Has Iran Inherited Syria’s Role at the Shebaa Farms ‘Mailbox’?

In July 2001 Hezbollah struck the position of an Israeli radar. The move was an act of retaliation to Tel Aviv’s attack on a Syrian military radar in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley region. That attack was, in turn, a response to Hezbollah’s shelling of positions in the disputed Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms region.

Twenty years later, the Iran-backed party struck an open area in the Shebaa Farms and Israel retaliated with artillery fire. The attacks were a sign of their commitment to the “rules of engagement” in place since 2006 after testing how much they can be changed and after southern Lebanon has become tied to the “shadow war” playing out between Israel and Iran on land and at sea.

How has the “southern front” become more connected to Tehran than to Damascus? What do the Shebaa Farms have to do with the Golan Heights? Is there a connection between the escalation in Syria’s Daraa and the test in southern Lebanon?

After he became prime minister in 2001, Israel’s Arial Sharon attempted to change the “rules of the game” in Lebanon. He retaliated to Hezbollah attacks by ordering raids on Syrian forces in Lebanon – a first since 1982. Previously, such attacks were limited to Lebanese targets.

At the time, Damascus was in control and averted any direct confrontation with Israel. That role was relegated to Hezbollah. All sides, therefore, conveyed messages through the Shebaa Farms that acted as a form of “mailbox” after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. The new rules were: An Israeli radar in return for a Syrian one, with Hezbollah executing the order.

Several developments have since taken place in Lebanon, Syria and the region that have altered this equation:

One: After the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Damascus declared that Shebaa was Lebanese territory occupied by Israel. The United Nations, however, says that it is in fact Syrian territory that has been occupied since 1967. Then Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa informed then UN chief Kofi Annan that Syria views the territory as Lebanese, granting Hezbollah free reign to “resist” Israeli occupation.

Two: The death of Syrian president Hafez Assad in June 2000 and his son Bashar’s assuming of power changed the equation between Damascus and Hezbollah. When paying his respects at Hafez’s grave in al-Qardaha in 2001, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah vowed to “liberate the Shebaa Farms.”

Three: The Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005. The assassination of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005 prompted the withdrawal. Ahead of the pullout, Hezbollah staged a “loyalty to Syria” march. Soon after, the party would begin to hold greater sway in Lebanon, while Iran’s influence in the region would outmatch Syria’s and its traditional allies.

Four: Syria and Israel, through American mediation, were on the verge of signing of a peace deal in late February 2011, just days before the eruption of the Syrian protests. American mediator Frederic Hof had drafted the deal that would include Damascus severing “military ties” with Iran and Hezbollah and “neutralizing” any threat to Israel. In return, Syria would reclaim the Golan Heights according to the June 4, 1967 border.

At the time, Hof recalled that Bashar had informed him that the Shebaa Farms were Syrian territory, not Lebanese. Bashar falsely predicted that Lebanon would soon follow in striking peace with Israel should Syria make a similar deal. Such a move would have inevitably impacted Iran and Hezbollah’s influence.

Five: The eruption of anti-regime protests in Syria in March 2011 gave way to Hezbollah and Iran’s eventual intervention in the country to defend their ally in Damascus. They would later reinforce their military presence in various Syrian regions, especially the south. The Golan Heights would become “tied” to other Iranian “fronts” in the Middle East.

Six: Russia intervened militarily in Syrian in September 2015 to support the regime and help it reclaim territory after it was on the brink of collapse. Syria was therefore, turned into a Russian base and starting point for its expansion in the Middle East. Moscow would sponsor various deals and settlements, including one in mid-2018 that called for Iran and its allies to pull out from the South and the area bordering the Golan.

Seven: Israel would soon begin carrying out raids against Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria in an attempt to impose “red lines” that include preventing Iran from establishing military bases, preventing the delivery of precision missiles to Hezbollah and preventing Tehran and the party’s military entrenchment in the Golan. The United States in turn entrenched itself in the al-Tanf base on the border between Syria, Jordan and Iraq in an attempt to block the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut route. In 2020, Israel announced that it had carried out over 50 air strikes against Syrian targets and fired over 500 projectiles and rockets.

Eight: Syria transformed into a “mailbox” between Iran and Israel after the assassination of Jihad Mughnieh, the son of prominent Hezbollah operative Imad. Jihad was killed by an Israeli strike on the Golan Heights in early 2015. The ensuing escalation was “limited and agreed” to be restricted to the Shebaa Farms in line with the “rules of the game” that had been in place after the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

In February 2018, Syrian air defenses shot down an Israeli F-16 jet in retaliation to Israeli strikes that were prompted by an Iranian drone’s breach of Israeli airspace. Tel Aviv responded by carrying raids against Syrian and Iranian positions. That was the first time that Israel and Iran directly confronted each other since the 1979 Iranian revolution. It also marked the widest Israeli attack against Syrian forces since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Golan had by now become one of the arenas where retaliations can play out. At the time, an Iranian Mahan Air jet flew over the al-Tanf base to test the American response. An American F-15 flew very close to the Iranian aircraft and shots were fired from Syria Quneitra towards the Golan, prompting Israeli helicopter fire.

Nine: For the first time, Russia began to detail Israeli strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria. At the same time, reports said Damascus had received a new anti-aircraft defense system that would protect Syria against Israeli strikes. Simultaneously, Russia was exerting efforts to meet its commitments in the deal on southern Syria, specifically in Daraa, amid complaints from Jordan, Israel and the US over Iranian attempts to advance in the area.

Ten: Iranian sources confirmed the July 29 drone attack on an Israeli tanker in the Gulf of Oman that left a Briton and Romanian dead. This marked the first escalation of its kind between Israel and Iran. The drone attack was retaliation to Israeli raids in June on central Syria that killed senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hezbollah.

Those attacks were followed up last week with rocket fire from southern Lebanon on northern Israel, not the Shebaa Farms nor the Golan. Israel consequently fired back with air strikes, not artillery fire, on Lebanon – the first such attacks since 2006.

The two sides would soon, however, return to limiting their retaliatory attacks to Shebaa – the old mailbox. This time around, the messages were being exchanged between Tel Aviv and Tehran that are waging both a “shadow” and direct war. As it stands, new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is unhappy with the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear deal, while Iran’s new President Ebrahim Raisi is keen on burnishing his credentials on the Arab “fronts”.

Winter is hitting the Gaza Strip and many of the nearly 2 million Palestinians displaced by the devastating 14-month war with Israel are struggling to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.

There is a shortage of blankets and warm clothing, little wood for fires, and the tents and patched-together tarps families are living in have grown increasingly threadbare after months of heavy use, according to aid workers and residents.

Shadia Aiyada, who was displaced from the southern city of Rafah to the coastal area of Muwasi, has only one blanket and a hot water bottle to keep her eight children from shivering inside their fragile tent.

“We get scared every time we learn from the weather forecast that rainy and windy days are coming up because our tents are lifted with the wind. We fear that strong windy weather would knock out our tents one day while we’re inside,” she said.

With nighttime temperatures that can drop into the 40s (the mid-to-high single digits Celsius), Aiyada fears that her kids will get sick without warm clothing.

When they fled their home, her children only had their summer clothes, she said. They have been forced to borrow some from relatives and friends to keep warm.

The United Nations warns of people living in precarious makeshift shelters that might not survive the winter. At least 945,000 people need winterization supplies, which have become prohibitively expensive in Gaza, the UN said in an update Tuesday. The UN also fears infectious disease, which spiked last winter, will climb again amid rising malnutrition.

The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, known as UNRWA, has been planning all year for winter in Gaza, but the aid it was able to get into the territory is “not even close to being enough for people,” said Louise Wateridge, an agency spokeswoman.

UNRWA distributed 6,000 tents over the past four weeks in northern Gaza but was unable to get them to other parts of the Strip, including areas where there has been fighting. About 22,000 tents have been stuck in Jordan and 600,000 blankets and 33 truckloads of mattresses have been sitting in Egypt since the summer because the agency doesn’t have Israeli approval or a safe route to bring them into Gaza and because it had to prioritize desperately needed food aid, Wateridge said.

Many of the mattresses and blankets have since been looted or destroyed by the weather and rodents, she said.

The International Rescue Committee is struggling to bring in children’s winter clothing because there “are a lot of approvals to get from relevant authorities,” said Dionne Wong, the organization’s deputy director of programs for the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The ability for Palestinians to prepare for winter is essentially very limited,” Wong said.

The Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating aid shipments into Gaza said in a statement that Israel has worked for months with international organizations to prepare Gaza for the winter, including facilitating the shipment of heaters, warm clothing, tents and blankets into the territory.

More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry's count doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has said more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war was sparked by Hamas’ October 2023 attack on southern Israel, where the armed group killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages in Gaza.

Negotiators say Israel and Hamas are inching toward a ceasefire deal, which would include a surge in aid into the territory.

For now, the winter clothing for sale in Gaza's markets is far too expensive for most people to afford, residents and aid workers said.

Reda Abu Zarada, 50, who was displaced from northern Gaza with her family, said the adults sleep with the children in their arms to keep them warm inside their tent.

“Rats walk on us at night because we don’t have doors and tents are torn. The blankets don’t keep us warm. We feel frost coming out from the ground. We wake up freezing in the morning,” she said. “I’m scared of waking up one day to find one of the children frozen to death.”

On Thursday night, she fought through knee pain exacerbated by cold weather to fry zucchini over a fire made of paper and cardboard scraps outside their tent. She hoped the small meal would warm the children before bed.

Omar Shabet, who is displaced from Gaza City and staying with his three children, feared that lighting a fire outside his tent would make his family a target for Israeli warplanes.

“We go inside our tents after sunset and don’t go out because it is very cold and it gets colder by midnight,” he said. “My 7-year-old daughter almost cries at night because of how cold she is.”

Has Iran Inherited Syria’s Role at the Shebaa Farms ‘Mailbox’?