ANALYSIS: Israel-Lebanon border clash underscores area's volatility

By Ofira Koopmans Aug 4, 2010, 13:15 GMT

Tel Aviv - Four dead because of a few trees and bushes that needed pruning?

Tuesday's lethal exchange of fire between the Israeli and Lebanese armies underscored once again how the smallest movement or most banal event can trigger tensions at the border, which had previously witnessed four years of relative calm since the 2006 war.

An Israeli engineering force escorted by combat forces arrived in the early afternoon of Tuesday at the border near the northern Israeli kibbutz (agricultural commune) of Misgav Am to prune some vegetation which had been causing false alarms to go off on the electronic security fence.

They gave an advance notice to UNIFIL, the United Nations force in southern Lebanon, which in turn informed the Lebanese Army, as it is required to.

A crane carrying a soldier who was to cut the branches rolled behind the security fence, some 50 metres from the internationally recognized 'blue line,' military officials said.

But when it was about the lift its arm, Lebanese Army snipers from a nearby Lebanese house opened fire, killing the battalion commander and critically injuring the company commander - and unleashing a clash that lasted a few hours, involved also Israeli artillery and helicopter gunships and killed two Lebanese troops and a journalist.

UNIFIL Wednesday ruled the Israeli force had indeed been on the Israeli side of the border. The security fence is located several dozen metres south of the actual blue line and when an Israeli force passes through the fence, this can at times create the wrong impression as if it has crossed the border. Lebanese Army officials said they warned the Israeli force and were convinced it had violated Lebanese territory.

Israeli politicians and commentators raised several theories as to why the Lebanese army opened fire at the force.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, charged that a Lebanese Army commander, acting on his own initiative, had pre-planned a 'sniper ambush' as a provocation, and even in advance invited Lebanese journalists to the area to document it.

Others said that while previously it tended not to interfere in routine Israeli maintenance activities, the Lebanese army was now becoming more radicalized and ready to use force against anything seen as an Israeli provocation or violation, because more radical Shiites had been joining its ranks.

The border clash showed the 'infiltration of Shiite radicalism into the Lebanese Army,' opined Efraim Inbar, who heads the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a think-tank near Tel Aviv.

'It's a continuation of Hezbollah's take-over of Lebanon,' he said of the Iranian-backed Shiite movement, although the Israeli military said Hezbollah had not been directly involved in the shooting.

'There is something almost ironic about the fact that it were Lebanese armed forces which were positioned in the south to prevent the presence of Hezbollah, who were themselves responsible for the incident,' said Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, of the Haaretz daily.

Others in Israel were immediately suspicious that the timing of the incident - suggesting it was to divert attention from internal political problems in Lebanon, namely the UN probe into the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri in 2005.

Hezbollah chief Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah Tuesday accused Israel of having assassinated Hariri. Others have implicated the Syrian government, and Hezbollah itself.

But conspiracy theories aside, perhaps the exchange of fire was just a flare up of tensions between two armies who are deeply suspicious of each other - much like hostile next-door neighbours who are so wary of each other, that when one tries to trim the other's overhanging cherry tree, the other immediately suspects another tress-passing attempt.

Frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace have made the Lebanese extra sensitive to this. Israel, for its part, argues it has the right to carry out routine and vital engineering work on its own side of the border.

Four years after a deadly and devastating 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah, the distance between an isolated clash and igniting the entire area was 'a hair's breadth,' wrote Alex Fishman in Israel's biggest-selling daily, Yediot Ahronot.

Asked by the German Press-Agency dpa whether he feared a further escalation, political science professor Inbar replied:

'That's hard to say. We live in the Middle East. We cannot know what will happen tomorrow.'