Israel-Hezbollah conflict

Hezbollah's spokesperson Hassan Ezzedin "If they go from Sheba'a, we will not stop fighting them. Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine… [Jews] can go back to Germany or wherever they came from.”

— New Yorker, 14/10/02


[T]he January 20, 2005 UN Secretary-General's report on Lebanon stated rather emphatically: "The continually asserted position of the Government of Lebanon that the Blue Line is not valid in the Shab'a farms area is not compatible with Security Council resolutions. The Council has recognized the Blue Line as valid for purposes of confirming Israel’s withdrawal pursuant to resolution 425 (1978). The Government of Lebanon should heed the Council’s repeated calls for the parties to respect the Blue Line in its entirety."

— UN Press Release SC/8299, 28/1/05


On May 19, 2005, an off-the-record senior diplomat at a Brookings Institution luncheon reported that: "in drawing the 'Blue Line' in 2000, the United Nations looked at more than ninety different maps of the region. Only one of them — which was deemed a forgery — showed the Shebaa Farms as Lebanese."

— Brookings Institution, 19/5/05


Nancy Soderberg, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, made a similar observation on July 21, 2006. She wrote that: "When it was clear the Israelis were going to withdraw fully from Lebanon, Syrian and Lebanese officials fabricated the fiction that this small, sparsely populated area was part of Lebanon. They even produced a crudely fabricated map to back up the dubious claim. I and United Nations officials went into the map room in the United Nations and looked at all the maps of the region in the files for decades. All showed the Shebaa Farms clearly in Syria."

— Florida-Times Union, 21/7/06


[T]he Lebanese parliamentary speaker, a prominent Shiite who has been negotiating on behalf of Hezbollah, rejected the U.S.-French draft U.N. cease-fire resolution on Sunday because it did not include the government’s plan for ending the fighting.

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“Lebanon, all of Lebanon, rejects any talks or any draft resolution that does not include the seven-point government framework,” Berri said at a news conference in Beirut.

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The U.S.-French proposal, which was expected to go to the floor of the U.N. Security Council early this week, calls for Hezbollah to stop all military operations and for Israel to stop its offensive drive against Lebanon. The proposal would allow Israel to strike back if Hezbollah were to break a cease-fire.

— Associated Press, 6/8/06


Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem stood next to his Lebanese counterpart and declared Israel would never defeat the hardened guerrilla force.

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“As Syria’s foreign minister I hope to be a soldier in the resistance,” said Moallem, the first top Syrian official to visit Lebanon since Damascus ended a 29-year military presence in Lebanon last year.

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Iran on Sunday gave its ally Hezbollah a green light to keep fighting in Lebanon, saying that the United States cannot be a mediator in the crisis because of its support for Israel.

Many in the U.S., Europe, the Arab world and Israel accuse Iran of fueling the warfare in Lebanon through Hezbollah, in a bid to show its regional strength. …

— Associated Press, 6/8/06