Resistance and Liberation Day: When South Lebanon broke free from Israeli occupation

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]How do you [music] explain the feeling of returning to a house stolen from you and occupied for 22 years?

[00:00:07]How do you explain [music] seeing the street across your home, once filled with Israeli tanks, checkpoints, interrogation rooms, detention centers, [music] suddenly open before you?

[00:00:19]May 25, 2000 was not just the liberation of South [music] Lebanon. It was the moment an entire people realized that pain was not eternal and that indeed the Israeli occupation [music] is frailer than a spider's web. For 22 years, people [music] in South Lebanon did not live normal lives. They lived under the weight of the Israeli [music] occupation. People of South Lebanon swallowed humiliation daily. The humiliation of being searched [music] on your own land, questioned on your own roads, watched in your own villages as if you did not belong there. And the coolest part [music] about the Israeli occupation was not only the violence. It was the way it tried to convince people that this reality would last forever, [music] that Lebanon was too weak to resist, too small to claim itself.

[00:01:07]But while the Israeli occupation tried to normalize fear, the resistance [music] was doing the opposite. It was normalizing bravery.

[00:01:15]>> [music] >> It was teaching people that occupation is not destiny. Young men left behind families, [music] futures, ordinary lives, not because they loved war, >> [music] >> but because humiliation is far from us.

[00:01:29]And slowly, through years of sacrifices, [music] ambushes, operations, imprisonment, torture, and blood, the [music] image of the invincible Israeli occupation army began to crack until >> [music] >> May 25, 2000 finally arrived.

[00:01:47]People did not wait for official [music] announcements to understand what was happening.

[00:01:52]They felt what liberation is.

[00:01:55]They saw it in their own eyes.

[00:01:57]They saw Israeli occupation soldiers fleeing, military positions abandoned, [music] and the prison gates of the Khiam detention center shattered open.

[00:02:07]And suddenly, after decades of suffocation, the South inhaled.

[00:02:13]Maybe that is the closest word to liberation, breathing.

[00:02:18]People kiss the ground, not symbolically, literally. Maybe that is why Liberation Day is sacred in Lebanon to this very day.

[00:02:26]Cuz on May 25th, 2000, [music] the people of Southern Lebanon were not simply celebrating the Israeli occupation military's withdrawal.

[00:02:35]They were celebrating dignity.

[00:02:37]And the moment the Israeli occupation finally understood that a people who refuse to surrender can never truly be defeated.

[00:02:47]>> [music]