Grid position 175/285 PAL Governorate South Governorate Elevation 1,280 ft (390 m) Area 14.57 km² | Country Lebanon District Tyre Time zone GMT +3 Population 3,000 (2015) | |
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Zibqine is a town in South Lebanon, 103 kilometres (64 mi) from the capital, Beirut, 4 km from the border with Israel and 450 metres (1,476.4 ft) above sea level.
Contents
Map of Zibqin, Lebanon
It was heavily damaged in the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war and underwent a heavy process of rebuilding.
Name
According to E. H. Palmer, the name probably comes from the Arabic word for "to bind", or "confine".
History
In 1596, it was named as a village, Zibqin, in the Ottoman nahiya (subdistrict) of Tibnin under the liwa' (district) of Safad, with a population of 12 households and 12 bachelor, all Muslim. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on agricultural products, such as wheat, barley, olive trees, goats and beehives, in addition to "occasional revenues" and winter pastures; a total of 3,172 akçe.
In 1875, Victor Guérin found the village to contain eighty Metawileh. He further "observed a great pool, constructed with regularly cut stones, and several broken columns. On the chapter of one he saw a mosaic representing a cross fleuronnée, which proves that it came from a church."
In 1881, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described it: "Small ruined village on a hill, surrounded by brushwood; contains about thirty Moslems [..], and has olives and arable land to the south. The water is supplied by cisterns."
During the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war, on the 13 July, 12 civilians were killed by Israeli missiles, fired on the house of the late Mukhtar. All the victims belonged to the Bzeih family, and they included 6 women and 5 children, aged between 11 and 78 years of age. There was no Hizbollah activity in the vicinity at the time of the attack. The IDF gave no explanations as to why the house had been attacked.