Israel's path of destruction in southern Lebanon raises fears of an attempt to create a buffer zone

BEIRUT (AP) — Perched on a hilltop a short walk from the Israeli border, the tiny southern Lebanese village of Ramyah has almost been wiped off the map. In a neighboring village, satellite photos show a similar scene: a hill once covered with houses, now reduced to a gray smear of rubble.

Israeli warplanes and ground forces have blasted a trail of destruction through southern Lebanon the past month. The aim, Israel says, is to debilitate the Hezbollah militant group, push it away from the border and end more than a year of Hezbollah fire into northern Israel.

Even United Nations peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in the south have come under fire from Israeli forces, raising questions over whether they can remain in place.

More than 1 million people have fled bombardment, emptying much of the south. Some experts say Israel may be aiming to create a depopulated buffer zone, a strategy it has already deployed along its border with Gaza.

Some conditions for such a zone appear already in place, according to an Associated Press analysis of satellite imagery and data collected by mapping experts that show the breadth of destruction across 11 villages next to the border.

The Israeli military has said the bombardment is necessary to destroy Hezbollah tunnels and other infrastructure it says the group embedded within towns. The blasts have also destroyed homes, neighborhoods and sometimes entire villages, where families have lived for generations.

Israel says it aims to push Hezbollah far enough back that its citizens can return safely to homes in the north, but Israeli officials acknowledge they don’t have a concrete plan for ensuring Hezbollah stays away from the border long term. That is a key focus in attempts by the United States to broker a cease-fire.

Orna Mizrahi, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said Israel's immediate aim is not to create a buffer zone — but that might change.

“Maybe we’ll have no other choice than staying there until we have an arrangement that promises us that Hezbollah will not come back to the zone,” she said.

Troops pushed into southern Lebanon on Oct. 1, backed by heavy bombardment that has intensified since.

Using satellite images provided by Planet Labs PBC, AP identified a line of 11 villages — all within 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) of Lebanon's border with Israel — that have been severely damaged in the past month, either by strikes or detonations of explosives laid by Israeli soldiers.

Analysis found the most intense damage in the south came in villages closest to the border, with between 100 and 500 buildings likely destroyed or damaged in each, according to Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Der Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in damage assessments.

In Ramyah, barely a single structure still stands on the village’s central hilltop, after a controlled detonation that Israeli soldiers showed themselves carrying out in videos posted on social media. In the next town over, Aita al-Shaab — a village with strong Hezbollah influence — bombardment turned the hilltop with the highest concentration of buildings into a gray wasteland of rubble.

In other villages, the damage is more selective. In some, bombardment tore scars through blocks of houses; in others, certain homes were crushed while their neighbors remained intact.

Another controlled detonation leveled much of the village of Odeissah, with an explosion so strong it set off earthquake alerts in Israel.

In videos of the blast, Lubnan Baalbaki, conductor of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, watched in disbelief as his parents’ house — containing the art collection and a library his father had built up for years — was destroyed.

“This house was a project and a dream for both of my parents,” he told the AP. His parents’ graves in the garden are now lost.

When asked whether its intention was to create a buffer zone, Israel’s military said it was “conducting localized, limited, targeted raids based on precise intelligence" against Hezbollah targets. It said Hezbollah had “deliberately embedded” weapons in homes and villages.

Israeli journalist Danny Kushmaro even helped blow up a home that the military said was being used to store Hezbollah ammunition. In a television segment, Kushmaro and soldiers counted down before they pressed a button, setting off a massive explosion.

Videos posted online by Israel’s military and individual soldiers show Israeli troops planting flags on Lebanese soil. Still, Israel has not built any bases or managed to hold a permanent presence in southern Lebanon. Troops appear to move back and forth across the border, sometimes under heavy fire from Hezbollah.

October has been the deadliest month of 2024 for the Israeli military, with around 60 soldiers killed.

The bombardment has been punctuated by Israeli attacks on U.N. troops and the Lebanese Army — forces which, under international law, are supposed to keep the peace in the area. Israel has long complained that their presence has not prevented Hezbollah from building up its infrastructure across the south.

Israel denies targeting either force.

The Lebanese military has said at least 11 of its soldiers were killed in eight Israeli strikes, either at their positions or while assisting evacuations.

The peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, said its forces and infrastructure have been harmed at least 30 times since late September, blaming Israeli military fire or actions for about 20 of them, “with seven being clearly deliberate.”

A rocket likely fired by Hezbollah or an allied group hit UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura on Tuesday, causing some minor injuries, said UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti.

UNIFIL has refused to leave southern Lebanon, despite calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for them to go.

Experts warn that could change if peacekeepers come under greater fire.

“If you went from the U.N. taking casualties to the U.N. actually taking fatalities,” some nations contributing troops may “say ‘enough is enough,’ and you might see the mission start to crumble,” said Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group.

International cease-fire efforts appear to be centered on implementing U.N. Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

It specified that Israeli forces would fully withdraw from Lebanon while the Lebanese army and UNIFIL — not Hezbollah — would be the exclusive armed presence in a zone about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the border.

But the resolution was not fully implemented. Hezbollah never left the border zone, and Lebanon accuses Israel of continuing to occupy small areas of its land and carrying out frequent military overflights above its territory.

During a recent visit to Beirut, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein said a new agreement was needed to enforce Resolution 1701.

Israel could be trying to pressure an agreement into existence through the destruction wreaked in southern Lebanon.

Yossi Yehoshua, military correspondent for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote that the military needs to “entrench further its operational achievements” to push Hezbollah, the Lebanese government and mediating countries “to accept an end (of the war) under conditions that are convenient for Israel.”

Some Lebanese fear that means an occupation of parts of the south, 25 years after Israel ended its occupation there.

Lebanese parliamentarian Mark Daou, a critic of both Hezbollah and of Israel’s military operations in Lebanon, said he believed Israel was trying to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities and turn the Lebanese public “against the will to resist Israeli incursions.”

Gowan, of the International Crisis Group, said one aim of Resolution 1701 was to give the Lebanese army enough credibility that it, not Hezbollah, would be seen “as the legitimate defender” in the south.

“That evaporates if they become (Israel’s) gendarmerie of southern Lebanon,” he said.

Frankel reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Lujain Jo in Beirut contributed to this report.

For more Middle East news: https://apnews.com/hub/middle-east

This Oct. 24 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Mhaibib in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Sept. 26, 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Mhaibib in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Oct. 24 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Aita al-Shaab in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Sept. 26, 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Aita al-Shaab in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Oct. 24 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Blida in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Sept. 26, 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Blida in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Sept. 26, 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Ramyah in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

This Oct. 24 2024, satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the village of Ramyah in southern Lebanon. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

MADRID (AP) — It’s the eyes peering from the canvases that get him, their gaze piercing the boundary between art and life.

That’s why acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville prefers to visit Spain’s Prado Museum during its opening hours — even though he's been invited to browse anytime as part of a month-long literary fellowship.

Still, he doesn't want to be alone with the multitude of watchers hanging from the walls of the labyrinthine galleries.

“I don’t like coming here after hours, it’s too eerie. The pictures, they look at you,” Banville said turning away from the glare of Diego Velázquez himself looking down from the Spaniard's greatest work, “ Las Meninas.”

The huge 17th-century painting shows the Infanta Margarita, her young ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, a buffoon with a dog, a nun, a mysterious man exiting through a door, a mirror reflecting King Phillip IV and his queen — and also Velazquez, stepping back from his canvas and looking straight down at the viewer.

The painting — a paragon of Baroque sophistication — has fascinated generations of artists. Banville, with his love of poetic detail, is no different.

“I find that ‘Las Meninas’ is always a surprise to me, and a challenge,” Banville told The Associated Press during a recent stroll through the Prado.

“It’s the enigma of it, the strangeness of it. Every time I look at it, it becomes stranger again," he said, surrounded by throngs of museumgoers. “Velázquez looks at you, saying, ‘Look what I did. Would you have been able to do anything like this?'"

Banville's privileged access to the Prado — including after hours and off-limits areas such as its restoration workshops — over the past month is part of the museum’s “Writing the Prado” program.

The program, sponsored by the Loewe Foundation, started last year and counts Nobel prize winners John Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as the Mexican American author Chloe Aridjis, as its first fellows.

The fellows immerse themselves in the museum over four weeks before producing a short work of fiction published by the Prado with the editorial guidance of Granta en español magazine.

Banville, author of the Booker prize winner “The Sea,” the recent “The Singularities,” as well as popular crime novels, has an inkling of what he will write following his deep dive into the Old Masters.

“I haven’t worked out the details," he said — but it's about someone going through the gallery and about those piercing eyes.

“The eyes follow him. And I think ... all his life ... he’d had the fear of being found out, and all these eyes seem to know it. And I think Velázquez says ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’”

While his mesmerizing novel “The Book of Evidence” hinges on a failed art heist, the storyteller’s relationship to painting goes back to a restless teenager tempted to pick up the brush in addition to the pen.

“I couldn’t draw, had no sense of color, no grasp of draftsmanship. These are distinct disadvantage if you want to be a painter," Banville said with a wry chuckle. "I painted some dreadful pictures, oh God. If they ever come out I am doomed.”

From then on, he says, the sentence was his brushstroke.

Over 3.2 million people visited the Prado last year to admire an impressive collection of the artwork of Spain’s golden age.

The 4,000 artworks on display, including the world's largest collections of works by Velázquez, Rubens, Bosch, Goya, El Greco and Titian — along with gems by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Bruegel the Elder — are just a sample of the 34,000 items in its trove.

The Prado offers solace for Banville and others who need an escape from the modern world — taking pictures either with a phone or camera is strictly prohibited.

"It's wonderful. I see people going around other galleries just taking photos, and I want to say to them, ‘look at the bloody picture’!” Banville said. “All the museums in the world should bring in that rule."

While Banville considers that Goya’s sinister “Black Paintings” are “overdone,” the alluring ladies of Rubens’ “The Garden of Love,” who he jokingly says “are made of bread dough,” have won him over.

Another Velázquez catches his eye — or perhaps it's Banville who is noticed by the leering drunkards in “The Feast of Bacchus,” where the god of wine revels with some men well into their cups.

In Madrid, Banville has also allowed himself his first month off from a daily writing routine that he figures he's maintained since he started to scrawl out stories at age 12.

“This little voice inside of me said ‘John, take the month off. Just enjoy’,” he said. “My family in Ireland was telling me just how dreadful the weather was, and I am sitting here having a glass of wine in the sun. I don’t dare tell them.”

At age 78 and widowed three years ago, he is not sure how many more books he has left in him. But one thing he is not worried about is artificial intelligence usurping the place of true artists.

“A work of art is a very rare thing. There are attempts at works of art, and there are people who imagine that they’ve made a work of art, but they’re just kitsch. Real art won’t succumb to AI,” he said.

“I find works of art to be alive.”

Novelist John Banville poses between Tiziano's 'Sisyphus' on left and Tityus on right at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville walks around looking at paintings including 'Diego Velazquez's 'Las Meninas' in the background at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville looks at 'Diego Velazquez's 'Las Meninas' at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. Banville has enjoyed unlimited access to Madrid's great El Prado museum for the past month as its latest writer-in-residence. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville looks at Diego Velazquez's 'Vulcan's Forge' at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville poses in front of Tiziano's 'The Emperor Charles V at Muhlberg' at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Novelist John Banville poses by Diego Velazquez's 'The Feast of Bacchus' at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)