Tsawwar… Rawan Mazeh
"Amid the war between Israel and Lebanon, and the declared ceasefire that followed on November 27, 2024, and before the renewed escalation in early 2026, I began visiting border villages in South Lebanon to document conditions on the ground. Despite the ceasefire, Israeli attacks and violations did not stop. Airstrikes, targeted shootings, drone surveillance, and restrictions on movement continued, making the idea of “post-war” feel entirely false. The ceasefire functioned more as a diplomatic declaration than a lived reality for people in these villages. A week after the so-called ceasefire in 2024, I went to Aita al-Shaeb. What I found was not a village recovering from war, but a place systematically erased. Entire neighborhoods had been flattened. There were no houses left standing, no recognizable streets, no visible traces of ordinary life. The destruction was total enough that orientation itself became difficult; memory could no longer map onto the landscape. Israeli forces were firing at people only meters away, and gunfire continued as civilians attempted to move through the area. The Israeli aggressions were not suspended by the ceasefire; they were simply renamed. The air was thick with dust from collapsed buildings, and the smell of destruction remained everywhere. Looking back at the photographs later, what became most visible was not only the scale of material destruction, but the attempt to make return impossible: to transform inhabited villages into unlivable terrain."
Rawan Mazeh is a photographer based in Lebanon. Her work explores the complex relationship between people and their environments, with a particular focus on the aftermath of war in Lebanon. She examines how conflict and displacement shape personal and collective experiences of belonging and memory. Since 2022, she has been working as an archivist at Arab Image Foundation. She is currently responsible for the collections, their preventive preservation, and all preservation projects at AIF. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Photography and Multimedia from NDU, Lebanon (2018), and a Master of Arts in Photography and Visual Design from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy.
Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.
