Israel pushing forward on plans to exit Lebanon border village

Senior army officers from Lebanon, Israel and the United Nations will meet in two weeks to coordinate Israel's withdrawal from the northern part of the village of Ghajar, which straddles the Israeli-Lebanese border.

The meeting at the Rosh Hanikra border crossing will be held on May 18. Representatives at the meeting will include Alan Le Roy, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Major-General Claudio Graziono, commander of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) in Lebanon; officers from Israel Defense Forces Northern Command and their Lebanese counterparts.

The meeting is scheduled prior to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's departure for Washington, where he is slated to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama.

UN official Le Roy is expected to meet with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon Wednesday for talks about the UNIFIL's operations in southern Lebanon and the planned Ghajar withdrawal. The security cabinet is also expected to convene soon to approve the IDF's pullout from the northern part of Ghajar over the next few weeks, and discuss ways of strengthening moderate politicians in Lebanon ahead of the elections scheduled for June.

Ghajar is split by the international border between Lebanon and the Israeli-held Golan Heights, which was part of Syria before the Six-Day War. Its residents are Alawis, a Shiite sect of Islam to which the majority of Syria's ruling elite belong, who also have Israeli identity cards. Since Israel's withdrawal from its self-proclaimed security zone in southern Lebanon in 2000, Jerusalem has been in talks with the UN to find a way to transfer its control over the northern part of the village back to Lebanon.