Shebaa Farms
The Shebaa Farms, also spelled Sheba'a Farms (Arabic: مزارع شبعا, Mazāri' Šib‘ā; Hebrew: חוות שבעא Havot Sheba‘a), also known as Mount Dov (Hebrew: הר דב, romanized: Har Dov), is a strip of land on the Lebanese–Syrian border that is currently occupied by Israel.
From the early 1950s to Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, Syria was the de facto ruling power.
In August 2008, the president of Lebanon, Michel Suleiman, stated: "The countdown for liberating the rest of our lands has begun.
These "edges" are connected by the Shebaa Farms area's northeastern limit 2.5 km east of IDF military camp at Har Dov as defined by a 2007 UN report.
[11][failed verification] The same report defines the southwestern limit as a line roughly following the foot of the ridge and starting at just over a kilometer northwest of Banias, then running northwest to the international Lebanese–Syrian border's sharp turning point 3.4 km east of Ghajar and 1.0 km "south of the (Lebanese) village of El Majidiye."
[17] The United Nations Security Council declared this extension of "[Israeli] laws, jurisdiction and administration... null and void and without international legal effect" in Resolution 497, which was not passed with Chapter VII enforcement powers.
For decades the international diplomatic community has requested that Syria and Lebanon take steps to determine the exact boundary and officially register the demarcated border with the United Nations.
[20] The dispute over the sovereignty of Shebaa Farms resulted in part from the failure of the French Mandate administrations, and subsequently the Lebanese and Syrian governments, to demarcate the border between Lebanon and Syria.
Documents from the 1920s and 1930s indicate that local inhabitants paid taxes to the Lebanese government, while French officials expressed confusion as to the actual location of the border.
The UN Security Council passed Resolution 425, calling on Israel "to withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory".
[6] Between 2000 and 2005, Hezbollah attacked the IDF at Shebaa/Har Dov 33 times, resulting in seven Israeli soldiers killed in action, three taken prisoner, and dozens wounded.
[24] On 26 April 2024, an Israeli Bedouin truck driver was killed at Har Dov during infrastructure works as a result of an anti-tank missile strike by Hezbollah.
"[28] Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze politician and leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, stated that Lebanon has no claims to the Shebaa Farms.
On 28 August 2006, Hezbollah fighters withdrew from positions facing Israeli occupation lines in the Shebaa Farms area.
On 16 May 2000, the Syrian Foreign Minister, Farouq al-Shara, indicated to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a telephone conversation that Syria supported Lebanon's claim.
"[6] On 21 January 2006, President of Syria Bashar al-Assad spoke before the convention of the Arab Lawyers Union in Damascus which was translated into English by the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) He said there are two legal requirements for demarcating the border: first, the complaint must be registered with the UN; and second, engineers must precisely define the border.
As neither Syria nor Lebanon have access to the area, Assad argues that resolution is waiting on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory.
[35] Former Vice President of Syria Abdel-Halim Khaddam, in an interview with the Lebanese Future Television on 27 August 2006, said: "Saying that the farms are occupied, and hence cannot be demarcated, is nothing but a pretext.
"[15] In a 28 February 2011 one-on-one meeting with an American diplomat, Assad declared that both Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shuba Hills were Syrian territory and not Lebanese.
"[37] Former US president Jimmy Carter suggested in the Washington Post on 1 August 2006, that: "Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms.
[8] At the same time the UN noted that its decision was "without prejudice to future border agreements between the Member States concerned," referring to Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.
"[14] In 2006, Terje Rød-Larsen, the UN special envoy on implementation of Resolution 1559, declared that "the Shaba Farms area is not part of Lebanon.
[43] A joint meeting of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in November 2023 passed a resolution which called for an "end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including East Al-Quds, the occupied Syrian Golan, and the Lebanese Shebaa Farms, Kafr Shuba hills, and the outskirts of the town of al-Mari, and the implementation of the two-state solution.
"[44][45] In 2002, Asher Kaufman of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered previously unknown documents in French government archives.
Two other documents, from 1937 and 1939, were reports from the administrative councilor of south Lebanon and the head of the Services Spéciaux in the Syrian town of Quneitra.
