Many 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):
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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...
Many 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):
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.
Here's a screenshot from a 2020 tweet that implies this was the case (although it is not zoomed in very far).
https://x.com/hezbolsonaro/status/1310354231795171328
Still odd because OSM has all these towns and Apple appears to be using the OSM street network, but not showing the labels
Why do we need to bother with facts when we can do rage bait conspiracy theories instead?
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroun_al-Ras
[1]: https://maps.apple.com/frame?center=33.107500%2C35.444722&sp...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742363
Israel is really out there just killing everyone in the middle east
Dark humor but it almost seems like Israel is using Apple Maps as a checklist.
Perhaps this is a humanitarian action, messing with Apple tankplay.
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.
With US-made munitions
Don’t underestimate Israeli munitions. Israel is like the sixth biggest defense exporter, bigger than the UK.
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.
Not a party to the conflict? Are you joking? Don’t focus on what the US says. Focus on what it does.
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.
So does Israel, it’s not even a war with Lebanon it’s just happening there but the Lebanese government and armed are not participating in it
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.
This isn't happening on Google Maps though is it? We're just talking about Apple Maps here.
> I'm in the US, which is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Lebanon.
Oh honey…
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...
Blame the Israeli public for not wanting to feed their enemy.
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.
US government demanded it, not requested it
Yeah, that was another one of the constant mask-off moments. The Party of Free Speech hates free speech.
Associated Press was even banned from the White House for calling it the Gulf of Mexico: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/ap-st...
> I'm not sure why they would do this for US users unless the US government requested it.
Because the US govt. is petty and vindictive at the moment.
> Because the US govt. is petty and vindictive at the moment.
And has been for many, many years.
This saddens me and I don’t understand why it is allowed to continue.
And I’m not just talking about Apple Maps.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> Netanyahu and Putin are two war criminals according to International Court of Justice.
You mean the ICC, not the ICJ. The latter is a separate body that handles disputes between states.
Both have warrants for arrest by the ICC but note that neither Putin nor Netanyahu have been tried or convicted by the International Criminal Court.
> Although Trump threatened the ICJ
I’ve wondered, in the immediate aftermath of his recent genocidal threats, whether Mr. Trump was feeling left out of that club.
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.
The US political system is this. It has not been recently "captured". This is business as usual for them.
it... feels... more captured than usual, lately
gross
Captured by whom?
This comes to mind: https://nypost.com/2025/03/19/us-news/benjamin-netanyahu-gif...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...
Israel
Worth mentioning that the person that posted this is antisemitic.
https://xcancel.com/EthanLevins2/status/2043386231900262610#...
In one of the replies, he says "all you people care about is money".
This is a well known racist anti semitic trope. He even uses the phrase "you people." Shameful.
Currently 50 points and is just a link to Apple Maps with an unverified claim.
EDIT: I'm at -2 for stating a fact.
It is straightforward to visit any other online mapping service and see many villages labeled there.
Bing: https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=33.185932%7E35.321974&lvl=11.9&...
Google: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1649913,35.2506666,11.55z
OSM: https://www.openstreetbrowser.org/#map=11/33.1554/35.2890
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.
Just check literally any Lebanese social media site?
I wish this thread had more discussion on why Apple Maps is missing the labels but Google and Bing are not. That’s awfully curious, no?
Yeah true, how do we know these bridges and towns were there beforehand? Maybe Apple has never had good coverage in this area.
Just linking to a map doesn't tell us what was removed or when.
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.
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.
Actually I can't because I've never seen if Apple ever had them in the first place.
It sounds like a great opportunity to ask if people have used Apple Maps in Lebanon before.
It seems like people are asking, and the answer is that these towns and villages have indeed never been on Apple Maps:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744594
[flagged]
You are assuming I didn’t know before this news came out.
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.
Correct
> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
You can open the link and see it for yourself; what other "verification" do you need?
How did you verify that they previously existed on the Apple maps?
ps. your domain is misconfigured for your website, the www prefix is missing so only b....org works, but the link in your HN bio, doesn't.
[flagged]
You've made your substantive point by asking whether the claim of removal is accurate. Please don't spoil that by breaking the site guidelines yourself, as you did here and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742917 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743106. That only makes things worse.
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.
[flagged]
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.
How much do they rely on OSM these days? They were a TomTom shop, that was obviously horrible, then were OSM based. Is that still the case?
There is no perhaps.
This is amid an ongoing bombing campaign by Israel which is primarily targeting civilians.
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'.
This is insane
Willful blindness as a service
This war in Lebanon is a horrible crime.
'Greater Israel' is just the 21st Century version of Nazi Germany's 'Lebensraum'.
Since when has war not been awful? I don’t remember anyone complaining when Hezbollah attacks Israel though.
You mean to tell us you were living under a rock when there was an international outcry agaist Hezbollah attacking Israel?
Where was this outcry? Hezbollah made northern Israel uninhabitable for years.
Likewise… Israel has made southern Lebanon inhabitable. And large swaths of Palestine.
Apple maps used (last i knew) Scala to import externally sourced map datasets continuously, and those may have lost towns and villages in Lebanon.
I don't understand what using Scala has to do with anything here.
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps
yeah Scala doesn't matter, just thought that was interesting as a "factoid"
What purpose would this serve in any way?
Could it be that their data source is tied to satellite data that is now being blacked out?
The data is in OSM, which Apple uses (to what degree and where, I'm not sure).
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.
Surely they could just... Leave what they used to have?
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.
Any justification given by Apple?
We all know why, but we're too scared to say.
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.
But what if you're not allowed to notice?
Some one said it directly in response to you and their comment is dead, so it's not just a "complex".
They gave up the pretense much easier than I thought they would.
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 mean, your right, unless you actually work for a government or state and then you cannot.
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant...
Maybe because there are laws against it?
[flagged]
It's certainly not made easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
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.
This is sadly not that far fetched.
"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."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/how-israeli-of...
So did Munich stop existing after we leveled it in 1944?
And if they do, they probably don't want to be found
War crimes. War crimes are the words you're looking for.
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...
Why is this flagged?
Well…what to expect from these tech companies who are openly and shamelessly complicit of genoc/de and the worst crimes in humanity?
Just read it:
“Apple buys Israeli ‘pre-speech’ tech firm implicated in Gaza genocide” https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/15/apple-buys-israeli-pre-sp...
And, of course, this post is flagged…because who know who run Y Combinator!
How 1984 of them. "This village never existed, stop asking about it"