KFAR-TIBNIT: On the outskirts of this southern Lebanese village, workers in a pickup truck parked at a nature reserve named after a fallen fighter of the militant Hezbollah group. They took two large eucalyptus tree seedlings out of the truck and planted them.
The men are from Green Without Borders, a non-governmental organization that says it aims to protect Lebanon’s green areas and plant trees.
But Israel, the United States and some in Lebanon accuse the NGO of being an arm of Hezbollah to hide its military activities. They say the organization has been setting up outposts for the militant group along the border with Israel. Last month, residents in the southern Christian village of Rmaych near the border said they encountered armed men at an outpost of the organization that was blocking them from farmlands.
Green Without Borders denies any link to Hezbollah, which also says it is not connected to the environmental group.
“We are not an arm for anyone,” the head of Green Without Borders, Zouher Nahli, told The Associated Press. “We as an environmental association work for all the people and we are not politicized.” He spoke at the Bassam Tabaja Nature Reserve, named for a Hezbollah fighter killed in Syria in 2014, where the NGO has planted hundreds of trees.
He said the organization’s funding comes from the ministries of environment and agriculture as well as from wealthy Lebanese who care about the environment and municipalities, mainly in the eastern Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. He said he is an Agriculture Ministry employee.
Since it began operations in 2009, the group has helped plant about 2 million trees, Nahli said.
Israel and Hezbollah are archenemies and have fought several wars over the past decades, the last of which ended in August 2006. The 34-day conflict killed 1,200 in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
The UN Security Council resolution that ended that war said the border area should be free of “any armed personnel, assets and weapons,” other than those of the government and UN peacekeepers. After the war, thousands of Lebanese troops were deployed in the border zone and the UN peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, which has been present there since 1978, was beefed up.
In a November report, UNIFIL said shipping containers and prefabricated buildings, some of them with visible Green Without Borders markings, had been set up at 16 sites along the border. In several instances, UNIFIL patrols were prevented from nearing the locations, it said.
The Israeli military says Green Without Borders outposts on the border are used by Hezbollah to gather intelligence information.
At a Security Council meeting in September, the US deputy UN ambassador, Richard Mills, said the proliferation of the group’s outposts along the border obstructs UNIFIL access and “is heightening tensions in the area, further demonstrating that this so-called environmental group is acting on Hezbollah’s behalf.”
At the meeting, the council unanimously approved a resolution strongly condemning harassment, intimidation, attacks and restrictions on UNIFIL.
Last month, an Irish UN peacekeeper was killed and several others were wounded when attackers opened fire on a UNIFIL convoy in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah denied any connection to the attack.
Nahli said he was not aware of any shipping containers or buildings being set up by his organization. “All we do along the border is protect forests and all the claims are illogical and baseless,” he said.
Residents in border Shiite villages that support Hezbollah praise the organization. “It is doing good for the environment and planting trees along the border. We are very happy with their work,” said Salah Rammal, a shop owner in the border village of Odaisseh.
Residents of the Christian village Rmaych, however, have complained for years about a position set up by Green Without Borders on farmland belonging to village families in a nearby valley. They say the organization did not plant any trees there and actually chopped down trees and cut a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) dirt road on their land.
“It is a cover for Hezbollah to have positions. We have no problems with Hezbollah, but it should be outside our lands,” said Bassam Al-Hajj, a Rmaych schoolteacher.
In December, Al-Hajj and other residents went to the outpost and confronted the men there. Al-Hajj said some of the men at the site were masked and armed, and that the outpost included several rooms, a tent and a fence that blocked off village farmland.
The residents and the men argued, he said. One resident who was videoing the encounter was told by one of the men, “We will crush you if you don’t delete the photos that you took,” Al-Hajj said.
Days after the confrontation, a Hezbollah official and members of the organization visited the village and met residents at the mayor’s office, said Father Najib Al-Ameel, a priest from Rmaych who attended the talks.
The mayor and residents asked that the post be removed, he said. Al-Ameel said he told the Hezbollah official, “We will not accept anyone but the Lebanese army to protect us.” A few days later, Green Without Borders removed the post and now residents can freely access their land, he said.
Nahli said the media had blown the incident in Rmaych out of proportion and refused to discuss details. In the past, Hezbollah has blamed frictions at Rmaych on members of the Christian Lebanese Forces party, which is among Hezbollah’s harshest critics.
When asked if peacekeepers could visit the organization’s sites, UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti said, “We had the possibility, of course, to monitor the whole area of operations and also areas and places where Green Without Borders operated.”
He said there has not been “a breach of 1701,” the Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war.
Nahli argued that Green Without Border’s work is sorely needed. Over the past few decades, Lebanon has experienced one of the world’s worst deforestation rates, which he said has accelerated since the economy collapsed, starting in late 2019, as poor people cut trees to use the wood for heating. The forested area has dropped from 25 percent of the country’s territory to only around 3 percent now, he said.
“We are trying by all our means, in coordination with all concerned authorities, to prevent more deforestation,” he said.
Lebanese environmental group accused of being Hezbollah arm
https://arab.news/66y4u
Lebanese environmental group accused of being Hezbollah arm
- Israel, the United States and some in Lebanon accuse the NGO of being an arm of Hezbollah to hide its military activities
- Green Without Borders denies any link to Hezbollah, which also says it is not connected to the environmental group
Israel’s settler movement takes victory lap as a sparse outpost becomes a settlement within a month
- Smotrich, who has been in charge of Israeli settlement policy for the past three years, has overseen an aggressive construction and expansion binge aimed at dismantling any remaining hopes of establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank
YATZIV SETTLEMENT, West Bank: Celebratory music blasting from loudspeakers mixed with the sounds of construction, almost drowning out calls to prayer from a mosque in the Palestinian town across this West Bank valley.
Orthodox Jewish women in colorful head coverings, with babies on their hips, shared platters of fresh vegetables as soldiers encircled the hilltop, keeping guard.
The scene Monday reflected the culmination of Israeli settlers’ long campaign to turn this site, overlooking the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour, into a settlement. Over the years, they fended off plans to build a hospital for Palestinian children on the land, always holding tight to the hope the land would one day become theirs.
That moment is now, they say.
Smotrich goes on settlement spree
After two decades of efforts, it took just a month for their new settlement, called “Yatziv,” to go from an unauthorized outpost of a few mobile homes to a fully recognized settlement. Fittingly, the new settlement’s name means “stable” in Hebrew.
“We are standing stable here in Israel,” Finance Minister and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich told The Associated Press at Monday’s inauguration ceremony. “We’re going to be here forever. We will never establish a Palestinian state here.”
With leaders like Smotrich holding key positions in Israel’s government and establishing close ties with the Trump administration, settlers are feeling the wind at their backs.
Smotrich, who has been in charge of Israeli settlement policy for the past three years, has overseen an aggressive construction and expansion binge aimed at dismantling any remaining hopes of establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank.
While most of the world considers the settlements illegal, their impact on the ground is clear, with Palestinians saying the ever-expanding construction hems them in and makes it nearly impossible to establish a viable independent state. The Palestinians seek the West Bank, captured by Israel in 1967, as part of a future state.
With Netanyahu and Trump, settlers feel emboldened
Settlers had long set their sights on the hilltop, thanks to its position in a line of settlements surrounding Jerusalem and because they said it was significant to Jewish history. But they put up the boxy prefab homes in November because days earlier, Palestinian attackers had stabbed an Israeli to death at a nearby junction.
The attack created an impetus to justify the settlement, the local settlement council chair, Yaron Rosenthal, told AP. With the election of Israel’s far-right government in late 2022, Trump’s return to office last year and the November attack, conditions were ripe for settlers to make their move, Rosenthal said.
“We understood that there was an opportunity,” he said. “But we didn’t know it would happen so quickly.”
“Now there is the right political constellation for this to happen.”
Smotrich announced approval of the outpost, along with 18 others, on Dec. 21. That capped 20 years of effort, said Nadia Matar, a settler activist.
“Shdema was nearly lost to us,” said Matar, using the name of an Israeli military base at the site. “What prevented that outcome was perseverance.”
Back in 2006, settlers were infuriated upon hearing that Israel’s government was in talks with the US to build a Palestinian children’s hospital on the land, said Hagit Ofran, a director at Peace Now, an anti-settlement watchdog group, especially as the US Agency for International Development was funding a “peace park” at the base of the hill.
The mayor of Beit Sahour urged the US Consulate to pressure Israel to begin hospital construction, while settlers began weekly demonstrations at the site calling on Israel to quash the project, according to consulate files obtained through WikiLeaks.
It was “interesting” that settlers had “no religious, legal, or ... security claim to that land,” wrote consulate staffer Matt Fuller at the time, in an email he shared with the AP. “They just don’t want the Palestinians to have it — and for a hospital no less — a hospital that would mean fewer permits for entry to Jerusalem for treatment.”
The hospital was never built. The site was converted into a military base after the Netanyahu government came to power in 2009. From there, settlers quickly established a foothold by creating makeshift cultural center at the site, putting on lectures, readings and exhibits
Speaking to the AP, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister at the time the hospital was under discussion, said that was the tipping point.
“Once it is military installation, it is easier than to change its status into a new outpost, a new settlement and so on,” he said.
Olmert said Netanyahu — who has served as prime minister nearly uninterrupted since then — was “committed to entirely different political directions from the ones that I had,” he said. “They didn’t think about cooperation with the Palestinians.”
Palestinians say the land is theirs
The continued legalization of settlements and spiking settler violence — which rose by 27 percent in 2025, according to Israel’s military — have cemented a fearful status quo for West Bank Palestinians.
The land now home to Yatziv was originally owned by Palestinians from Beit Sahour, said the town’s mayor, Elias Isseid.
“These lands have been owned by families from Beit Sahour since ancient times,” he said.
Isseid worries more land loss is to come. Yatziv is the latest in a line of Israeli settlements to pop up around Beit Sahour, all of which are connected by a main highway that runs to Jerusalem without entering Palestinian villages. The new settlement “poses a great danger to our children, our families,” he said.
A bypass road, complete with a new yellow gate, climbs up to Yatziv. The peace park stands empty.
