Half in Lebanon, half in Israel, with danger wherever you look

The lost villages of southern Lebanon are a disgrace. Some, like Ein Arab, have been used as a target range for Israel's proxy "South Lebanon Army" militia, a crumpled mass of cement porches and bedrooms and wild gardens below Golan.

The lost villages of southern Lebanon are a disgrace. Some, like Ein Arab, have been used as a target range for Israel's proxy "South Lebanon Army" militia, a crumpled mass of cement porches and bedrooms and wild gardens below Golan.

Others, like Ghajar, lie on the other side of the Israeli frontier wire, a clutch of houses, half in occupied Lebanon, half in occupied (and annexed) Syria, so the Lebanese say, that ripple in the afternoon heat. Others, like Abbasiyeh, have no memorial. Just a single, slightly rusted sign shows where Abbasiyeh stood. "Danger Mines!" it says in English, Hebrew and Arabic, as if we needed to be told.

Then, in crude paint on a cardboard sign beside the old Israeli border fence - and note that odd phrase "the old Israeli border fence" - it says: "Abbasiyeh welcomes you: in front of you is a Lebanese village that is still occupied".

As if acres of Israeli barbed wire and unguarded giant gates and a windswept, ploughed strip, an eerie, post-nuclear image of the world, could provide comfort to any stranger in this dangerous land.

I walked through the gate, through the Israeli fence, past a tent wherein dwells - when he comes down at weekends - one of Abbasiyeh's surviving residents, to a rough embankment of dark red earth.

On the other side, an Israeli flag snapped in the hot breeze, a tarpaulined tank basking beneath the Star of David and a soldier who, when I forlornly waved, waved back. Who did he think I was? And what was he doing, here in the hot plain of northern Galilee, the "border" fence hissing in the mini-gale that swept the north of Israel?

Was I in Lebanon or Israel? In Lebanon, I think. For Abbasiyeh, before the Israelis razed it 22 years ago - was half in Lebanon, half in Israel, and now, forced by the United Nations to acknowledge their little infringements, the Israelis have pulled back from the original frontier wire - the great wire swath through which I walked - to a border they have not yet prepared to defend. Hence the rampart of earth and the covered tank and the acres of sparkling new, grey barbed wire curled beside it. Even now, the Israelis have not built their new defensive line.

To the Hizbollah officer sitting a few metres away - and how the yellow and green Islamic guerrilla flag colour-codes away from the blue and white Israeli banner - the cartography is simple. "Abbasiyeh was always Lebanese and with the efforts of our fighters, it will all return to Lebanon," he says. "You can see how far it stretches, right down there to the car park."

But it's not a car park. It's a three-square mile concrete abscess packed with heat-shimmering trucks and limousines and family cars, abandoned by the collapsing "South Lebanon Army" militia when they crossed from Lebanon into Israel during the final retreat. "Over there is Ghajar," the Hizbollah man tells me as the poplars hiss and sway above us. "It is partly in Syria and partly in Lebanon."

The Syrian bit was annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. The Lebanese bit remains Lebanese, but inside Israel. And, so the word goes in the hayfields along the old frontier wire, the Arabs who live there prefer to keep their Israeli passports than campaign to become Lebanese.

It's an argument that would be easier to accept if the evidence of Israel's encroachment on Abbasiyeh was not so obvious. When the UN followed the old 1923 border line, it found Israel had moved its border fence forward a quarter of a mile, over the ruins of Abbasiyeh, a move so obvious the Israelis abandoned the fence and withdrew to the earthen revetments where I found the tank. "Danger Mines!" it says again beside my feet. "Danger Mines!" it announces beside the cracked asphalt road that leads from the old Israeli frontier gate to the tank. It is as if the whole of southern Lebanon is a minefield. Which is, in a sense, true. They say a minimum of 15,000 mines lie around here.

Isn't it a bit of an anti-climax? I ask the Hizbollah man. I tell him that when I - as a schoolboy - approached the end of term, I wanted to look forward to the holidays. So what was the point of arguing about a few square miles of land now?

He grins. "If we get to the end of term and don't pass the final exam," he asks, "what was our struggle worth?" A man who knows how to pick up on a metaphor. Worrying.

He hands me his binoculars. "The Israelis are reinforcing their position up on the hillnear Chebaa fields," he says. "See how they are digging in rather than preparing to leave."

The Israelis have withdrawn - up to a point - but the village is dead and the soil too dangerous to tread on. You cannot walk off the road in Ein Arab. Nor in Abbasiyeh. So what is liberation worth?