'All of Ghajar is Lebanese'

Lebanon's Hezbollah group yesterday claimed a village spanning the volatile Lebanese-Israeli frontier as Lebanese territory and said it was ready to fight for it. The group, backed by Syria and Iran, has set up checkpoints just hundreds of yards from Israeli soldiers on the edge of Ghajar, a village lying on both sides of a line marking Israel's pullout from south Lebanon last year after a 22-year occupation.

"Ghajar is Lebanese," Hezbollah executive council head Hashim Safieddin was quoted as saying in a statement from the group. "As Lebanese and as Hezbollah it is our right to walk on every crumb of soil in our land."

"The Zionists have three choices in Ghajar: withdraw, submit to the facts the resistance has made on the ground, or turn the area into a zone of confrontation," it quoted him as saying. "There is no solution between us and the enemy except confrontation." The village has become the focus of attention at the border since UN peacekeepers several weeks ago quit a nearby post from which they restricted access to Ghajar from Lebanon.

Most of Ghajar, home to some 10,000 members of the Alawite sect found in neighbouring Syria, lies on the Lebanese side of the UN "Blue Line". Israeli troops man a checkpoint at the other end of the village, and have restricted access to it. When the UN drew the withdrawal line, it assigned the northern two-thirds of Ghajar to Lebanon and the rest to the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

On Friday, after Hezbollah moved close to Israeli forces near Ghajar, Israel asked the United States, the main broker in Middle East peacemaking, to assure Syria, a backer of Hezbollah, that it did not seek an escalation on the Lebanese border. Hezbollah, a main force pushing Israel from southern Lebanon, has skirmished with Israeli troops since the pullout in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, which lies at the junction on the Lebanese border and the Golan Heights.

Hezbollah vows to drive Israel from the area, where it kidnapped three Israeli soldiers last October who it hopes to swap for Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in Israel. The United Nations certifies Israel's pullout as complete and does not endorse claims by Beirut, Damascus and Hezbollah that Shebaa Farms is Lebanese territory. It regards the area as Syrian land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.