alt Hacker NewsRemoved 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.
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walletdrainer • yesterday at 7:21 PM
Just check literally any Lebanese social media site?
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It is a reasonable assumption that these population centers were labeled and Apple (or one of its data partners) has withdrawn the labels.