On May 25, 2000, 19-year-old Abeer received the historic news that southern Lebanon had finally been freed after 18 years of brutal Israeli occupation. Within hours, she and her family packed their belongings and left Beirut, heading south to their ancestral hometown of Kfar Kila – a centuries-old village sitting directly on the tense Lebanon-Israel border. Recalling that moment decades later, Abeer, now an events coordinator working with musicians, says the joy she felt that day was unlike anything she had ever experienced.\n\nToday, 26 years after that landmark liberation, Abeer is once again displaced. Relentless Israeli bombardment across southern Lebanon forced her to flee her home in Nabatieh, and she now resides in a makeshift tent in Beirut’s Biel district, sharing the small space with her two dogs. Since Israel launched its current military campaign against Lebanon on March 2, the conflict has displaced more than one million Lebanese people. Hundreds of thousands remain barred from returning to their properties, as Israeli troops continue to hold dozens of southern villages under occupation, while 45 percent of all towns across southern Lebanon have suffered severe damage or been completely destroyed.\n\nSitting just outside her temporary tent home, Abeer says she longs to return to Kfar Kila, and holds out hope that the south will be liberated for a second time. “We need to remember this day because we were victorious and hopefully we will be again. They have turned Kfar Kila into a football field,” she told reporters from Middle East Eye. Over the past two and a half years, repeated Israeli airstrikes and ground operations have gradually leveled Kfar Kila along with more than a dozen other villages along the southern border. “Our grandparents, my mother and father are buried in Kfar Kila,” Abeer said. “I pray we can return to them, to our homes and to our work.”\n\nThe long arc of Israeli incursion into Lebanon stretches back decades. In 1967’s Six Day War, Israel seized the Chebaa Farms region, followed by the 1978 Operation Litani invasion, and a larger 1982 ground incursion launched with the stated goal of dismantling the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon convinced parliament to approve Operation Peace for Galilee, claiming troops would advance no more than 40 kilometers into Lebanese territory and the operation would conclude in just two to three days. Instead, Israeli forces pushed all the way to Beirut, occupied the capital for three years, then withdrew to a buffer zone in southern Lebanon where they remained for an additional 15 years. A sustained guerrilla resistance campaign led by Hezbollah through the 1990s, targeting Israeli positions and their allied South Lebanon Army militia, ultimately forced full Israeli withdrawal from the south in May 2000.\n\nThis cycle of occupation and resistance is personal history for 28-year-old political activist Tarek Serhan, who holds a master’s degree in human rights. Though Serhan was only two years old when the 2000 liberation was declared, he remains deeply connected to the south, with family roots in Dweir, a village in the Nabatieh district, and upbringing in Beirut’s southern Dahieh suburb. Today, he shares a small Beirut apartment with his dog Lexy, the entrance of which is decorated with a Lebanese flag. The apartment has also become a refuge for his parents and grandmother, who fled intense Israeli bombardment of Dahieh to stay with him. Serhan makes regular trips back to Dweir and neighboring villages to attend funerals and offer condolences to families who have lost loved ones.\n\nEven amid ongoing violence, Serhan says he has been struck by the steady resilience of southern Lebanese communities. “When I was in the village three or four weeks ago, people were not afraid,” he said. “They were carrying the martyrs on their shoulders during the procession, in the middle of the village, under warplanes and bombardment. My heart was full, honestly.”\n\nAccording to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health, Israeli strikes across Lebanon have killed 3,151 people and wounded 9,571 more since the current conflict began. Despite a formal ceasefire agreement reached on April 16, Israel continues to carry out daily strikes and enforce mandatory evacuation orders across southern Lebanon, with civilians, journalists, medical workers, and civil defense teams repeatedly targeted, often in deadly double-tap attacks. Hezbollah has continued to launch retaliatory strikes against Israeli occupation troops and targets inside Israeli territory.\n\nAmid the reoccupation, bombardment, and near-constant presence of Israeli drones over Beirut, some have questioned whether the annual marking of Resistance and Liberation Day, the holiday commemorating the 2000 Israeli withdrawal, is appropriate this year. For Serhan, marking the holiday is a non-negotiable national duty. “We have this country due to people’s sacrifices. These aren’t just words. Liberation cost lives, families, time that detainees spent in prison, people who are living to this day with physical pain or disabilities,” he said. “Lebanese were resisting from all areas and all sects. Liberation happened. It’s part of history. It cannot be erased. As Lebanese we have a responsibility to show the danger of the Zionists on our border. We need more education and awareness for all people, especially the youth, to know the history and know what has happened to Lebanese like them.”\n\nIn the small northern Lebanese town of Karm Saddeh, near Ehden, one extended family has worked tirelessly to keep the memory of the 2000 liberation alive for younger generations. In May 2000, the entire clan – grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins – boarded a bus and traveled south to see the newly liberated lands and join the celebrations. For Dominic, the family’s son who was just eight years old at the time, the trip was a formative experience. Now a designer living in Beirut, Dominic says his mother instilled in him a deep connection to the south from childhood. “I’m very much from the north, and my heart is very much in the south. That’s what my mother always told me as a kid,” he said. “I love my village, and the south feels like my village but greener, more natural. Southerners are a lot like northerners, but even more hospitable.”\n\nDominic believes that Liberation Day should be commemorated across an entire week, just as the original 2000 celebrations unfolded. “It was a week of celebrations in 2000. A week of people returning to their land. Let’s take a week to remember what happened, why it happened, and what happened after,” he said. The family made the same trip south to reconnect with their land after the 2006 July war, and their commitment to honoring the liberation remains unshaken.\n\nAs Tel Aviv and Beirut hold their first direct diplomatic talks in decades, some Lebanese have publicly expressed support for the prospect of formal peace and normalization with Israel. But for Dominic, normalization with Israel was never an acceptable option after the 2006 war, and it remains off the table today, 25 years after liberation. If he had his way, Lebanese people from every region of the country would travel south to mark the day, even amid the threat of bombardment, as an act of national solidarity.\n\n“We have festivals for cherries and apples that many attend. They matter because they connect people to the land,” he noted. “But the south is the land, and the most precious olive trees in the world grow there. It’s one of the most important parts of our culture. Maybe next year we can hold an olive festival on the border with Palestine – and maybe Palestinians can come too.”’