Photo by: AFP

Lebanese Mohammad Hammudi hasn't seen his home village in the disputed Shebaa Farms since it was occupied by Israel more than 40 years ago, but says he remembers every nook and cranny. "I know every inch of the Farms because I covered every one of them when I was a teenager. How can they say that they are not Lebanese," asked 56-year-old Hammudi, whose family fled after Israel seized the territory during the 1967 Middle East war.

The tiny sliver of lush land 25 square kilometres (10 square miles) across is located at the junction of southeast Lebanon, southwest Syria and northern Israel. Israel seized the Farms from Syria at the same time it captured the nearby Golan Heights, which it later annexed. Ever since, the Farms have been caught in a tug-of-war over ownership. Lebanon claims them, with the backing of Damascus, while Israel says they are part of Syria. The simmering dispute is now back in the international spotlight after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during a visit to Beirut on Monday, called for an end to the standoff. "The United States believes that the time has come to deal with the Shebaa Farms issue... in accordance with (UN Security Council Resolution) 1701," Rice said after discussing it with Western-backed Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. Resolution 1701 brought an end to a devastating 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006 and called for the UN secretary general to propose a border demarcation for the Shebaa Farms.

Hammudi, who is now an official with the Shebaa municipality, said, "We are optimists. "It is the first time that attention has been seriously focused on the issue," he said of Rice's comments. For Hammudi and other people from Shebaa, there is no doubt that the stretch of land belongs to Lebanon, even if Israel disagrees. "Our farms, our land and our animals used to be our lifeblood," Hammudi said. "There are thousands of people originally from Shebaa who own properties in the Farms," Hammudi said, adding they had documentation to support the claims, some of which dated back to the Ottoman period.

Israel occupied southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years until withdrawing its troops in 2000, but it remained in the Shebaa Farms. The United Nations ruled that the withdrawal from Lebanon was complete and that the Farms were Syrian. It has not revisited the issue despite protests from Beirut.