Dressed in US Army fatigues, his face smothered in green and black paint, and standing beside his Soviet-era Sagger antitank missile, Abu Haidar explains why he and his fellow Hizbullah fighters are here. Given the escalating tensions in the Mideast, the Shebaa Farms is widely viewed as a potential flashpoint that could spark a war between Israel and Syria, the dominant powerbroker in Lebanon. The Shebaa Farms is definitely a potential ignition point.
Escalation is very possible.
The 14 farms of Shebaa were originally owned by Lebanese nationals, but the territory was included inside Syria when Lebanon's borders were demarcated in the 1920s. Syria ceded the district to Lebanon in the 1950s, but the agreement was never formally ratified. The area was later occupied by Israel during the invasion of the adjacent Golan Heights in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. To Lebanon's irritation, the UN last year decreed that Israel was not obliged to withdraw from the Shebaa Farms in fulfilling UN resolutions calling for a withdrawal from Lebanon. The calm following Israel's withdrawal lasted five months.