MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump is pledging more support for Lebanon after a White House meeting with the country's leader on Tuesday. Trump said Lebanon has become, quote, "a very badly treated place and country." Israel's military has systematically demolished entire villages in southern Lebanon, using explosives and bulldozers to try to wipe out Hezbollah. Most of that destruction is in areas Israel still occupies. NPR's Ruth Sherlock and Jawad Rizkallah followed a Lebanese poet as she returned home to see the destruction firsthand.
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RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Nothing remains of the place where 27-year-old Kholoud Al Gharib (ph) grew up. After Israeli forces withdrew a few weeks ago and moved their positions less than a mile away, she's risked the journey back four times.
KHOLOUD AL GHARIB: And every time we come back, you feel something different.
SHERLOCK: What are you feeling today?
GHARIB: Today, I feel like there's a heavy load. And, you know, it's not about, like, only my home. It's the whole village. Yeah. And it's all literally rubbles.
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SHERLOCK: The homes that stood on this high point in the village of Dibbine, surrounded by undulating hills with forests and olive groves, have been flattened. Broken trees poke out from the expanse of rubble. People's clothes dangle from the remaining branches.
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SHERLOCK: Where was your home?
GHARIB: It was here directly.
SHERLOCK: This rubble here?
GHARIB: Yes.
SHERLOCK: She finds her notes from university and her father's books of philosophers and poets. Gharib is herself a poet and reads us part of an elegy she's written to this destroyed home.
GHARIB: (Reading) You rest upon a hill. It's an Eden surrounded by olive trees in every direction. Straight ahead, and I see Palestine. It's waiting for salvation, and I guess we are too right now.
SHERLOCK: From here, she can see northern Israel. Satellite imagery shows the Israeli military has badly damaged or destroyed at least two dozen villages in the part of south Lebanon it now occupies, for what it calls a buffer zone to stop Hezbollah firing rockets across the border. Touching the concrete and twisted rebar of her house, Gharib shares her memories of coming here before the war.
GHARIB: When I get off the bus, I step into Dibbine, I check on my mom and dad, my brother. I would be eager, you know, to even taste the food here because it hits different, you know? Even coffee on the balcony with the flowers.
SHERLOCK: A flower garden surrounded her home. She grew up with neighbors who cared for her.
GHARIB: You enjoy the people that you say hi to, the one that - they ask you, like, where have you been all week?
SHERLOCK: Yeah.
GHARIB: Like, we haven't seen you for long.
SHERLOCK: That sense of community.
GHARIB: Yeah. Exactly. It is a sense of belonging in this community.
SHERLOCK: Now those neighbors are displaced across Lebanon. Israel has made it clear it will not allow Lebanese to return to the lands it controls, and possibly to Dibbine, until Hezbollah disarms - a demand the militia refuses.
Thank you, ma'am.
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SHERLOCK: We leave to head back to Beirut. That evening, Gharib joins other artists performing poetry and songs to mark the beauty of south Lebanon and all that has been lost.
GHARIB: (Speaking in Arabic).
SHERLOCK: "This is my message to you and to the land," Gharib tells the audience. "We were here. We are here." And she says she will do all she can to return.
Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Beirut.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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