Global Policy Forum

The last Israeli soldier had left Lebanon barely six hours before the first flashpoint along the Lebanon-Israel border began to take effect.

During the summer of 2000, the Fatima Gate border crossing in Kfar Kila became the focal point of anti-Israel protests with crowds gathering to hurl abuse and stones at the Israeli troops on the other side of the fence. Similar protests on a smaller scale erupted at Sheikh Abbad hill near Houla, where Lebanese civilians could stand a meter apart from Israeli soldiers, separated by nothing more than a disputed tomb.

But these two early flashpoints have since ceased to be of concern and now only attract curious tourists.

The Shebaa Farms continues to be the primary focus of concern and remains the only point of actual confrontation between Hizbullah and the Israeli Army. But the UN-delineated Blue Line also contains numerous other flashpoints, some of which have caught the public's attention in the past year and others which remain dormant but have the potential to cause problems in the future.

Most of the non-Shebaa Farms flashpoints lie in the so-called tri-border area, a pocket of territory of some 12 square kilometers where the Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli frontiers meet. The historical ambiguities over the sovereignty of the area have given rise to continued claims of Israeli occupation of Lebanese land and produced anomalies such as Ghajar, a village split by the Blue Line with two-thirds inside Lebanon and the rest in Israeli-occupied Syria, whose Syrian residents possess Israeli nationality.

Staffan de Mistura, the UN secretary-general's personal representative to south Lebanon, has spent much of the past year keeping a close eye on developments along the Blue Line and occasionally intervening in an attempt to reduce tensions at some of the more persistent flashpoints in the tri-border area. Ghajar has resurfaced in the media again lately with the Israelis apparently deciding to build a fence around the southern entrance of the village, a move which would effectively place the entire village inside Lebanon. The Israelis are concerned that Hizbullah may coerce Ghajar's residents to smuggle weapons to Palestinians or gather intelligence inside Israel. The residents of Ghajar have vowed to obstruct any attempt to isolate their village. The Israelis have apparently put the plan temporarily on hold.

De Mistura believes that the latest drama over Ghajar is "a storm in a teacup."

"There is already a security fence around the southern edge of the village and all residents are required to pass through a single gate manned by Israeli soldiers when exiting or entering the village," he said. "The issue seems to be simply upgrading the existing fence, possibly by electrifying it."

He added that Ghajar should not be considered a source of tension involving Lebanon.

"It's a problem the residents and the Israeli Army have to sort out. What happens south of the Blue Line has nothing to do with Lebanon or the UN," he said.

While the Ghajar flashpoint simmers, Abbassieh, an abandoned village two 2 kilometers to the east, is gaining greater attention as a new source of friction along the frontier.

The residents of Abbassieh were driven from their homes in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when Israeli troops occupied the tri-border pocket. The village was subsequently destroyed; the buildings were bulldozed and dynamited, the cemetery desecrated and the area sown with land mines.

When Israel withdrew from south Lebanon 18 months ago, about 20 percent of the original village area found itself on the Lebanese side of the Blue Line, according to the residents. Some former residents began building new homes on the sliver of "Lebanese" Abbassieh. All the residents complain that the Blue Line unfairly prevents them from accessing their original properties lying to the south.

Hizbullah has referred to Abbassieh in a number of speeches since July, most recently on Dec. 1 when the group's secretary-general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave it a prominence second only to the Shebaa Farms.

"Nasrallah has not raised Abbassieh with us nor has the Lebanese government," de Mistura said. "When the Blue Line was drawn, nobody discussed the Abbassieh question."

Of more pressing concern than Abbassieh is the potential for future tension over the use of water from the Hasbani river. The Hasbani flows down the western flank of the tri-border pocket, passing Ghajar and crossing the Lebanon-Israel border three kilometers south of the village. It feeds into the Upper Jordan and runs into the Sea of Galilee, the Jewish state's largest supply of surface water. The Wazzani springs beside Ghajar are the only source of water for the river during the hot dry summer months.

Last March, the Council for the South installed a small pump and a pipe 10 centimeters in diameter to supply drinking water from the Wazzani springs to the nearby village of Arab Louaize. In response, Israel warned that unchecked pumping of the Hasbani's water could spark a war.

Tempers flared again in June when a local farmer, Hussein Abdullah, announced that he intended to pump water from the Hasbani, one kilometer below the Wazzani springs, via an 18-centimeter pipe to irrigate some 3,000 dunums of land he owned nearby.

Although the amount of water being diverted from the river is inconsequential, the UN is aware that, given Israel's acute water shortage, an argument over the Hasbani could spark a more serious confrontation than the recent heated rhetoric.

An attempt in the 1960s to divert the Hasbani away from Israel led to a series of military confrontations, culminating in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The figures on the Hasbani's water flow are vague, varying between 110 million cubic meters (mcm) per year to 146mcm. The 1955 Johnston Agreement on regional water sharing which was never fully ratified allocated to Lebanon 35mcm per year of water from the Hasbani. But Lebanon is not believed to be utilizing more than 10mcm per year.

With the government's blessing, the UN contracted an Italian engineering company in July to compile a technical report on the Hasbani's water flow to provide de Mistura with some "objective criteria" to help defuse future rows over water usage.

"The whole purpose was to be equipped with an opportunity to pour water on a fire when a fire was raised unduly by one side or the other," he said.

The report is "purely technical" and will not be released to the public.

"We hope that the fact we have some objective criteria will serve as a deterrence to anyone who wants to make (the Hasbani) a potential flashpoint," he said. "Also, the report should help us when a new development takes place to objectively consider any allegation" of water being taken illegally.

The other main territorial dispute which has been raised by the government and Hizbullah is the so-called Seven Villages, whose residents became Lebanese following the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920 but ended up in Palestine four years later as part of an agreement between Britain and France on demarcating Palestine's northern frontier with Lebanon and Syria.

In 1948, the residents of the Seven Villages all Palestinian nationals since 1924 fled their homes in the first Arab-Israel war and sought refuge in Lebanon. Some purchased Lebanese nationality immediately; the rest were officially granted citizenship in 1994. The government has declared that the return of the Seven Villages is one of seven demands to be met by Israel in exchange for peace. In recent months, however, the Seven Villages issue has all but disappeared from the agenda as other, arguably more convincing, flashpoints have emerged.

The discrepancies over properties owned on either side of the Lebanon-Israel border have been raised by Hizbullah. Land belonging to some border villages, such as Houla and Mais al-Jabal, ended up inside Palestine when the Lebanon-Palestine border was demarcated in 1923. The Israeli border settlement of Manara, originally just a couple of Jewish-owned farms, was built on property owned by Houla residents. Similarly, some Israeli residents of Metulla still grumble about property purchased just north of the town inside Lebanon at the beginning of the last century. After the Lebanon-Palestine border was demarcated in 1923, the Jewish owners were cut off from their property.

Then there are potential sources of friction waiting in the wings, chief of which is the fate of Nkhaile, a deserted "Lebanese" village in the tri-border pocket, 2 kilometers south-east of Abbassieh.

Like Abbassieh, Nkhaile was abandoned by its residents in the 1967 war. Syrian troops had been deployed in Nkhaile since the 1950s a tank battle was fought there in the 1967 war. The village is considered by the UN as falling inside Israeli-occupied Syria. At least some of the former residents have acquired Lebanese nationality and began making demands for the return of their village after the Abbassieh issue caught the public attention.

Hizbullah is aware of Nkhaile's potential and has declared that the fate of the village "is for (consideration) after" the liberation of the Shebaa Farms.

Then there are the quirks in the Blue Line where it deviates from the original 1923 boundary in three places: south of Rmaish, at Addaisseh and between Metulla and the Hasbani bridge.

Nasrallah has referred to the discrepancy at Addaisseh, where the Blue Line dips into Lebanon beside the Misgav Am settlement to save a few Israeli houses built on Lebanese soil during the occupation.

What has not been mentioned by Hizbullah is the strip of Lebanese land some 100 meters deep running east of Metulla for almost 4.5 kilometers which was incorporated into Israel. Even Miklos Pinther, the UN's chief cartographer, has conceded that a mistake may have been made along this section of the Blue Line. The Lebanese authorities vigorously protested the error during the process of demarcating the line in summer 2000.

But the territorial disputes along the Blue Line receive little sympathy from de Mistura, even if some of them could be justified. What tends to be overlooked, he said, is that the Blue Line is not a legal border between countries but simply a line of withdrawal, a device by which to sanction Israel's troop pull out from south Lebanon in May 2000.

"It's simply a demarcation line that was agreed upon by all sides and is 'without prejudice to any internationally recognized border agreement that Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic may wish to conclude in the future'," de Mistura said, quoting from Kofi Annan's May 22, 2000 report on the Blue Line.

"The Blue Line is the only game in town to maintain calm, and we have to defend it in the interests of everyone," he said.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.