Before Hussein Saleh describes the destruction of his village, he describes the water.
In winter, rain would fill the meadow below Ramia until it looked like a lake. Ducks and geese would arrive. From the village above, the view opened onto water, trees and the road where people went walking. Months later, as the water receded, the land turned green with crops.
This is the Ramia he remembers.
When Hussein speaks about what Israel has destroyed, he returns to these details. The changing seasons. The trees along the road. Winter evenings with a stove, firewood and chestnuts. The things that made an ordinary day worth remembering.
Reports of war rarely have room for them. Buildings can be counted. Satellite images can show where a neighbourhood stood. But understanding the loss requires knowing something about the lives inside that landscape.
Hussein grew up in Ramia, a village on Lebanon’s southern border. He became a telecommunications engineer and continues to work in his profession. He describes an upbringing that brought together a love of the land and a commitment to education.
Community service was part of it, too. Through the scouts, he became involved in village life from an early age. During the coronavirus pandemic, he joined other young people helping residents access testing and hospitals, and checking on those who needed care.
The village he describes was sustained by people working, studying, farming and looking after one another. Some residents lived elsewhere for employment. Others remained throughout the year. Families depended on the land to support themselves and pay for their children’s education.
Alongside that life, there was fear.
Hussein remembers having two bathrooms at home. As a child, he avoided the one facing the Israeli position. He imagined danger coming through the window.
“We grew up frightened,” he says.
His account places that fear long before October 2023. For him, growing up beside the border meant learning that violence could interrupt daily life at any moment. Even inside his own home, a window could make him feel exposed.
When he left Ramia in October 2023, he expected a short absence. A day, perhaps two or three. There had been earlier confrontations at the border; he thought this departure might also end with a return.
Instead, displacement continued, and the village suffered devastating destruction.
An Associated Press analysis published in November 2024 found that almost no structures remained standing on Ramia’s central hilltop following a controlled detonation documented in videos posted by Israeli soldiers.
Hussein says subsequent destruction took the homes that remained, as well as the school, the clinic and other public facilities.
His memories give those losses their meaning. A school belongs to the years children spend growing up together. A clinic belongs to a community’s ability to care for its people. Agricultural land carries the work of a season and the income a family is waiting for.
Displaced residents, he explains, have tried to find work elsewhere. Some have succeeded. Others struggle. Losing access to their land has taken away the livelihood on which they depended.
Then there are the trees.
Hussein recalls waiting roughly ten years for trees along the road to grow, anticipating how beautiful the street would become. He says they were bulldozed.
That detail holds a particular cruelty: the years spent watching something grow, followed by the destruction of what those years produced.
Occupation reaches into a civilian life through experiences like these. It shapes where a child feels safe. It separates a farmer from a harvest. It leaves people remembering a road they can no longer walk and a home they cannot return to.
Hussein still remembers Ramia through its seasons. Water in winter. Green fields in summer. Firewood and chestnuts when the weather turned cold.
Anyone trying to understand what has been taken from him must make room for that village, too.