UPPER GALILEE, northern Israel — Standing at her nearly empty food counter in Kiryat Shmona, Edna Peretz is visibly distraught.
“We’ve come back, but with half a heart,” she says of the thousands of evacuees slowly returning to their homes during the current fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Edna and her husband returned from displacement in Tiberias three months ago, she says as her young granddaughter, Emmanuel, clutches her leg. It wasn’t a peaceful north that brought them home, but the need to begin repairing their house after it was struck by a Hezbollah rocket.
Though Israel has pummeled Hezbollah since the Lebanese terror group joined Hamas’s war against Israel on October 8, 2023, the northern border remains a turbulent frontier, both militarily and diplomatically.
The border in question is just that — in question. Since May 2000, the UN-approved withdrawal line for IDF troops, known as the Blue Line, has become Israel’s de facto border with Lebanon. But the two enemy states do not recognize it as an international border. And nor is establishing one — potentially setting in motion a process that brings long-term quiet — a simple undertaking.
Driving through the Upper Galilee, it’s easy to understand why.
Multiple areas of dispute
As the vivid greens of the Galilee hills roll by, Boaz Shapira, a researcher at the Alma Research and Education Center on northern security, points to areas under dispute in land border talks, which Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to restart last month.
The Lebanese government contests 16 points along the boundary, Shapira explains, while Hezbollah independently claims additional areas.
“According to some of these claims, we’re currently passing through Lebanese territory,” says Shapira, adding that three locations in particular — Rosh Hanikra (Ras Naqoura) at Israel’s northwest tip, Shebaa Farms and Ghajar — pose the greatest challenges at the negotiating table.
The commanding heights of the Shebaa Farms area are well within view as we drive, but not easily accessible. Known in Israel as Har Dov, Shebaa Farms contains key IDF positions, Shapira notes.
Shapira now heads to the most peculiar of the three major disputed points, Ghajar. With its colorful gardens and vistas of Lebanon’s white-capped mountains, this Alawite village doesn’t feel like it straddles two enemy countries. But while Israel exercises full control here, the Blue Line technically places its northern half under Lebanese jurisdiction — prompting Lebanon to dispute Israel’s sovereignty over part of the area.
Residents of Ghajar, nearly all holding Israeli citizenship, do not hide their reservations about Lebanon’s contention.
“First and foremost, we are Ghajarites. We’ve never belonged to Lebanon and we will not accept any decision aimed at entangling us with Lebanon,” Bilal Khatib, Ghajar’s spokesman, tells The Times of Israel.
According to Khatib, some Ghajarites fled to Lebanon during the 1967 Six Day War, but “the Lebanese government dumped them at the Syrian border, telling them, ‘We don’t need more refugees. You are Syrians, go to Syria.”
Ghajarites wish to remain in their homes, he says, despite the challenge of living in “a very sensitive spot.”
Khatib isn’t referring only to today’s fraught circumstances. His village is also caught in a geopolitical tangle that grips the entire strip of communities on both sides of the border. The seeds of that friction were planted over a century ago by European diplomats, pre-state Zionists and diverse ethnic communities.
Imperial, biblical and a technical nightmare: The birth of the border
Borders are a relatively new arrival in the region, as the Ottoman Empire ruled the entire Levant for centuries, beginning in the early 1500s. Its Beirut administrative district ran from Syria’s coastal mountains in the north to the Samarian highlands in the south, where it met the Jerusalem sector.
The Galilee and southern Lebanon were part of one contiguous stretch, both legally and in the minds of those living there, explained Professor Gideon Biger, an expert on Israel’s borders.
That changed with the outbreak of World War I, when Britain and France, sensing the empire’s inevitable demise, clandestinely prepared to carve up the postwar Levant. The British set their eyes on Palestine and Iraq, seeking control over Mesopotamia toward India and access to Persian Gulf oil, while the French hoped to capitalize on historical ties to Christian populations in greater Syria.
The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement defined their realms of influence, creating a Lebanon-Palestine border from the Sea of Galilee’s northwest tip to today’s Nahariya, excluding the upper Galilee.
But by 1918, British forces had taken the eastern Mediterranean coast, giving Britain a stronger hand in border talks — to the great benefit of early Zionists. At the 1919–1920 Paris Peace Conference, Zionist representatives proposed an ambitious boundary up to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, encompassing the Golan Heights, approaching Damascus and some of Transjordan, mainly to secure vital water sources for future Jewish settlement.
The classically educated British diplomats backed the Zionists. Raised on the biblical vision of Israel stretching “from Dan to Beersheba,” starting at the River Jordan’s headwaters well north of the Sea of Galilee, the British felt the “Holy River Jordan” belonged in the Holy Land, as Biger put it. Those with a military bent also recognized the Litani River as the only natural, defensible border between the two mandates.
The French stubbornly rejected the Litani demarcation, but the agreed-upon border in 1920 went further north than the Sykes-Picot line, including the Jewish settlement of Metula, and spanning from the Rosh Hanikra area on the Mediterranean to a point on the Hasbani stream near where Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet.
The border quickly proved not only militarily incoherent, but technically faulty. “The line was sketched on maps in Paris and London,” explained Biger. “Then came the task of marking it on the ground.”
The line was sketched on maps in Paris and London…Then came the task of marking it on the ground.
British officer Stuart Newcombe and his French counterpart Maurice Paulet arrived for the task, but had to alter the line when they found it bisected local villages. They also picked features like rocks, trees and old ruins as reference points, which largely disappeared over time, and used military maps inconsistent with those used in 1920, and with scales unfit for precise demarcation.
The adjusted line was finalized in the 1923 Paulet–Newcombe Agreement, which served as the basis for Jewish-Arab partition proposals in the 1937 Peel Commission and the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and would remain the primary reference for future border drawings.
From isolation to independence: 1923-1949
In the wild, lawless north of the 1920s, the newly finalized border existed only on paper. The four lone Jewish settlements in the Galilee panhandle — Metula, Hamra, Kfar Giladi and Tel Hai — carried on with little British or French military presence. Metula residents crossed the “border” to farm land they owned on the other side, even paying taxes to the Lebanese government.
The Jewish settlements found themselves occasionally caught up in a war between French authorities and Syrian nationalists, a conflict separate from the Jewish-Arab friction brewing farther south. In 1920, local Shiites and Bedouin, searching for French troops, attacked Tel Hai. Eight Jewish defenders, including commander Joseph Trumpeldor, were killed, marking a foundational moment in Zionist memory.
The effectively non-existent border became a problem for the British during a bloodier conflict, the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Arab gangs infiltrated with ease to fight Jews and British authorities, and “it was here, for the first time, that the British military commanders realized how erratically their predecessors had negotiated the border demarcation,” in the words of military historian David Eshel.
The British brought Sir Charles Tegart from India as a counterterrorism adviser. He deemed the 1923 line militarily indefensible, and attempted to seal it off in 1938 with a barbed-wire fence dubbed “Tegart’s Wall” — a harbinger of challenges Israeli forces would face.
A decade later, after Lebanon joined the Arab war effort against the fledgling Jewish state, Israeli forces launched a lightning counteroffensive, seizing the entire border region, capturing 14 Lebanese villages, and reaching the banks of the Litani River.
They also overtook and later depopulated seven Shiite villages south of the border, planting seeds for a future claim by Hezbollah that the villages are rightful Lebanese territory — a stance the Lebanese government has not adopted.
In 1949, Israel and Lebanon signed an armistice agreement using the 1923 boundary as the IDF withdrawal line. Israel unilaterally recognized the withdrawal line as an international border, and in all future Israeli invasions of Lebanon, Biger noted, continued to see the boundary as legitimate, never attempting to establish settlements as it did in all other areas it conquered during war.
From calm to carnage: 1949-1978
Though Israel and Lebanon had become enemy states, the border enjoyed relative quiet for nearly two decades after Israel’s establishment.
“During this period, [the Lebanese] used to come to weddings held on [Israel’s] side, and would invite people to weddings on their side. There was also trade in goods,” Biger said.
“We know of an incident where a female officers course unintentionally wandered into the area, since there were barely any markings there. They crossed into Lebanon and were apparently detained by the Lebanese, but were quietly returned a few days later,” he continued.
Metula residents continued farming Lebanese land until Lebanon eventually revoked the permission.
The border remained largely open throughout the 1950s. It wasn’t Israel’s capture of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967 that changed the dynamic, though Israel’s victory did transform some of Lebanon’s boundaries with Syria into borders with Israel, creating future flashpoints in Shebaa Farms and Ghajar.
After Jordan expelled Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1970s, many militants from Fatah — the PLO’s most dominant faction — relocated to southern Lebanon, finding fertile ground for recruiting among Palestinian Muslims who had fled in 1948.
The PLO turned Israel’s northern border into a launch point for shocking terrorist attacks. These included the 1970 grenade attack on a school bus in Avivim that killed 12 civilians, nine of them children, and the 1974 attack where terrorists held over 100 schoolchildren hostage in Ma’alot, killing 25 of them, mostly children, during the Israeli rescue attempt.
From Beirut to the Blue Line: 1978-2023
Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 to push the PLO back, and after persistent terrorist attacks, invaded again in the 1982 First Lebanon War, this time reaching Beirut.
Although Israel succeeded in ousting the PLO, a new threat soon emerged. Hezbollah — a militia rooted in Lebanon’s Shiite community — was established by Iran to carry out a guerrilla war against IDF troops and Western peacekeepers. They quickly got to work, blowing up the US embassy in Beirut, firing rockets at Israel, and conducting overseas hijackings and bombings.
Though Israel withdrew most of its forces from Lebanon by 1985, the border de facto disappeared as the IDF maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon for nearly two decades, manned by Israeli soldiers and the South Lebanon Army.
Years of attrition and growing domestic pressure led Israel to fully pull out from Lebanon in May 2000. The UN approved and oversaw the withdrawal, based on but deviating slightly from the 1923 border, creating today’s Blue Line.
Now sitting comfortably on Israel’s border, Hezbollah turned its attention to IDF troops patrolling the fence. Months after the withdrawal, it killed and snatched the remains of three Israeli soldiers.
In November 2005, after a series of failed kidnapping attempts, dozens of Hezbollah operatives launched rockets and attacked IDF outposts. A force of 20 fighters attacked an Israeli position in Ghajar in an attempt to kidnap soldiers, but were driven back.
The next year Hezbollah succeeded. In July 2006, fighters ambushed an IDF patrol, kidnapping two soldiers and killing eight more. Israel responded with the 34-day Second Lebanon War. UN Resolution 1701 ended the indecisive conflict, calling for a demilitarized buffer zone where only the Lebanese army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon could operate.
The resolution resolved nothing. Hezbollah only grew bolder and more entrenched — rearming, digging tunnels and building command posts as Israeli civilians watched with growing alarm.
For nearly two decades, Israel relied on a strategy of preemptive strikes and deterrence to keep Hezbollah at bay. While Hezbollah continued to strengthen, stockpiling rockets and positioning fighters along the border, mutual deterrence translated into a fraught modus vivendi.
It fell apart on October 8, 2023, with Hezbollah strikes, not coincidentally, on IDF posts in the Shebaa Farms territory.
Mapping the mayhem: Today’s points of contention
Before the current war, Israel and Lebanon clarified much of the Blue Line, agreeing in coordination with the UN to mark some 700 points along the boundary with additional barrels beyond the approximately 300 in place, Biger said. But 16 points, which Lebanon argues diverge from the original 1923 border, remain contested.
Shebaa Farms continues to be a core point of contention. In 2006, UN Resolution 1701 explicitly noted the Lebanese prime minister’s request to rule the area, which, though originally owned by Lebanese farmers living in the nearby Lebanese village of Shebaa, was placed within French-mandate Syria due to shoddy cartography.
Lebanon had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a transfer of the land from Syria after both states gained independence, but made no further claims once Israel conquered the territory in the 1967 Six Day War.
Until, that is, the year 2000, when Beirut adopted the Hezbollah claim that the Shebaa Farms area is Lebanese. Hezbollah justified retaining its arms by deeming the IDF pullout incomplete, though Israel maintained that any conflict over the territory was with Syria alone.
Damascus seemed to agree. Former US envoy Frederic C. Hof told The Times of Israel that during his efforts for an Israel-Syria peace deal in 2011, then-Syrian president Bashar al-Assad “categorically” rejected Lebanon’s claim, telling the diplomat that Shebaa Farms “is Syrian territory” and “has never been transferred to Lebanon.”
The Ghajar dispute was also shaped by cartographic ambiguity. In 2000, the UN, using maps that were imprecise, partly due to manipulation by Lebanese cartographers, drew the Blue Line through Ghajar rather than around it. When Israel withdrew its troops, Ghajar residents, fearing a division of their village, demanded to remain united under Israeli sovereignty.
The area of Rosh Hanikra, sitting on the Mediterranean coast, influences more than just dry land, as its precise demarcation sets the maritime boundary and divides Israel and Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zones. The 1920 border named “Ras Naqoura” as the point where the border meets the sea, but referred to a ridge rather than a precise location, leaving the exact point under ongoing dispute.
Far from the finish line
While last month’s four-way meeting at the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura made headlines, experts remain skeptical of achieving an internationally recognized border.
“Before we speak about the points of conflict,” said Alma Center research head Tal Beeri, “we need to discuss why Hezbollah is still operating south of the Litani, without deterrence from the Lebanese army or UNIFIL as Resolution 1701 dictates.”
It’s hard to imagine an army in which many commanders and soldiers are Shiite successfully deterring Hezbollah.
Furthermore, Beeri said, the Lebanese Armed Forces has become increasingly Shiite, due to both natural demographic trends and the cancellation of Lebanon’s mandatory draft in 2007. While no official census has been conducted in Lebanon, “reasonable estimates place the Shiite demographic between 35% and 50%, and Shiites volunteer for military service at much higher rates than other groups,” according to Beeri.
“It’s hard to imagine an army in which many commanders and soldiers are Shiite successfully deterring Hezbollah or disrupting its activities in any significant way.”
Hof, involved in previous Israel-Lebanon maritime border mediation efforts, is similarly aware of Hezbollah’s hold on the border region.
“Hezbollah still has a lot of military capability, and it can use that capability inside Lebanon to try to influence things. This is something that I think Israeli diplomats and American mediators need to keep in mind,” Hof said.
While Israel and Lebanon successfully negotiated a maritime boundary in 2022, the agreement was largely economically motivated and, despite efforts by US Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein, did not trigger land border talks.
“This has got to be a step-by-step-by-step process — without anybody trying to leap to the finish line all at once,” warned Hof.
Century-old faults continue to undermine attempts at a deal — a reminder that international borders are not waiting to be discovered, but are decided by the states on either side.
For now, and likely for a while to come, then, Edna Peretz will keep serving her occasional customers in Kiryat Shmona’s central bus station. “We still hear booms three to four times a week,” she lamented.
The Times of Israel Community.
