Lebanon Issues - 2022

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES 

Disputes - international

Lebanon-Syria: lacking a treaty or other documentation describing the boundary, portions of the Lebanon-Syria boundary are unclear with several sections in dispute; in March 2021, Syria signed a contract with a Russian company for oil and gas exploration in a maritime area Lebanon claims as its own based on a 2011 map sent to the UN

Lebanon-Israel: Lebanon has claimed Shab'a Farms area in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights; Lebanon and Israel resumed negotiations over their maritime border in 2020, but their efforts were derailed when Lebanon argued that the map the UN was using needed modifications

 

Refugees and internally displaced persons

refugees (country of origin): 479,537 (Palestinian refugees) (2020); 825,081 (Syria) (2022)

IDPs: 7,000 (2020)

stateless persons: undetermined (2016); note - tens of thousands of persons are stateless in Lebanon, including many Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Syrian Kurds denaturalized in Syria in 1962, children born to Lebanese women married to foreign or stateless men; most babies born to Syrian refugees, and Lebanese children whose births are unregistered

Illicit drugs

source country for amphetamine tablets destined for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Libya and Sudan; in 2021 authorities in various Near Eastern countries seized millions of captagon tablets that originated in or transited to Lebanon, prompting Lebanese authorities to conduct raids on captagon production facilities and trafficking rings within the country

NOTE: The information regarding Lebanon on this page is re-published from the 2022 World Fact Book of the United States Central Intelligence Agency and other sources. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Lebanon 2022 information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Lebanon 2022 should be addressed to the CIA or the source cited on each page.