Ali Awadah
The New Arab / August 19, 2026
Uri Tzafon is laying the groundwork for a Jewish settler project in South Lebanon, using religion and security to revive an old territorial ambition.
Israel’s alteration of the map of Lebanon was quiet, but the ambition behind it was not.
When Israel’s Foreign Ministry published a report showing parts of southern Lebanon folded into Israel’s own borders – an apparent nod to what’s known as the “Yellow Zone” – Beirut moved fast through diplomatic channels, and Washington’s intervention got the map pulled.
But the episode shed light on a movement that has been working towards exactly that outcome for over two years: Uri Tzafon, “Arise, North”, or, in some readings, “Awaken, North”.
Founded in early 2024, Uri Tzafon is a coalition of activists united around one proposition: that southern Lebanon, down to the Litani River, belongs to the state of Israel.
According to Israeli affairs expert Abbas Ismail, the group frames this as a historical correction – the righting of a wrong done when Britain and France carved up the region under their mandates.
Their case rests on proximity as much as ideology, Ismail tells The New Arab. In areas like Marjayoun and Metula, the Litani sits just four or five kilometres from the Israeli border – a distance the group argues is strategically indefensible. Their answer: strategic depth, achieved through annexation and Jewish settlement, on the model of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Ismail is careful not to dismiss the movement as fringe. “It’s important not to underestimate the scale of this movement, even if it’s still limited in terms of members and supporters,” he told The New Arab.
“Israeli settlement movements, in their early stages, also started with limited numbers before expanding into wide-ranging political and settlement projects, especially in the West Bank.”
He also traces the claim further back than the current war. Some of the armed factions and groups involved in Israel’s founding, he notes, floated border concepts reaching the Litani during the state’s earliest territorial debates.
The ambition towards settling south Lebanon, therefore, isn’t a product of the present moment but has resurfaced at different historical junctures, this time revived by Uri Tzafon with the same religious, historical, geographic, and security framing.
Mixing security, history, and religion
Hassan Hijazi, another expert in Israeli affairs, is explicit that Uri Tzafon shouldn’t be folded into Israel’s longstanding disputes over Shebaa Farms or the Kfarchouba hills, nor equated with movements historically fixated on the West Bank or Syrian territory.
“What sets it apart”, he tells The New Arab, “is a defined agenda paired with organised political and media activity, a visible social media presence, and members who run structured field and media campaigns rather than making sporadic or informal claims”.
But the group’s pitch isn’t purely security-driven. Hijazi points to a doctrinal layer: Uri Tzafon invokes the tribes of Naphtali, Asher, and Manasseh, which it claims once inhabited stretches of the Lebanese coast and Jabal Amel.
It also cites historical Jewish presence in Tripoli and Beirut as evidence – in the group’s own framing – of the land’s connection to what it calls “the chosen people”.
“Uri Tzafon isn’t just a political movement or an ideological talking point,” Hijazi says. “It’s a settlement movement with a clear project to establish settlements on Lebanese land”.
From field tents to army protection
The movement’s footprint on the ground has grown incrementally. Hijazi traces its first incursion to the 2023 war, when a handful of members crossed several kilometres into Lebanese territory and pitched a tent – before the Israeli army moved them out.
Numbers later rose to around 15, who stayed near Wazzani and the Ghajar area for roughly five hours. Critically, Hijazi notes, this time they were under the army’s protection, not being expelled by it.
He reads this as a rehearsal of the West Bank playbook. “This is the pattern followed by settlement movements in the West Bank – field steps begin in a limited way, then gradually develop into outposts, before that reality is later fixed on the ground.”
Groups like the ‘Hilltop Youth’, he adds, function as scouts ahead of settlement – normalising a presence before the state moves to legalise it.
The ‘Hilltop Youth’ are a radical, Israeli right-wing movement of young Jewish settlers living in illegal outposts across the occupied West Bank.
Political cover exists at the top, according to Ismail, who notes that ministers, including far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have voiced sympathy for positions overlapping with the group’s demands, and Knesset members have attended its conferences.
Hijazi also points to an institutional dimension, as the Israeli right “draws support from social and financial bodies both inside the occupied territories and in the United States, tied to associations and parties that fund settlement activity – placing Uri Tzafon within a wider right-wing settlement project rather than treating it as an isolated fringe group”.
From buffer zones to annexation
Political analyst Mohammed Hamiya points to one incident as emblematic: a visit by Israeli archaeologist Ze’ev Erlich to a citadel in the town of Shama in south Lebanon in late 2024, accompanied by Golani Brigade chief of staff Colonel Yoav Yarom.
Israeli sources identified the site as the Tomb of the Prophet Shimon. The archaeologist was killed alongside two Israeli soldiers in an ambush by Hezbollah during the visit.
Hamiya framed the visit not as tourism but as “historical and intellectual groundwork that can later be used to justify settlement projects,” alongside the entry of settlers and rabbis into Lebanon’s border areas.
Hamiya situates Uri Tzafon within a broader post-7 October doctrine. He points to a 2025 paper from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which calls for preventing Hezbollah from rebuilding its strength and, regarding Gaza, for maintaining “full security control” to stop Hamas from reconstituting its capabilities.
Buffer zones once justified purely as security measures are, in his reading, being repurposed as tools “to re-engineer the border, demographically and geographically”.
Hamiya traces a deliberate sequence in Lebanon – targeting, then warnings, then mass displacement, then occupation and destruction of the means of life, then deliberate killing and siege to block residents’ return, before annexation appears on maps, pending the right political and military conditions.
Annexation, he notes, can either follow settlement, as in the occupied Golan Heights, or precede it, as in the West Bank, where multiple annexation proposals are already circulating.
He also revives an old Israeli concept: the “young fighting settlement,” modelled on Ben-Gurion-era Nahal outposts, established in 1948 as agricultural posts in remote areas, that fused soldier, farmer, and border settlers into one, making the settlement itself part of the defence system rather than simply a civilian community.
The failure of the Gaza envelope and northern communities – which “aged,” drifted from a military function, and were abandoned when war broke out – has, in Hamiya’s account, pushed planners back toward armed frontier settlements where civilian presence is itself a defence instrument.
Past failures, he argues, tend not to push Israeli strategic doctrine toward abandonment but toward reformulation – a search for new terrain on which to apply it.
None of the three analysts describes Uri Tzafon as a fringe curiosity. All three trace the same arc – the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank – where small, ideologically driven groups preceded formal state settlement policy by years or decades.
The map that Israel’s Foreign Ministry quietly deleted may be gone from its website. The claim behind it is not.
Ali Awadah is a Lebanese journalist with bylines in several local outlets, focusing on human rights
