Weaponized Environments: Mapping White Phosphorus Use in South Lebanon

Author: Ahmad Baydoun

TU Delft PhD project - 2025

Whitephosphorus.info is an ongoing spatial investigation that documents and analyses

the deployment of white phosphorus munitions across towns and agricultural

landscapes in South Lebanon between 2023 and 2024. The project combines open

source evidence, satellite imagery and architectural methods to verify when and where

these attacks occurred and to visualise their impact on the environment. White

phosphorus leaves a toxic residue that stays in the soil long after the first impact,

remaining dangerous yet invisible. The aim of this research is to make this hidden

toxicity visible and traceable.

Using a workflow that integrates geolocation, chronolocation and satellite analysis, the

research has verified more than six hundred pieces of visual evidence and mapped two

hundred forty eight individual strikes. Each incident is reconstructed through cross

referenced media, thermal signatures, burn patterns and plume behaviour, allowing me

to track how white phosphorus disperses through urban fabric, orchards and forests.

The resulting dataset exposes patterns of repeated targeting that caused severe and

lasting damage to homes, crops and soil.

The publicly accessible platform, whitephosphorus.info, brings these findings together

as an interactive spatial archive. It enables journalists, researchers and affected

communities to explore verified incidents, understand their geographic distribution and

compare sources across time.

This research is part of my PhD at TU Delft and continues to expand as new evidence

and environmental data become available.

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