Lebanon and Israel exchange gun fire

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Lebanese and Israeli soldiers exchanged gun fire in a border dispute that left four people dead Tuesday. It was the most significant fighting there since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Anchor David Baron talks with The World’s Matthew Bell who is on the Israeli side of the border.(Photo: Alon Tuval)
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DAVID BARON: UN peacekeepers in Lebanon are backing Israel’s version of events. The peacekeepers say Israeli soldiers were on Israel’s side of the Lebanon border when the two sides began exchanging fire yesterday. Four people were killed in the cross-border skirmish. It was the worst border violence since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Lebanon officials acknowledged today that Israeli soldiers may have been on Israel’s side of a UN-drawn boundary, but Lebanon disputes that boundary. The World’s Matthew Bell is on the Israeli side of the border.

MATTHEW BELL:  I’m at a kibbutz that’s called Misgav Am and it’s up on a hill right near the border and it’s just up the hill from where the skirmish happened. I came up here to sort of look at the scene and also to talk to Israeli military people about what happened. Now, they say that they were doing routine maintenance, trimming trees, across the fence from down the hill from the kibbutz. They say they do this all the time and that, as usual, they were closely coordinating the activity with the UN forces, the peacekeepers that are on the other side of the border in Lebanon. I heard from a lieutenant colonel today that was actually there, and he said he personally was coordinating this stuff with the UN, that they went over and even pointed out which trees they were going to trim. And then he said that as soon as they got into place, the Lebanese forces actually had, in his opinion, prearranged this, what they called an ambush, and that there were snipers that hit Israeli officers, two Israeli officers. One of them was killed, one was critically wounded.

BARON:  Well, Matthew, maybe you could just describe the landscape a little bit here. Is there any confusion about where the border is? Isn’t there simply a fence and that fence marks the border, so you would know which side of the border the tree is on?

BELL: Well, from this side there’s sort of two fences, right. The fence that’s closest to the kibbutz sort of marks the end of Israel for all intents and purposes. And beyond that fence is sort of what they call a gap area, that at some times its quite narrow, but just down from the kibbutz here it’s actually two or three hundred meters wide. And that is an area that the Israeli’s say is in Israel. On the other side of that gap is the internationally recognized, what they call the blue line. The Israelis say look, we recognize that border, the blue line. The Lebanese do. But then there’s that gap area that the Israelis say they need to maintain for security. They have their own fence that is a sophisticated fence that has sensors on it. There are cameras and they say that they need to maintain that thing in order to maintain security. I suspect what they mean in a lot of ways is they want to have clear vision. They want to be able to see what’s going on there and that’s what the tree trimming was all about.

BARON: Now, you are at a kibbutz right against the border there. What do the people at the kibbutz have to say about the events that occurred yesterday?

BELL: I talked to a 64-year-old woman who’s been here for 40 years. She said, look, I’ve seen a lot. The first Lebanon war. The second Lebanon war. She said the worst of it was 1973, what the Israelis call the Yom Kippur War. She said yesterday she was sitting on her couch and reading and heard shooting and was surprised because she said it’s been really quiet here for the past four years. But, she was not thoroughly rattled in any way. She said, look, this is our life. This is how we live. We’ve seen it before. Hopefully things will go back to the way they have been for the most part over the last four years. And things were very quiet today. Looking through the binoculars on the Lebanese side of the border, it almost looked like a ghost town over there. There just was hardly any movement. You couldn’t really see anybody around at all.

BARON: The World’s Matthew Bell at the Israeli-Lebanese border. Thank you.

BELL: You’re welcome, David.

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