a day ago
South Lebanese watched war next door in Israel while still facing attacks from their neighbour
For 20-odd days last autumn, Lt Col Alok Kumar Singh and his 70 fellow UN peacekeepers were trapped at their Unifil base in Shebaa village as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged around them.
From their vantage point 1,385 metres above sea level they were able to observe the culmination of a nearly year-long war between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group that reduced many towns and villages across southern Lebanon to rubble.
'We saw the movement of various Israeli vehicles in the vicinity of this post. And then there was a tank which was firing from that [hilltop],' Lt Col Singh says, pointing into the distance and then to a map showing where artillery shells had landed in the area.
'It was difficult, definitely it was difficult. But we were following the procedures, the alert levels,' he says. The peacekeepers spent many hours sheltering in the base's fortified bunkers, unable to conduct their usual patrols or receive fresh supplies.
More than six months later, the Unifil soldiers are back on their patrols amid the comparative calm that has followed a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel in November. Lt Col Singh says the patrols are conducted in co-ordination with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which has increased its deployment in southern Lebanon to ensure the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the region, collect its weaponry and dismantle its military sites; all conditions of the US-brokered truce.
However Israel has continued to conduct air strikes inside Lebanon on a near daily basis. The Israeli army says the attacks target Hezbollah figures, weapons and military sites, but they have also killed civilians and destroyed infrastructure. On Friday, at least one civilian was killed and 20 injured in Israeli strikes near the city of Nabatieh.
Despite these attacks, residents of the south who fled the war have returned to their wrecked homes and villages.
Lt Col Singh points to an Israeli base on a ridge opposite the Unifil base, from where Israeli soldiers opened fire a week ago. In the valley below sits Shebaa Farms, an Israeli-occupied sliver of land claimed by both Syria and Lebanon that has long been the scene of sporadic clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli troops.
His finger moves left to Mount Hermon in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, an area seized from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war. Another UN peacekeeping force is deployed there to monitor a buffer zone between Israeli-occupied territory and Syria, established under a ceasefire agreement following a war between the two countries in 1973. Despite this, Israeli troops invaded the zone after former Syrian president Bashar Al Assad was toppled in December.
Mount Hermon is also visible from Deir Mimas – a small Lebanese village to the south-west that sits about 2km from the UN-demarcated border between Israel and south Lebanon.
Israeli troops entered the village in late September as Israel ramped up its response to Hezbollah's cross-border fire with a ground invasion of border areas and intensified bombardment across Lebanon. Footage emerged of Israeli soldiers desecrating a church in the village.
The end of September should have been the time of the olive harvest in the picturesque village, perched above a steep valley from where Hezbollah would launch rockets at Israel. Instead, its residents fled.
'Some trees were damaged by the missiles,' said Michel Bechara, an olive farmer from Deir Mimas who decided to remain in Beirut. 'Others don't carry olives because of the bombs that came.
'Some people moved back to the south, but definitely life is not that stable there."
Though Israeli troops have left the village, they continue to occupy five points of Lebanese territory along the border, in another violation of the ceasefire.
'We've had enough'
Beirut resident Hassan Fakih says Israel's continuing attacks weigh on his mind as he awaits the arrival of his brother with his family for their annual visit to the family home in south Lebanon.
His concerns rose after Israel launched devastating air strikes on Iran on June 13 and Iran responded with drone and missile attacks. The 12-day war sparked fears of a wider regional conflict before it ended this week after US President Donald Trump declared a ceasefire.
The war provided Lebanese with the rare sight of Tel Aviv being struck. 'People were running in Tel Aviv. A lot of people's homes are destroyed, it looks like south Lebanon,' said Mr Fakih, who admitted to a sense of satisfaction at seeing the tables turned.
'But I'm happy it was not Hezbollah doing it. We've had enough,' he said.
The same sentiment was expressed by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in Qatar's capital on Tuesday. Like aircraft across the region, his flight to Doha was diverted the previous evening as Iran launched missiles at the Al Udeid American airbase in Qatar in retaliation for the US bombing of its nuclear sites at the weekend.
"We thank God for having succeeded, over the past two weeks, in preventing Lebanon from being drawn into a new war. We now aspire to open a new page of diplomatic action," Mr Salam told reporters.
'Normality has returned'
Hezbollah, severely weakened by Israel's attack's, ultimately did not intervene in support of its patron. The group has vacated its most threatening positions in the south and much of its arsenal is believed to have been destroyed by Israel.
On the outskirts of a town to the north of Nabatieh, near a bridge across a small ravine, a mound of dirt visible in the distance indicates where a major Hezbollah tunnel was destroyed earlier this year, according to a local.
'It was big,' he says. 'But not Emad-4,' he adds, referring to a large underground tunnel facility seen in a video Hezbollah released last year.
As incoming missiles triggered sirens across northern Israel during the war with Iran, farmers across the border in Lebanon were harvesting fields of wheat that line the road running north of the battered town of Khiam and then east to the Unifil base in Shebaa
'The difference between now and the [Hezbollah] war is that at that time the LAF was not here, the civilians had moved out. Shebaa, the village, was empty," Lt Col Singh says.
'But after the war, the LAF came in, they have occupied all the posts that were there. The civilians have come – they are now into a normal routine and have celebrated Eid and had their festivals.
'Normality, we can call it, has returned.'
