Bekaa Valley

The Bekaa Valley is a broad agricultural depression running 110 km north-to-south through eastern Lebanon, flanked by the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges and drained by the Litani River in its southern reaches. With a predominantly Shia population in the south and a mixed Shia-Sunni-Christian north, it is the most fertile farming zone in Lebanon — growing grain, fruit, and hashish — and has been a strategic corridor between Syria and the Lebanese interior in every regional conflict since the 1975-1990 civil war. Syria occupied large portions of the valley from 1976 to 2005, using it as a buffer and as a supply route for Palestinian factions and, later, Hezbollah.

The Bekaa is Hezbollah's organisational heartland. The movement grew from villages in the southern Bekaa after Israel's 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee invasion, trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers in the Bekaa town of Baalbek, and has since built a dense network of political, social, and military infrastructure across the valley. Israeli intelligence operations have repeatedly targeted the valley: in March 2026, a commando raid near Nabi Chit searched for the remains of navigator Ron Arad, shot down over the Bekaa in 1986. Israeli strikes hit the Bekaa in March 2026 as part of the broader air campaign against Lebanon, killing more than two dozen people across the country in a single day .

The Bekaa's significance extends beyond the current war. It is the primary overland corridor through which Iranian arms have historically transited to Hezbollah via Syria, making it central to the Iran-Hezbollah supply chain that Israel's military campaign aims to sever. Any ground advance up the Lebanese coast would leave Hezbollah's Bekaa infrastructure intact unless operations expanded eastward; whether Israel will extend its campaign into the valley remains one of the war's defining open questions.