The area where Christ is recorded in the Gospels as healing from a distance the daughter of a Phoenician woman is still meshed deeply in the Middle East conflict. Tyre and Sidon are today part of Lebanon's Shiite Muslim south, where the Muslim militant movement of Hizbollah has bases from which it regularly attacks Israeli troops occupying a southern strip of Lebanon.
Lebanese guerrillas say they are fighting to expel Israeli troops from Lebanese soil.
Both cities were themselves occupied by Israeli forces during the 1982 Lebanon war, when the Israeli army advanced as far north as Beirut and besieged the Lebanese capital during the summer with horrendous loss of civilian life, in order to make Palestinian guerrilla groups leave southern Lebanon. In Biblical times, both towns were well known as wealthy sea ports where Phoenicians set out to trade with the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. These days they are crowded cities with slums where many poor Shiite Muslim peasants from the surrounding countryside have migrated in the hope of escaping the fighting further south and of finding a job. Sidon also hosts the teeming refugee camp of Ain Hilweh, where poverty and politics combine to create hell for thousands of Palestinians. During the Lebanese civil war various militias besieged the camp so that in 1987 it nearly starved to death.