Farmers harvesting watermelons in southern Lebanon’s Tyre district were not expecting their fields to become a target on a random weekday. But on Tuesday, Israeli forces fired three phosphorus shells near the Mansouri junction, sending workers fleeing while three civilians were detained and another wounded in separate incidents the same day.
The attack came amid a ceasefire that Israel has repeatedly violated, and it was far from an isolated incident.
It was the latest episode in a years-long, meticulously documented pattern of Israel deploying incendiary and banned chemical munitions across Lebanon and Gaza, each instance adding to a record that human rights organisations have struggled to keep pace with.
The most recent confirmation of that pattern came just weeks ago.
In March 2026, Human Rights Watch verified and geolocated seven images showing artillery-fired white phosphorus airburst over a residential part of the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor, with civil defence workers responding to fires in at least two homes and one car.
HRW’s Lebanon researcher Ramzi Kaiss called it “extremely alarming” and urged states supplying Israel with weapons to immediately suspend military assistance, a call that went unheeded.
That incident, however, was itself built on a foundation of prior violations stretching back to the earliest weeks of the current war.
HRW had already verified white phosphorus use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon since October 2023, including five where it was deployed unlawfully over populated residential areas.
What those statistics obscure is the human reality behind them. Mohammad Hammud, an elderly man who stayed in his border village of Hula when others fled, described the moment an Israeli shell landed near his home.
“Fire broke out in front of the house… there was a strange smell… we had trouble breathing,” he recalled.
He and his wife were rushed to a hospital after emergency responders identified it as phosphorus exposure, joining four other civilians admitted to intensive care for asphyxiation and severe respiratory distress from the same attack.
Lebanon’s health ministry ultimately registered 173 people as suffering from chemical exposure due to white phosphorus since October 2023, and that was before Israel intensified its attacks.
Amnesty International had, in fact, raised the alarm even earlier, documenting unlawful white phosphorus use in south Lebanon as far back as October 10–16, 2023, and calling for an attack on the village of Dhayra, which injured at least nine civilians, to be investigated as a war crime.
Beyond the immediate injuries, the damage has spread into the soil itself, with south Lebanon’s farmers watching their agricultural land burn and scientists scrambling to assess long-term risks to food security and public health.
