The death of a Lebanese village

BEIRUT – In a parking lot strewn with trash near Beirut’s Mediterranean coast, Hassan Yahya has taped a cardboard sign to a traffic signal pole beside the tarp tent that now serves as his home.

“Kfar Kila welcomes you,” read the lines scrawled in thin pen.

The flimsy ⁠board recalls a signpost that once stood dozens of miles away at the entrance of the centuries-old village of that name. Kfar Kila is one of about a dozen villages along Lebanon’s southern border that have been progressively flattened by waves of Israeli bombardment over the past two and a half years.