Global Policy Forum

By Nayla Razzouk

The missiles flying over the border fence from Lebanon Wednesday landed with soft thuds rather than deafening explosions on the Israeli side, and provoked no reaction stronger than bemused smiles.

"Take this back, it belongs to you. We don't want it," shouted a Lebanese civilian, as he hurled a melon over the fence, to be fielded neatly by a journalist who merely laughed at the incident. Journalists on the Israeli side stared through the barbed wire fence at their Lebanese colleagues gathered there on the other side along with curious civilians and fully armed Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and Amal guerrillas.

The melon, grown in Israel and brought into southern Lebanon under the Israeli occupation, was among a mass of Israeli products seized by Hezbollah and Amal guerrillas, the two most important resistance groups, as they took over abandoned Israeli positions. The same man threw a second melon at a navy blue civilian car with tinted windows driving slowly past. "God damn you, you traitor, I know you are not an Israeli, you are a traitor coming back to look at us," he yelled. He was referring to the Lebanese who served in the South Lebanon Army militia which had helped Israel control the occupied zone for 22 years. With the Israeli collapse, they and their families fled in their thousands to Israel Tuesday, queuing for hours at Kfar Kila's Fatima Gate before being allowed across.

Another civilian took a box of chocolate cupcakes with Hebrew writing on it from a passing truck loaded Israeli-made products confiscated by Hezbollah guerillas and handed it over the barbed wire to a journalist on the Israeli side. "We don't want your products," he said, then picked up Lebanese and Hezbollah flags and raised them on the fence.

A number of Hezbollah guerrillas, with assault rifles on their shoulders, drove at full speed down the long road leading to the Fatima Gate checkpoint, revving up the engines of their motorbikes whenever they approached Israeli patrols on the other side of the fence. Two Hezbollah sheikhs posed for the journalists on the other side, raising machine guns into the air and holding up yellow Hezbollah flags, which show a Kalashnikov above the word Allah.

The journalists on the Israeli side of the border were more amused than anything else with such acts of defiance by the Lebanese, many of whom had probably not seen Israel before as Lebanon's southern border strip had remained sealed for more than two decades to non-residents of the region.

Lebanon and Israel are officially in a state of war, and the border between them is now closed. However until Tuesday, some 2,500 Lebanee from the former occupied zone crossed the borders every day to work in factories, hotels and fields in Israel to earn their living in an area which otherwise largely depended on salaries from the SLA and the Israeli-run "civil administration."

Nevertheless, there were some economic perks to living in the zone. Products from Israel entered in large quantities tax free, making them cheaper than Lebanese goods. Residents of the border area also flooded the roads with cars bought cheap, most of them originally brought from Germany to Israel and then driven into the border zone with no duty paid. They included vehicles more than five years old whose import is prohibited by Lebanese law. Another major source of revenue was smuggling drugs across the border, sometimes in truck tyres, or even using slings or catapults to throw packs of hashish, cocaine or heroin, across the fence to be caught by Israeli accomplices on the other side.

The United Nations said Wednesday that it would proceed with plans to mark the southern borders of Lebanon to verify the withdrawal of Israeli forces, already announced by Israel as complete. "The UN still intends to take cartographers to the area to identify the border and to make a line to confirm the Israeli withdrawal," UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

First, UN cartographers "will fly over areas where the border is not marked and will drop brightly coloured concrete canisters from a low altitude to mark the border," he said. After that "we shall patrol on the ground to make sure there are no remaining Israeli elements or SLA," he said. He was referring to the South Lebanese Army, the Israeli-backed militia which fled south across the border or surrendered to guerrillas of the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah as Israeli forces departed.

Israel announced that the last of its troops to leave Lebanon crossed the border early Wednesday, six weeks ahead of the schedule it had originally set itself. Their hasty departure, and the collapse of the SLA, caught the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) off guard. UNIFIL has a mandate from the Security Council to verify the withdrawal of Israeli forces, but its 4,513 troops were left behind as Hezbollah swept through areas vacated by the Israelis, up to the wire frontier fence.

Eckhard emphasised that the United Nations was not responsible for defining the international frontiers between Israel and Lebanon or between Lebanon and Syria.

The Israeli-Lebanese border runs for a total of about 80 kilometres (50 miles), eastwards from Naqoura on the Mediterranean coast, then northwards around the northern tip of Israel known as the finger of Galilee. In a report to the Security Council on Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pointed out that the frontier had been defined by France and Britain in 1923 and had been accepted with minor modifications by Israel and Lebanon. "We will draw a practical line to verify that Israel has withdrawn behind that line," Eckhard said.

But the Israeli-occupied zone in southern Lebanon extended further east than the tip of Galilee, running for about another 30 kilometres (18 miles) along the border between Lebanon and Syria. Before the cartographers could drop the concrete markers, "we will need assurances from Syria and Lebanon that they will be able to fly over the border," Eckhard said.

Annan's report said "there seems to be no official record of an international boundary agreement between Lebanon and Syria that could easily establish the line for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal." He drew attention to a number of farms in the Shebaa region, just beyond the easternmost extremity of UNIFIL's area of operations, which have become a matter of contention. Lebanon and Syria agree that the farms are in Lebanese territory, while Israel says they are in Syria.

Annan's report carefully avoided taking sides on that question.

But it pointed out that Israel had occupied the Shebaa area during the six-day war in June 1967, more than 10 years before UNIFIL was established in March 1978 under Security Council Resolution 425. The United Nations still insists that Israel withdraw from Arab territories occupied in 1967, Annan wrote. But he advised the Security Council that the Shebaa farms lay outside the UNIFIL area and should not be taken into account in verifying Israel's withdrawal under Resolution 425.