Israel is ‘disrupting entire ecosystems’, including Lebanon’s wheat crop
Israel’s war on Lebanon has damaged the country’s wheat production and harmed the lives of farmers, experts told Al Jazeera.
For the last three years, Israel has been waging a war on Lebanon, where it has occupied large parts of the south and destroyed homes and infrastructure, in what some experts have said is a deliberate effort to make the land uninhabitable.
Farmlands damaged
Since 2023, Israel has been attacking large swaths of southern Lebanon, including using chemicals like white phosphorus, in what analysts and locals said was an effort to make the ground sterile or uninhabitable. A ceasefire was brokered in 2024 by France and the United States, but Israel never stopped attacking targets in Lebanon.
On March 2, Israel escalated its war on Lebanon for the second time in under two years. Hezbollah had attacked Israel following Israel’s assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei two days earlier. The group also said it was in response to near-daily ceasefire violations by Israel.
Since then, Israel has reinvaded southern Lebanon, taking land up to 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) inside the country. Beirut and Tel Aviv signed a US-brokered framework agreement in June, which was supposed to put into motion so-called “pilot zones”. Under these pilot zones, Israeli troops would withdraw to be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces, who would also work to disarm Hezbollah.
Instead, Israeli troops have continued to level destruction in southern Lebanon, detonating homes and crucial infrastructure, including farmland.
“The South [of Lebanon] experienced the highest average losses [in wheat-growing areas], reaching 47 percent in 2023-2024 and 61 percent in 2024-2025,” Mariam Ibrahim, a researcher with Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research [CNRS-L] and author of a recent paper called “Wheat in Crisis” that tracked Lebanon’s wheat struggles from 2017 to 2025, told Al Jazeera. “The Bekaa plain, which accounts for approximately 64 percent of Lebanon’s national wheat production, was also significantly affected, losing around 43 percent and 57 percent of its wheat area during the two respective seasons.”
In areas like the border town Bint Jbeil, 100 percent of cropland was destroyed, while in the Baalbeck district to the east, the study says approximately 32 percent of cropland was destroyed.
Wheat price influences
Ibrahim said the Russian-Ukrainian war led to an increase in bread prices and incentivised some domestic Lebanese production.
“The depreciation of the Lebanese pound meant that farmers could potentially generate higher revenues and profits in local currency when selling their wheat, as wheat prices were increasingly influenced by international market prices,” she said. “This provided an additional economic incentive to expand wheat cultivation, and our results showed that Lebanon’s wheat cultivation area reached its peak [during] the 2022-2023 season.”
However, experts said that since 2023, Israel’s war on Lebanon led to the proportion of land that had been used to grow wheat that was now left fallow increasing from 9 percent to 24 percent, mostly in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
