Multiple commenters here are asking if the towns and villages were ever included in Apple maps in the first place, and some people are saying we should obviously assume they were.
However, a quick search reveals at least a few people claiming that Apple Maps has always been empty for Lebanon outside of major cities (and at least one commenter says they are Lebanese):
This thread is bizzare, full of commenters who pretend not to understand why the OP post doesn't prove anything. It's not the first pro-Lebanon anti-Israel post either in the last few days.
You can look up Maroun Al-Ras [0] and it's map coordinate [1]. If you search for the name, you find a garden of the same name, but not the village. The instagram reel that was posted earlier had more context [2].
From wikipedia:
> In October 2024, IDF forces operated in the village as part of its invasion of southern Lebanon. The Israeli flag was raised, after the victory.
Which Apple might use as a justification. There is a Israeli flag, so it must belong to them.
I think the bigger story here is that Israel are removing (in physical terms) towns and villages from Lebanon. Maps is one thing but ethnic cleansing is another.
it is good that hacker news is the place where I saw the most people using their brains and noticing that there is no proof of removal in this claim as there is no before image showing they were there in the first place.
but it is concerning that there is still a lot of people who totally miss this obvious flaw in the claim.
it takes a couple minutes to test the claim and notice that the issue in affecting all Lebanon and not only the Southern region where israel is invading and leveling entire villages to the ground as they did in Gaza.
zooming in around the Lebanon border you notice instantly that a lot of information is missing as the background become white: https://i.imgur.com/L2p1j15.png
and following this clue, you soon notice that the same issue of missing labels is also happening in Syria: https://i.imgur.com/8p1ANAZ.png
there is no evidence supporting the claim and evidence actually tends to disprove it.
This reminds me a bit of the Gulf of America fiasco from last year where if you changed your location to outside the US it would go back to showing Gulf of Mexico.
I'm not sure why they would do this for US users unless the US government requested it.
Google maps has done this forever. A good chunk of countries have disputed territories, and never in human history there has been a "universal" map that everybody agrees on.
Sure, but I'm in the US, which is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. To my knowledge the US continues to recognize Lebanon as a sovereign country.
Yea, that user made the most ridiculous statement.
I think the Onion did a piece saying something like "Netanyahu dead, Trump must go back to being the only president of the United States", and while satire, is a bit enlightening of the actual situation here.
In the case of the "Gulf of America" thing there was a clear and open statement by the executive that they wanted the maps changed (note that even in the US the name is still legally "Gulf of Mexico"). Apple and Google both decided to acquiesce to curry favor.
TMK there is no current government order to eliminate large swaths of Lebanon from maps. So the fact that Apple is doing this (seemingly on its own, despite all other mapping services reflecting the original place names) is the thing I'm explicitly calling out as being weird.
What's a little occupied, extra-territorial buffer zone between respectful neighbors? Nothing says "I respect your sovereignty" more leveling all buildings to the ground. Golan now, there's nothing to see here.
They hardly have electricity so there's nobody to fight back really. The international community left them to die after that big explosion and the country has been scraping by ever since.
We had to build a very expensive and risky pier to get aid into to Gaza instead of just sending it through our ally Israel to be delivered over the ground. There's something different than a normal ally relationship.
A very expensive and risky pier that still just delivered the aid to an IDF base inside Gaza and not to Gazans (or aid orgs) directly. Based on a plan from an Israeli think tank...
absolutely do blame the Israeli public for their state murdering innocent civilians in other countries (Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria). It's their state, they should do something about it.
I think part of the weird disbelief on my part is the speed with which those changes are submitted and implemented. I don't recall things changing that fast with disputed territories in Ukraine/Russia conflict.
i wouldn’t consider it very disputed, the only country “disputing” who it belongs to is israel. all other countries agree that area belongs to lebanon.
Netanyahu threw a temper tantrum on Wednesday (8th of April) and who suffered? Lebanese civilians that's who. The man (if you can call him that) is running on fumes at the moment. In the near future he'll wish he never left his original profession as a furniture salesman.
This saddens me as well, because that's the type of thing that happens every day where I live, but...
> I don’t understand why it is allowed to continue.
The answer is even sadder. It's even worse. And it is as follows: because there's not enough people who are taking action, and from those taking action there's not enough people in power to change something significantly. At least that's how I see it. And... I can't even blame those who don't take action - because many people feel completely powerless, they feel like "what you can do to stop this war/other thing if you're just a regular human?"
There's also a huge cost for taking action about this especially in the US. You can easily get thrown out of school, have your career destroyed or be deported.
This. There are entire groups dedicated to rooting out any sign of deviation from per-authorized storyline and verbiage. It is particularly striking given that US considers itself 'free speech' bastion.
This is mostly a US thing. Netanyahu and Putin are two war criminals according to International Court of Justice. Although Trump threatened the ICJ, this doesn't change that basic fact.
Already in 2002 US passed the "American Service-Members' Protection Act" that allows USA to deploy military to prevent U.S. or allied officials and military personnel from being prosecuted or detained by the ICC.
It passed via bypartisan vote well in time before US launched the illegal invasion of Iraq in which it committed various war crimes.
This goes beyond direct action by individuals, it’s completely obvious what’s happening and it happens because the US political system has been captured.
Removed means they were there before which means comparison to other maps means nothing. It's possible Apple never had them in the first place. It's completely unverifiable with the link or your links.
OSM is a foundational data layer for GIS. If you're building a mapping service, you're almost certainly using OSM augmented by satellite imagery and other sources to find population zones that OSM has not found yet.
If you look at the Apple Maps satellite layer, you see thousands of structures spread across the area.
It is a reasonable assumption that these population centers were labeled and Apple (or one of its data partners) has withdrawn the labels.
> If you look at the Apple Maps satellite layer, you see thousands of structures spread across the area.
and if stop fixating on South Lebanon and go to other places where israel is not invading and destroying villages, let's say Syria, you'll notice the exact same issue: https://imgur.com/8p1ANAZ
so your argument actually go against what you attempt to demonstrate.
now why is apple bad at maps in this area and possibly other areas elsewhere in the world is a different matter.
My family name comes from a Christian town in the mountains of Lebanon. I'm positive it was previously on Apple Maps (I've
shown it to people before), but now has no label. It still exists on other mapping services and if I search on DuckDuckGo, the top info summary includes an Apple Maps widget with the town. Clicking on it takes me to Apple Maps with the pin in the right place, without a label.
So it's clear that it was there and is no longer there. I'm not making a judgement as to why it's no longer there (the post on X makes an unsubstantiated claim that it's intentional). Could be a bug for all I know. I'm unwilling to make the leap that it's some malicious attempt without actual evidence. I can only verify that it no longer has a label.
I noticed a post on Reddit that claims Apple Maps only briefly had small towns listed. It's possible when I showed the town off in Apple Maps it could have been during that window. I looked through my texts and found when I recently shared the town a couple months ago it was on Google Maps because I was sharing a picture that was posted on Google Maps (my mom sent me an old photo of an overlook of the town and I sent a modern picture with the same vantage). To my knowledge Apple never had any local photos (just the town label; however briefly).
Since I don't look at the town often, I'm certainly willing to consider that they once had a data broker for the maps that they no longer have access to (or possibly trialed a data broker). Anyway, just thought I'd add as much context as possible, as it's definitely more nuanced than the social media posts imply.
Why do you say unverified? You can activate the hybrid satellite view and look around. There are many towns and cities showing up on satellite view without any label. That's easily verifiable.
What's not easily verifiable is (1) whether they were removed, in the sense that they were there before and now are not; (2) if so, when; and (3) if so, why.
The obvious interpretation—that they've been removed for political reasons connected to the current war—would require knowing all 3 of these, and we don't know those things yet.
I don't know if Southern Lebanon town names were removed or never there. In either case it seems quite odd that the southern part of Lebanon has been left so void of labelling.
Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?
and you can easily verify that this issue is not only in South Lebanon as it is also the case in Syria: https://imgur.com/8p1ANAZ and everywhere in Lebanon
so the verification process you suggest actually disproves the claim.
I believe OP is asking for a before/after of Apple Maps, because just seeing the map now isn't telling us whether Apple previously disclosed the villages and towns. I'm sure OP isn't thinking that the region is full of random roads out in the wilderness leading to nothing, which is the wrong conclusion the downvoters are probably leaping at.
You can very easily verify the claim by following the link. Other than three major cities, there are no agglomeration listed in Lebanon. Other countries have detailed maps.
Is anyone stopping you from doing that? Do you need my permission? If so, granted. I think you should spend whatever effort you want to verify claims if you believe that would be of value.
I agree with you that it isn't clear what's going on here. People are giving it an interpretation that feels obvious given the current context, and we don't yet know whether this interpretation is true.
Usually the obvious interpretation of an isolated internet factoid turns out not to be true.
They did the same thing when there was a war between India and China a while ago. As brutal as it sounds, time and again Apple always loves to be on the side of whichever market is bigger. It's really that simple (business wise). Morally? Perhaps not.
Apple does much of their own mapping but they also rely quite a bit on external data sources, whichever one of those they use probably dropped the data for one reason or another.
They might genuinely not exist any more. The world's attention was heavily distracted by the campaign in Iran and the Hormuz strait while Israel never stopped doing their ...stuff... in Lebanon.
"The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations."
"The demolitions came after Israel’s minister of defence, Israel Katz, called for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” to stop threats to communities in northern Israel. The Israeli military destroyed 90% of homes in Rafah, in south Gaza."
This kind of innuendo adds nothing of value to the conversation. Either say what you intend to say, or just don't post. The coy "I know something but can't say it" is silly and just sounds like you have a persecution complex.
he was referring to the famous DNA research, mentioned in this Israeli newspaper:
Scientists Discover Gene That Predisposes Ashkenazi Jews to Schizophrenia
Variations of the DNST3 gene make Ashkenazi Jews 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia and similar diseases.
No. Jews having 40% higher chances of schizophrenia in no way justifies the view that most Jews are lunatics. It’s a minuscule chance to begin with. Saying “most Jews are lunatics” is just antisemitic.
You are ignoring the elephant in the room: the media environment that artifically inflames every single incident that involes a jew, no matter how small. This creates a fake perseption that if something bad happens to a jew in australia, that means that every single one of them around the world is in danger.
Similar to how school shootings in US are inflated to the point that every school has to create measures to defend against an active shooter.
Do this poisonous media tactice over decades and inflate the danger and you will make people pretty nervous and trip them over the edge
Entire segments of the podcast sphere are making their money talking about these so-called unspeakable subjects. Why don't you share what you really think.
I don't know either but here is the answer from Wikipedia: "The main provider of map data is TomTom, but data is also supplied by Automotive Navigation Data, Getchee, Hexagon AB, IGN, Increment P, Intermap Technologies, LeadDog, MDA Information Systems, OpenStreetMap, and Waze."[1]
Satellite source would require detailed editing, and there’s very little chance those are fully automated. The entire Middle-East is being blocked, but only Lebanon is being affected.
It could be that they have a provider in Lebanon that was bombed but I’ve never heard of a cartographer with local dependencies like that.
Yeah, that’s the default option for detailed databases like that. Large deletion are either technical issues (and that should affect a lot more than one country) or deliberate edits.
Netanyahu is running out of steam. There's only so much a guy who went to furniture sales school can pull off, at least that's my hope. I think he'll have to face justice in a few months but will it be enough? I doubt it.
The whole thread here seems to be full of people who know why Apple would have done this for some kind of bad reason, but nobody saying what that bad reason is. Anybody want to say it? I don't actually know other than something about Israel?
Israel is currently doing a ground offensive in southern Lebanon, with the stated aim of occupying the area and turning it into a depopulated "buffer zone" against Hezbollah. The Israeli army has announced that the Lebanese population must evacuate the entire area up to the Zahrani river.
In the area between the Israeli border and the Litani river (another river further south), the IDF is destroying all villages and has destroyed most of the bridges over the river, effectively isolating the area from the rest of Lebanon. All of that "smells" like annexation.
It seems Apple is doing preemptive compliance with the Israeli government here, by already erasing the destroyed villages from the map.
Apple, like a lot of other tech companies in the US has both deep financial ties to Israel as well as deep business connections. The answer can be as simple as 'The government asked them to do so and they complied'.
Israel is done being on the receiving end of the Iranian octopus. No more Iranian missiles, rockets, drones, or Iranian funded and directed Islamist terrorists on its borders.
Only Syria is an exception: there, it was internal Druze pressure on the Israeli government to act to protect their brothers in Syria.
Interesting you assumed violent destruction! I don’t suppose you’re Israeli? Also curious that Israel hasn’t yet “won” even when not being attacked.
I’m talking about a (relatively) peaceful process with reparations, right of return, and international policing. Destroying Israel through violence doesn’t move us forward.
And how do you suggest this concept is marketed to Israelis? I mean, it doesn’t sound too appealing: giving their flourishing country away to Islamist elements and turning into Jewish a minority in what is essentially a large Gaza strip.
It will need to happen by force.
You could argue for sanctions but with the fracturing of the Western world that’s not likely to happen, and the west is very heavily invested in Israel already (Apple has more R&D in Israel than in the entire EU; Nvidia does all of their networking stuff in Israel and now plans a 12k engineer campus; Microsoft, Intel, Google…). The west buys tons of Israeli weapons and if you live in the EU then congratulations, your sky is now protected by Israeli Arrow-3 systems that Germany bought for 5bn Euro.
And then there’s the Israeli nuclear deterrence and strong self reliance. Sanction it for something and it will likely make its own or get it from a different actor, this is what happens in the first 30 years of its existence (US would not sell it arms back then).
Add to that the Jewish communities in Western countries which would block any kind of sanctions.
All you’re left with for “dismantling” Israel are Islamist actors operating military. Iran, Turkey, the likes, which brings us back to the endless loop I’ve mentioned before.
How about, then, a different alternative where Israel is recognized as a done deal, just like the US is? In both cases someone suffered from their creation but no one is calling to dismantle the US and no one is giving Indians their home.
That won’t happen though because the Palestinians are weaponized against Israel by Islamists, and the conflict with Israel is just too convenient for countries like Egypt and Turkey to keep the inflamed rhetoric and to have someone to blame for all of their woes.
They're people. And this is not about religion it's about rights and land.
> turning into Jewish a minority
Again, why the focus on ethnicity and/or race here? Equal rights for all people without regard to religion or ethnicity. (Otherwise it's racism)
> It will need to happen by force.
Some kind of force, yes.
> not likely to happen
Doesn't make it morally wrong.
> west is very heavily invested in Israel
disgusting.
> strong self reliance
Pretty sure Israel can't survive in its current state without being propped up by the West.
> Sanction it for something and it will likely make its own or get it from a different actor, this is what happens in the first 30 years of its existence (US would not sell it arms back then).
We should still sanction them.
> "Islamist"
Stop saying this, it's racist and again diverts from the fact that the conflict is about peoples rights and land, not religion.
> How about, then, a different alternative where Israel is recognized as a done deal, just like the US is? In both cases someone suffered from their creation but no one is calling to dismantle the US and no one is giving Indians their home.
Yeah, that's fucked up. The US is fucked up. But, I think it will probably happen this way. The Palestinians who were originally on the land will be ethnically cleansed and/or put on reservations, let out to work in Isreal for cheap, and the Israelis will be free to party in the Gaza Riviera atop the bones of hundreds of thousands of buried Palestinian skulls.
> That won’t happen though because the Palestinians are weaponized against Israel by Islamists
Like lebanon was dismantled (it was a christian nation in the 1960s) solved all its problems? Giving in to the islamo supremacists just migrates the problem. If israel ends you will have dhjihad in cyprus, greek, al andaluz and africa. They dont give a fuck about that worthless strip of dessert beach, except for the fact that unsupressed dhimi thrive in it.
The only ethno-supremacists are the Israelis and the whole world is watching the Greater Israel Project unfold before their very eyes. It's concerning and probably unsustainable.
I don’t think Israelis have heard of the “Greater Israel Project”. Sounds like scaremongering designed to defend the indefensible (Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, etc)
There is no such thing. I'll accept that Iran's model is a bit weird but there's definitely no supremacy nor expansionism going on in the name of some book or some psychopath's mind (like Netanyahu)
Apple: 1984 as a service. "We know walled gardens."
Quick: someone do the graphic, you can sell merch. Mail a freebie and a purchase link to every makerspace on the planet.
Some interesting background to current hostilities: "The UN Security Council has voted to wind up the near 50 year UNIFIL [peace keeping] mission after lobbying from Israel pushed the United States to veto its renewal. The mission will end in 2027."https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2025/08/un...
This is not an article, but a link to Apple Plans/Maps where you can observe all locations have been removed. As for now, it is hard to conclude anything but this looks like a bug (I know I am being optimistic).
This is quite normal for politics-related news on HN. Many people flag them and they disappear from the FP. Whatever contentious issue you take, there always people who will dislike an even or how it's presented and will flag the submission.
funny thing you mention the word 'Lebensraum', it is actually non-ironically being pushed in Israeli society as a justification to lower housing costs.
Lebensraum as a Justification for Israeli Settlements
We were fortunate when we occupied the West Bank because had we not done so, where would we have come to live? And who knows how high housing prices would have risen?
Let’s put it this way. I’d rather send money to North Korea than give a cent to an Israeli business. I wish they’d get served the same dose of humility that made Germany ashamed to make any display of national pride, such as openly waving the flag, for many decades.
But given who their closest ally is, many more people have to die before that wretched country finds a healthier way forward.
All my solidarity to the Jewish people that disavow any connection with the state of Israel. Your voices aren’t loud enough.
The majority of the population in Israel supports this. And the horrifying and surprising thing to me is that a number of my American Jewish friends will just say "they feel conflicted", while their parents (in their 60s by now) overwhelmingly support Israel. Obviously this is anecdotal but I still found it shocking. The scary thing is that this unhinged behavior will only lead to more antisemitism and violence directed back at them. It's so obviously counterproductive from my perspective as someone who hasn't had Israeli indoctrination. We're in a seriously dangerous moment but of course this has been building since the 40s when the country was founded on brutal dispossession and racial superiority.
What is the alternative that Israelis could support instead? Just ignore Hezbollah's attacks? Give up on returning to their homes and schools in northern Israel?
Our voices aren’t loud enough because we are fucking terrified.
Look through this thread and see how many people broadly label Jews - not Israelis, not Zionists, but Jews - as the problem.
I am incredibly opposed to Israel’s evil actions, but I can’t stand to be part of the conversation because of the profound Jewish hate. Opposing Israel is not antisemitic, but these things I have seen written or heard stated, from left leaning Americans, in the last several years definitely are:
> Free Palestine, Kill all Jews
> Save a life, kill a local colonizer
> Hitler should have killed them all when he had the chance
> Zionist propaganda (in response to me saying the above occurred)
> Jewish people in this country (US) should be afraid
I’m not going to come back and read this comment, because I have utter certainty that in spite of vocally denouncing Israel’s violence, I will either be: accused of being a Zionist, talked down to about how this actually is Jews’ fault, or just straight up responded to with hate.
To be clear you aren’t the problem, what you have said is fine. Someone else is going to respond hatefully though.
These people are insane. They scare Jews out of their country, and where do they think they'll go? They're the same kind of people who think that letting Trump win and glass Gaza will somehow force Democratic voters to choose other candidates in their primaries to save Gazans.
All of their actions are against their stated interests, and if you try to point that out to them, even if you also say that you agree with their end goals, they'll call you a fascist. There is an extremism problem on the left, and while it isn't as big as the extremism problem on the right, it still exists and needs to be solved.
nah, israel has been terrorizing all its neighbours non-stop since the creation of the colony, and even before its creation, the IDF's predecessor organizations have been recognized as the terrorist organizations (irgun lehi haganah) due to high profile terrorism (King david's hotel etc).
They actually imported the concept of terrorism from Europe into the middle east, which was pretty peaceful before
A lot of israeli prime ministers were members of these terrorist organizations and were engaged in massive ethnic cleansing (ben gurion, begin, shamir, sharon).
Wars aren't supposed to be even. By this logic, the Nazis were the victims of WWII, and the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War. And if Israel wants to be "better", it should just disable its air defenses to let Hezbollah "catch up".
If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.
Germany lost fewer civilians than Poland or the Soviet Union, so not really victims by that logic.
And while it's true that German civilian casualties were a couple orders of magnitude higher than American civilian casualties, the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison.
While not directly relevant to the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it's probably also worth drawing a distinction between casualties of war and state-sanctioned killing outside the scope of combat.
Germany killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
The Allies tried and executed ten high-ranking Nazi officials, including six civilians.
By that measure, the ratio of civilian killings is at least a million to one.
> the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison
What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.
I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".
If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.
Actually, wars are not supposed to be driven by "Dahiya doctrine" or "Rafah model" either, if we're talking about what wars are supposed to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
And yeah, if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say. Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this. When Israel kills 1 child or more per every active combatant... then that was apparently violated.
Maybe explain how does killing 20 000+ children and counting help Israel? Or how burning/blowing up entire villages and cities in Lebanon and Gaza help them? They did this to hundreds of villages in 1947-48 and that created the whole problem they have now. Continuing the same strategy is supposed to solve it? Seems like Israel got inspired by the whole Nazi style "preventive security" thing.
Heinrich Himmler: "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror... we do not ask for their love; only for their fear." (looks like Himmler could have coauthored Dahiya doctrine and would be fond of it, if still alive by then)
You're also not supposed to initiate aggressive wars against your neighbors either, like Israel did against Syria, Iran, and many others in the past with its "pre-emptive" strikes.
If Israel wants to be better, maybe they should not intentionally murder 10s of thousands of children as a policy (20-300 allowed killed civilians per strike in a population where half of it is children).
This is gonna be interesting with all the anti-zionist Jews in the US or the religious zionist evangelical christians...
But it's in line with the pro-Israel pattern of putting words into peoples' mouth or simply asserting that certain terms are "codes" that mean something different than what the speaker actually said.
Those towns and villages will be rebuilt after the war. This is not excuse for what Apple did, it is justification for ethnic cleansing and occupation. Same as with Gaza City. It existed for 3500 years, it will be rebuilt and it will outlive the US/Israel for sure.
I'm sure Apple doesn't see it as malicious, and that's precisely the issue. Apple's political grandstanding has forced them into awkward and contradictory positions.
Yeah, maybe they have some kind of computer vision algorithm that automatically recognizes that the villages are now only rubble in satellite pictures and auomatically update the map /s
However, a quick search reveals at least a few people claiming that Apple Maps has always been empty for Lebanon outside of major cities (and at least one commenter says they are Lebanese):
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1sjmrol/comment/oft1...
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1sjoxqo/...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1sjo66s/apple_maps...
https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1sjou17/apple_maps...
I don't know how trustworthy these comments are, but I don't see anyone contradicting them.
So it's definitely not clear this has anything to do with the current war.
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