Is Israel’s ‘buffer zone’ inside Lebanon an attempt to grab gas reserves?

Israel’s new demarcation line into Lebanon’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea absorbs two blocks that are part of the Qana gasfield that border Israeli waters: Block 9 and Block 8, where gas exploration is due to begin.

In January, weeks before the US and Israel launched the war on Iran, France’s TotalEnergies, Italy’s Eni and QatarEnergy signed an offshore exploration permit with the Lebanese government for Block 8.

Reports of potential gas and mineral reserves off the Levantine coast go back as far as the early 1990s, but efforts to exploit them began in 2010 when the Lebanese government passed a hydrocarbon law that granted oil companies exploration and production rights.

Since 2010, however, Lebanon has not seen much progress regarding offshore gas exploration, and what has been done has been disappointing to many, especially as government officials have spent years touting an energy revolution as a potential game-changer for a country that has endured years of financial crises.

Laury Haytayan, a Lebanese oil and gas expert and the Middle East-North Africa director of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, told Al Jazeera that Lebanon has 10 offshore blocks. “Only one, Block 8, has a contract for hydrocarbon activities,” she said.

She added that exploration on Block 4, which started in 2020, was abandoned because it was not economically feasible. Nothing was found in Block 9 either, she said.

“That’s why we don’t have any proven reserves to determine the financial value of these resources,” Haytayan said, adding: “Not all resources discovered are going to be exploited. The proven reserves are the ones you can exploit.”

What is the Lebanon-Israel 2022 maritime agreement? Is Israel in violation of it?

After more than a decade of tensions over the demarcation of their maritime borders, Israel and Lebanon signed a demarcation agreement on October 27, 2022, which was mediated by the US. Under the agreement, the two countries established a clear maritime boundary to settle their dispute over an area of 860sq km (332sq miles).

“It is not purely a maritime boundary agreement but also a partnership agreement on how to explore and exploit the resources that may overlap between the two states,” Aref Fakhry, a maritime lawyer and associate professor at the World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden, told Al Jazeera.

Lebanon technically doesn’t recognise the state of Israel, so the US brokered the agreement through its envoy Amos Hochstein without the two states entering into direct talks.

“It’s still a treaty in international law binding the two states, no matter how it came to be,” Fakhry said.

The lawyer called Israel’s attempt to expand its borders into Lebanon’s EEZ an “outright land grab”. The area Israel has placed in the “buffer zone” includes waters within 12 nautical miles (22.2km) of Lebanon’s coast. Under international law, those waters are the territorial sea of a country, where it has full sovereign control.

“As we move further out into the EEZ, it becomes a resource grab, where sovereign rights and resources are being infringed,” Fakhry said, referring to a zone where, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country has exclusive rights to explore, exploit, and manage natural resources.

Fakhry also noted that the 1982 convention establishes a legal obligation for neighbouring states to negotiate their maritime boundaries in good faith. Israel’s new demarcation line, Fakhry said, “would represent a departure from these established legal norms and a further violation of international law by Israel”.

What have Israel and Lebanon said about the 2022 maritime agreement?

The 2022 maritime agreement has been a major point of debate within Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government expressed its desire to cancel the deal and take more territory for “security” reasons while more moderate Israeli politicians have said the deal favours Israel.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who helped pass the agreement, said in 2022 that it “bolsters Israeli security and the Israeli economy”. More recently, on April 28, he posted on X that “there’s no gas there, no security risk there, nothing there at all. Sea,” rebuking how Netanyahu’s ministers “incessantly babble about the ‘gas deal’”.

In response, Energy Minister Eli Cohen said the deal “was a surrender agreement that ceded to Lebanon all the disputed territories. This agreement weakened Israel and strengthened Hezbollah.”

Despite clear intentions by Israel to violate their maritime agreement, Lebanese Energy Minister Joe Saddi was matter-of-fact, telling the Reuters news agency on April 19: “From a legal point of view, this map [of Israel’s buffer zone] doesn’t change anything about the fact that there is a maritime border agreement.”

(Al Jazeera)

What can Lebanon do if Israel starts occupying its EEZ?

Experts said Lebanon has several ways to respond.

“One of the fundamental arguments would be to seek justice to hold Israel accountable to the letter of the 2022 maritime boundary agreement,” Fakhry told Al Jazeera.

“For that, Lebanon could call on the US as the mediator to wield its diplomatic efforts and pressure the state of Israel to hold itself to what was concluded and agreed,” he said.

The maritime lawyer also suggested that Lebanon could invoke the UN Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone of 1958, which says “a state has sovereign rights over its territorial sea.” Both the 1958 and 1982 conventions, Fakhry said, state that redrawing lines “violates the territorial integrity and jurisdictional rights of the coastal state under the UN Charter”.

Fakhry said Lebanon could also ask the UN Security Council to intervene, citing the Barcelona Convention for the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea Against Pollution as a legal recourse, which Lebanon and Israel are both parties to. This convention would force Israel to provide compensation for environmental crimes committed during warfare that violate its legal responsibility to protect the Mediterranean ecosystem, even during conflict.

Haytayan, the Lebanese oil and gas expert, said: “Any kind of activity that Israel, Israeli companies, or international companies do in the Lebanese EEZ will be considered illegal under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, so international oil companies [which Israel depends upon] are not going to work in an occupied EEZ as they would face legal problems they wouldn’t want.”

Are there parallels between Israel’s maritime actions in Gaza and Lebanon?

Analysts said any Israeli maritime occupation would have devastating impacts on the economy of southern Lebanon, which is largely dependent on its soil and sea, similarly to Gaza, which has been under an Israeli sea, land, and air blockade since 2007.

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the UN has estimated that 72 percent of Gaza’s fishing fleet has been damaged or destroyed, severely affecting food availability. But even before the war began in October 2023, fishermen in Gaza operated under heavy Israeli restrictions. Fishing zones were repeatedly reduced, and maritime boundaries outlined in agreements after the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords were rarely implemented.

As for southern Lebanon, Fakhry said: ”We are witnessing a denial of basic maritime rights for fishing, of coastal settlements, towns being erased, which again could also raise the stakes of these violations to potential genocide.”

Even though “genocide” has not been used frequently to describe Israel’s war on Lebanon, the term “ecocide” has been employed by researchers at the Middle East-North Africa think tank Arab Reform Initiative. Multiple parallels are being drawn of the environmental destruction in Gaza and southern Lebanon, notably through Israel’s unlawful use of white phosphorus, which is expected to impact ecosystems and residents’ health for generations.

Ahmed Baydoun, a Lebanese researcher working on conflict investigations, told Al Jazeera that Israeli attacks in Lebanon are “beyond ecocide or urbicide or all of these terms. It’s literally poisoning the soil, poisoning the land, poisoning the air. It’s beyond scorched earth policy. It’s weaponising the environment in itself.”

But what separates Gaza from Lebanon is that a gasfield was discovered in Gaza’s waters in 2000 by British Gas although Israel prevented Palestinians “from any kind of development of it”, Haytayan said. This was done politically and economically by restricting Palestinian rights and preventing the international recognition of a Palestinian state, which meant that energy deals in the Eastern Mediterranean happened mostly between Israel and Egypt.

The Gaza Marine field holds an estimated 45.3 billion cubic metres (1.6 trillion cubic feet) in recoverable natural gas, according to the US Energy Information Administration, although uncertainty remains around the maritime delineation among Israel, Gaza, and Egypt and the field remains largely untapped despite suggestions that the field could generate $4bn in revenue.

“Regarding the Israelis, I think they’re just adding pressure on Lebanon to come to the negotiation table with more cards in their hands,” Haytayan said, “as they know how much emphasis Lebanon has put on developing its natural resources.”

But still, analysts said Israel’s intentions of occupying Lebanon both on land and at sea should be taken seriously in spite of legal agreements. Baydoun said the Israeli military has a “clear strategy of developing this buffer zone by its destruction of villages, uprooting of trees and continued evacuation notices in this area”. The question that many are now asking is how far will Israel’s incursions go.