall militarily — Bint Jbeil first — they mine. demolish. bulldoze. and erase every feature to make these areas uninhabitable and prevent residents from returning.”.

Sakhir said official buildings become specific targets under this program. “Israel focuses on civil registry offices and government serails,” he said. “The archive in Bint Jbeil’s serail covers not just the city but all the villages in the district.”

The IDF again rejected the idea that it targets civilian infrastructure as such. saying it does not operate against institutions of the State of Lebanon. the Lebanese Armed Forces. or Lebanese civilians. and rejects allegations of intentional harm to population registries. civil documents. land registry records. or administrative institutions.

For families on the move, the danger is not hypothetical. A legal system depends on documentation—on records that can be consulted, copied, or verified. In Lebanon’s southern districts. where registration rules have been applied unevenly. that dependence becomes more brutal when war destroys the paper trail.

Lebanon does have a partial digital backup. The Finance Ministry holds electronic records for most registered properties in the south as a safety net for deeds that were formally logged. But thousands of transactions were never registered. And that gap is where the fear concentrates.

Ali Khreizat, known as Abu Hassan, was displaced from his home in the village of Aitaroun in Bint Jbeil district. When the village faced Israeli bombardment, he left—yet he left behind a worn leather bag in a drawer that held his bill of sale for land he had lived on for five years.

Abu Hassan has come to terms with the destruction of his house, but the worry he cannot shake is whether he will ever prove he owned the property.

“Who protects the buyer’s right if the paper contract has disappeared?”

He said. “The house I built stone by stone is dust now. ” and added. “And the paper that says it was mine has gone to God.” Even five years after moving in. his bill of sale had not reached the land registry. Like many in Lebanon, he said he felt no particular urgency about bureaucratic deadlines, pointing to the state’s inefficiencies.

Now, locals in the area have told him that even the notary’s office was destroyed, leaving him with diminishing hopes that a copy of his bill of sale exists anywhere.

“This will create a major legal problem in proving ownership,” Jaber said. “Who owns what? Who protects the buyer’s right if the paper contract has disappeared?”

When Jaber took office in February 2025, he said he found the registry system unfit for a modern, online era. He is overseeing a full overhaul meant to digitize documents, a project he estimated will take six months to complete. He described it as “a digital vault,” something “that no shell can reach and no fire can erase.”.

Still, even with a digital vault in progress, what people in Bint Jbeil describe as a missing archive threatens to turn reconstruction into a maze of disputes.

The Interior Ministry’s internal figures, the reporting says, list 190,000 people registered on the 2025 voter rolls for Bint Jbeil district. Mohamed Sarhan. the mukhtar of Kfarkela. a village north of Bint Jbeil district. told the reporting that residents and civil servants from the area reported that Israeli forces confiscated land registry records belonging to Bint Jbeil district. The fate of the civil registration records remains unclear—no one can say with certainty whether they were burned. taken. or lost amid chaos.

Dalia Boussi, a local video producer, left Bint Jbeil last fall under shelling, bringing her documents. She said she is not in panic; she is worried about people who left without papers and about what the state will do when residents return.

“There is complete destruction in the city center, as we can see in satellite images. When we return. we’ll have to redraw the borders of properties from scratch and determine what public land is and what’s private before reconstruction can begin. ” Boussi said. “It’s important that the state and the relevant ministries show flexibility to ease things for citizens. Within each town and city. a crisis cell should be established specifically to follow up on property files and civil registration records. and to ensure every person has their official papers.”.

She paused, then joked about identity and age records: “Whatever happens, no one is going to lose their identity and no one is going to shave years off their age.”

Her humor lands on top of a painful reality: the people of Bint Jbeil still exist. Their records may be gone, but Boussi and others know who they are and what was theirs.

For Abu Hassan, the fight after the fighting will not just be about rebuilding walls.

“Tomorrow’s battle won’t only be reconstruction,” he said. “It will be a battle to prove we exist, with an archive that has been looted or set on fire.”

Bint Jbeil Lebanon civil registry records land deeds property ownership Israel-Lebanon ceasefire ICRC Mechanism Committee reconstruction Dahiya Doctrine