The Israel Defense Forces have released a map of the new security zone that is being set up inside Lebanon. The zone includes a strip of land along the border and also appears to include a maritime buffer zone.
The IDF wrote yesterday that “the Forward Defense Line and the area in which IDF soldiers are operating, following the ceasefire agreement.”
The IDF says that “5 divisions are operating simultaneously south of the Forward Defense Line in southern Lebanon in order to dismantle Hezbollah terror infrastructure sites and to prevent direct threats to communities in northern Israel.” The maritime buffer zone has also caught some people’s attention.
Ahmad Baydoun, who describes himself as interested in “planes, clouds and conflict,” notes that the IDF's new “maritime boundary fully absorbs Lebanon's Qana gas field, whose exploration rights were explicitly guaranteed under the 2022 US-brokered maritime border agreement.”
Elai Rettig, an Assistant Professor in Energy Politics at Bar-Ilan University, and Senior Researcher at the BESA Center, noted that one problem with Baydoun’s theory is that “there's no gas in the Qana prospect In 2023, TotalEnergies announced it did not find commercial gas reserves in that field and abandoned Block 9 entirely. The more interesting issue is Block 8, which is beyond this map, which TOTAL wants to explore.”
Dünya Başol, a PhD at Bar Ilan University’s Middle Eastern Studies, also notes that “Israel's new forward security zone in Lebanon isn't purely military. Look at the maps, it includes the Qana gas field. That's not incidental…Even wealthy states have to finance their wars, and gas fields help. If the occupation of this zone is meant to last, it increasingly looks that way. Qana is an obvious way to fund it.”
The new maritime buffer zone and the discussion about the gas field are interesting. It also conjures up memories of 2022, when Israel was pressured into a deal over the maritime demarcation line with Lebanon.
Considering the fact that Israel’s ambassador to Washington recently met the Lebanese ambassador with US mediation, there is a lot of talk again about Israel and Lebanon possibly coming to more deals. Any deal appears unlikely unless Lebanon actually disarms Hezbollah.
Without incentives from the US or the region, Lebanon is unlikely to move forward. Israel is also signaling it won’t withdraw from Lebanon anytime soon.
2022 Israel-Lebanon gas deal aimed to boost offshore exploration
Let’s remember what happened back in 2022. In those days, the Biden administration was in office. Lebanon wanted to secure a maritime deal so it could explore for natural gas off the coast. Israel has found a lot of gas reserves off the coast, and this has had a transformative effect. Lebanon wanted to move forward. Companies will usually only invest in exploration if they feel secure. They don’t want platforms being attacked.
As pressure mounted on Israel to do a deal, Hezbollah was operationalized to ratchet up the rhetoric. Hezbollah showed that it could use one-way attack drones to target gas platforms off the coast of Israel. Israel had its new Sa’ar 6 corvette warships to help defend Israel’s exclusive economic zone off the coast.
But Hezbollah was increasing its threats. At the time, Israel was doing everything possible to avoid escalation. Israeli citizens had been told that war with Hezbollah would be catastrophic. Thousands of people could be casualties. Hezbollah was expected to launch thousands of rockets a day, possibly laying waste to Israeli infrastructure.
Israel was also heading towards elections on November 1. The heat was on in October. On October 12, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the “Security Cabinet votes to support PM Lapid's summary on the maritime agreement with Lebanon. There is importance and urgency in reaching the maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon at this time. The members of the Security Cabinet express their support for the Government of Israel to advance the agreement.”
Note the word “urgency.” Israel’s then Prime Minister Yair Lapid said, “This is an historic achievement that will strengthen Israel’s security, inject billions into Israel’s economy, and ensure the stability of our northern border.”
The public in Israel was told that a deal had to be done immediately. If there weren’t a deal, there would be war. War with who? With Hezbollah. How had Hezbollah suddenly come to dictate Lebanon’s maritime claims? Very few asked this question. Why was the gas deal being dictated to Israel, and why were Israelis told that the deal would “stave off war.”
Israel’s then Defense Minister Benny Gantz said, “The agreement is moving forward despite the threats of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which tried to sabotage the process — and not because of it…We will continue to meet the security needs in every scenario and provide security to the citizens of Israel.”
On October 19, 2022, at the Post, we covered a statement by Gantz at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, where he said, “the regime in Lebanon continues to disintegrate as poverty increases...In this situation, Hezbollah’s influence grows, and through it so does the Iranian influence….The maritime border agreement will act as a deterrent and has the potential to reduce Iranian influence on Lebanon.”
US envoy Amos Hochstein, who mediated the deal, believed that this would create goodwill between Israel and Lebanon.
“This agreement was written with the idea in mind that it was between two countries that don’t have diplomatic relations,” he said in Lebanon.
“I think the good will and good faith efforts by all parties is what’s going to make this move forward…I truly believe and hope this can be an economic turning point in Lebanon for a new era of investment and continued support to lift up the economy.”
In the wake of the deal, the Hezbollah provocations did not stop. Hezbollah felt emboldened by the deal. It set up a tent in Mount Dov, a disputed area on the border which Israel controls. Reports in Israeli media also said Hezbollah was suspected of being behind a terrorist attack near Megiddo.
In addition, the group enabled rocket fire on Israel over Passover, 2023. Hezbollah looked at the recipe for the maritime deal, and instead of moving toward peace, it moved toward war. On October 8, 2023, it began attacks on Israel, a day after the Hamas attack. It had only been a year since the maritime deal was supposed to help bring peace and investment.
Now Israel appears to be taking control over areas that come under the deal. Rettig points out that it is “worth mentioning that occupation does not give the occupying force the rights to a country’s exclusive economic zone or the resources within it.
So no international energy company would agree to explore for gas in the area under Israeli control, and Israel does not have its own energy company able to explore gas in deep water.”
The new buffer zone won’t lead to any kind of exploration off the coast, but it does shed light on the problems with the 2022 deal.
It also raises questions about whether those meetings back in 2022 and other meetings between Israel and Lebanon will ever pave the way for any kind of actual peace between the countries. Every time there are meetings, there are lots of predictions about peace, but reality gets in the way.