In a span of 48 hours, close to 70 Syrian refugees arrived at the Lebanese Shebaa Farms area from the town of Beit Jann, in the Syrian-controlled section of the Golan Heights. They crossed the border with Lebanon on foot in a journey that took around eight hours, bypassing the zone patrolled by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which has overseen the disengagement of the Syrian and Israeli armies since the 1973 war. It is the third batch of Syrian refugees to arrive from the Beit Jann area. The first arrived about three months ago and the second in March.
A source in the Lebanese army told Al-Monitor that more than 2,500 displaced Syrians have fled to the area, mostly from the village of Beit Jann and the surrounding farms. Their displacement is the result of clashes between the armed Syrian opposition and the Syrian army that have reached the section of the Golan unoccupied by Israel.
Tensions peaked last month, when groups affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra abruptly entered Beit Jann and declared it a liberated village. As a result, the Syrian army warned the town’s residents to expel the insurgents, or it would be bombed. Some residents fled their homes and headed toward the section of Shebaa Farms facing their village in Syrian territory. Others fled to Shebaa after the Syrian army followed up on its warning and bombed the town. The second batch of refugees arrived transporting injured villagers, who had been carried on foot into Lebanon. One of them died after being transferred to a hospital in the Lebanese Bekaa.
The people of Shebaa Farms rejected a suggestion by a municipality member affiliated with the Lebanese Islamic Group to bury the Syrian refugee in the town cemetery for fear that his grave would become a shrine for Syrian opposition militants at nearby posts on Syrian territory. That would transfer the fighting between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the regular Syrian army to their town, as is happening in Lebanese villages in the north opposite the Syrian towns of Talkalakh and al-Qusayr, in the countryside around Homs.
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