In October, Lebanon and Israel sealed a landmark agreement on the delineation of their joint maritime border, ending a tortuous 10-years of United States-brokered negotiations.
It also put an end to what was the tensest summer along the Lebanon-Israel border since the end of the month-long war in 2006 between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization. Hezbollah had threatened to sabotage any attempts to extract oil and gas from Israel’s Karish field before the conclusion of talks on the Lebanon-Israel maritime boundary. Its fighters were placed on alert, and some of its elite units were deployed to the front lines in south Lebanon. It also dispatched three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) toward the Karish field as a gesture of intent. The UAVs, which were unarmed, were shot down by the Israeli military.
Ultimately, vested interests in both Lebanon and Israel and strong diplomatic pressure from Washington bore fruit and a deal was reached. It is one of the brighter spots in an otherwise dark landscape. Lebanon is in the throes of what the World Bank has described as one of the top three worst economic crises of the last century and a half. Eighty percent of the population now lives below the poverty line, the value of the Lebanese lira, the national currency, has fallen by about 90 percent, and there are shortages of electricity, gasoline, medicines and other commodities. Lebanon desperately needs to move ahead on exploring its coastal waters for the hoped-for oil and gas reserves lying there and begin extraction. Israel, on the other hand, concluded the negotiations with an eye on elections held at the beginning of November. The government of Prime Minister Yair Lapid was facing a stiff challenge from veteran politician Benjamin Netanyahu and a successful agreement with Lebanon could have helped tip the balance in his favor. Netanyahu said ahead of the election that the deal was a “historic” surrender to Hezbollah and that he would not be bound by the agreement if elected. Although Netanyahu won the election, it is highly unlikely that he will pull out of the agreement.
At the heart of the negotiations was a disputed area of some 840 square kilometers between the differing lines that Lebanon and Israel submitted as their joint maritime boundary. Earlier negotiations had suggested a compromise in which Lebanon received 55 percent of the disputed area and Israel the other 45 percent. That offer was rejected by Lebanon. In late 2020, Lebanon came up with a new demarcation line, Line 29, as its maritime border. This boundary fell far to the south of Line 23, its original proposed boundary, and was immediately rejected by Israel. However, Lebanon never officially endorsed Line 29 as its proposed border, knowing that doing so would end US mediation efforts, leaving the maritime issue in stasis and whatever oil and gas wealth resides beneath Lebanese waters untouched.
Renewed talks earlier this year coincided with the launch of exploratory drilling in the Karish field which straddles Line 29, a step that significantly raised tensions but also sharpened the final rounds of negotiations. Israel eventually accepted Line 23 as the joint maritime boundary. The line cuts through the Qana gas field. The agreement allows Lebanon to exploit the entire Qana field while Total, the French company contracted to drill Qana, will deliver a percentage of its financial proceeds to Israel. Lapid’s decision to fall back to Line 23 was greeted with heavy criticism in some quarters in Israel. However, it was a pragmatic decision that not only eased tensions with Hezbollah but also allowed Israel to step up gas extraction from the Karish field in peace. There is also a lingering – and fateful – question about how much gas or oil the Qana field actually holds. Some people closely following the maritime negotiations believe that the Qana field is not as bountiful as Lebanon hopes which is why Israel was willing to concede to Line 23.
The conclusion of the maritime agreement appears to have ushered in an anticipated period of calm along the Lebanon-Israel border. Even before the conclusion of the deal there was little appetite for a renewed conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is usually averse to negotiations with Israel, although it has indirectly reached prisoner swap deals in the past mediated by third parties. But the party was not in a position to block the maritime negotiations because it would have been roundly blamed for stalling the process of gas exploration in Lebanese waters. Instead, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, expressed the party’s delight in sealing this deal, and claiming that it was the threats of the “resistance” that forced Israel to compromise. If the talks had foundered and Israel proceeded to extract oil and gas from Karish, Nasrallah would have had no choice but to launch some form of military effort against Israel in order to make good on his threats. In multiple conversations during the summer with Hezbollah fighters and party supporters in south Lebanon (all of whom were convinced that war was imminent), the preference was for a limited conflict with Israel rather than an all-out confrontation which would be devastating to both countries. Some of them noted, however, that Israel had far more to lose in a major war with Hezbollah given that Lebanon is already in a state of economic collapse. However, such calculations are extremely unpredictable; once a conflict breaks out, there are no guarantees that it will remain at a low level and for a limited duration of time.
Nasrallah’s bellicosity during the summer raised some interesting questions about Iran’s view on the maritime border negotiations and Hezbollah’s aggressive stance. After all, Hezbollah is Iran’s greatest force enabler and for more than a decade has been serving Tehran’s interests across the region, specifically in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Hezbollah also is a factor in Iran’s deterrence; any country contemplating striking Iran’s nuclear facilities must take into account the reaction of Hezbollah in Lebanon with its huge arsenal of precision-guided sub-ballistic missiles. Would Iran really have approved of Hezbollah engaging in what could have evolved into a devastating and costly war with Israel just for the sake of determining which line the Lebanon-Israel maritime boundary would follow?
Nevertheless, there was one reason why Iran might have approved of a limited flare-up between Hezbollah and Israel. Israel has been hitting Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria since January 2013 as part of what it calls its “war-between-wars” campaign. But this year, the rate of attacks has increased. The air strikes have become almost weekly events and stretch across the country with a focus on the area south of Damascus and western Syria between Homs and Latakia. Indeed, the low rumble of Israeli jets often heard above Beirut heading north is usually a harbinger that some target in western Syria will be going up in smoke in the next half an hour. In the first three weeks of November alone, Israeli aircraft attacked a Syrian military air base, a suspected arms convoy crossing from Iraq into eastern Syria, and military positions in the western half of the country, and near Damascus. Furthermore, in the past two and a half years, there has been a swathe of attacks inside Iran itself, which the Iranian authorities have pinned on Israel. They include explosions at Iranian nuclear facilities, suspected assassinations of scientists and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officer, cyber-attacks and a suicide UAV attack on an Iranian UAV production facility. There has been no visible response against Israel by Hezbollah or other Iranian proxy militias for this unending slew of air strikes and attacks in Syria and Iran. It is impossible to say how debilitating the air attacks have been on Iran’s attempts to entrench a military network on Syrian territory, but the Iranians are still pressing ahead. Some Hezbollah interlocutors admitted that Iran was growing increasingly unhappy with the Israeli air strikes in Syria and the embarrassing operations on Iranian soil. One air strike at Damascus airport in May apparently destroyed a warehouse containing two year’s supply of food for Hezbollah and killed several Iranian officers, according to a veteran Hezbollah member. The attacks may have convinced Tehran to possibly approve a limited escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, nominally over the maritime dispute but implicitly over Israeli actions in Syria and Iran.
Therefore, while the Lebanon-Israel border may remain calm for the time being, Syria will remain a tense theatre as Israel presses ahead with its aerial campaign with the ever-attendant possibility that Iran and Hezbollah will at some point refuse to keep turning the other cheek.
Nicholas Blanford is a senior nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program.
