Lebanon’s UNIFIL Resort Town on the Brink

By Motti Verses

For thousands of years, the port city of Tyre in southern Lebanon was one of the most important cities of the Phoenician world. From here sailed the ships that established colonies across the Mediterranean, including the famous city of Carthage. Today, Tyre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to one of the largest Roman hippodromes in the world, impressive archaeological remains, and a sandy coastline widely regarded as one of the most beautiful in Lebanon.

On paper, all the ingredients for tourism success are present: history, sea, a Mediterranean climate, heritage attractions, and an authentic atmosphere. Yet for decades, security realities have stood between Tyre and its tourism potential.

In 2026, that reality became dramatically harsher. Renewed fighting brought Israeli airstrikes, evacuation orders and widespread displacement to southern Lebanon, including Tyre. Following the ceasefire reached in June, residents gradually began returning. By early July, restaurants and cafés had reopened and families were once again gathering along Tyre’s beachfront. The recovery remains fragile. Renewed strikes and exchanges of fire in August have demonstrated just how quickly southern Lebanon can move from apparent normality back toward confrontation.

For decades, some of the people helping to sustain the city’s hospitality economy have come from countries such as Italy, Spain, France, India, Nepal, Indonesia, Ghana, and Malaysia. Yet they are not tourists at all. They are soldiers serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

What began as a temporary peacekeeping mission has become one of the longest-running UN operations in the world. Established in 1978, UNIFIL has brought generations of soldiers, officers and civilian personnel to southern Lebanon, alongside international consultants, contractors, diplomats, aid workers and visiting delegations.

As of August 2026, UNIFIL consisted of approximately 7,460 peacekeepers from 46 countries. Its headquarters is located in Naqoura, south of Tyre, while Sector West operates from Shama’a, placing the international military presence firmly within the economic and social geography of the Tyre region.

Anyone imagining that UNIFIL personnel simply live inside military bases misses an important part of the story. Over nearly five decades, an economic ecosystem has developed around the international presence: hotels, restaurants, transportation services, food suppliers, apartment rentals, contractors and local businesses.

Traditional tourism in Tyre has repeatedly been interrupted by war, political instability and Lebanon’s economic crises. The international presence, meanwhile, has created another stream of demand. One  tied not to holiday seasons, but to peacekeeping operations, diplomatic activity and the organizations operating alongside them.

Few places illustrate Tyre’s unusual story better than the Rest House Tyre Hotel & Resort. Opened in its current form in 1995, the hotel occupies one of the city’s most attractive stretches of coastline. With its private beach, palm trees, restaurants, accommodation and event facilities, it represented the kind of Mediterranean resort Tyre might have expected to fill with international holidaymakers in more peaceful circumstances.

Instead, over the years, the Rest House also became a familiar venue for members of southern Lebanon’s international community, hosting visitors, meetings and events connected with diplomatic, development and international activity. In this way, the hotel became more than a conventional tourism business. It formed part of the civilian hospitality infrastructure surrounding a region with an unusually large and permanent international presence.

Yet peace never truly arrived.

The hotel survived years of conflict in southern Lebanon, Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Lebanon’s economic crises and repeated confrontations along the border.

Then came 2019. During Lebanon’s mass protest movement, the Rest House transformed from a tourism symbol into a political one. On October 18, protesters set parts of the property on fire amid widespread anger against Lebanon’s political establishment. The property was publicly associated with Randa Berri, wife of longtime Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, although claims surrounding its ownership and political connections have been contested.

The building survived, and after restoration, the Rest House returned to operation. Another chapter in the remarkable resilience of a hotel that has repeatedly found itself caught between tourism and Lebanon’s turbulent politics. In many ways, the Rest House has become a microcosm of Tyre itself: a Mediterranean city built for visitors that learned to survive with the help of a very different kind of international presence.

There are no authoritative figures documenting the cumulative number of hotel nights generated by UNIFIL and the wider international community in Tyre. After nearly five decades of rotating military contingents, civilian personnel, contractors, diplomats, experts, aid organizations and visiting delegations, their contribution to the region’s hospitality and service economy has undoubtedly been substantial.

This is where one of the most contentious debates surrounding UNIFIL begins. Supporters argue that the force contributes to stability while providing employment, contracts and income to communities in southern Lebanon. Critics counter that money flowing into an area where Hezbollah has exercised deep military, social and political influence inevitably benefits the wider local economy in which the organization operates.

The American think tank JINSA has been particularly critical, arguing that UNIFIL’s presence has helped sustain an economic environment from which Hezbollah benefits.

The United Nations rejects the broader contention that its mission serves Hezbollah. It stresses that UNIFIL operates under a UN Security Council mandate, works with the Lebanese authorities and Lebanese Armed Forces, and maintains relations with local communities as part of its peacekeeping responsibilities.

Yet supporters and critics can probably agree on one point: after almost half a century, southern Lebanon would look economically different without UNIFIL.

And that is no longer a hypothetical question. The UN Security Council has decided that UNIFIL’s current mandate will be its last. Under Resolution 2790, the mission is scheduled to cease its operations on December 31, 2026, followed by an orderly and safe withdrawal of its personnel over a period of up to one year.

The approaching end of UNIFIL therefore represents much more than a change in the security architecture along the Israeli-Lebanese border. It could also mean the gradual disappearance of an economic presence that has existed in southern Lebanon since 1978.

In Israel, UNIFIL has traditionally been viewed almost entirely through a security lens: whether it succeeded in restraining Hezbollah, implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and contributing to stability along the border.

In Tyre, however, the force can also be viewed through an economic lens. For hotel owners, restaurant operators, taxi drivers, landlords, construction companies, suppliers and shopkeepers, UNIFIL has never been merely a peacekeeping force. It has also been a customer.

For nearly fifty years, soldiers, officers, civilian employees and other international personnel connected directly or indirectly with the mission have consumed services, rented properties, eaten in restaurants and injected money into a region repeatedly battered by war, political instability and economic crisis.

From an Israeli perspective, the scale of such a relationship can seem almost unimaginable. If thousands of international peacekeepers had permanently lived for decades around cities such as Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya or Tiberias – using hotels, renting apartments, dining in restaurants and purchasing services from local businesses – their presence would inevitably have become part of those cities’ economic life.

For many residents and businesses in southern Lebanon, that is part of what UNIFIL has represented. And perhaps that is Tyre’s greatest irony. One of the ancient Mediterranean’s great trading cities, a place that for thousands of years depended on merchants, sailors and foreign visitors, found itself in modern times relying partly on another type of foreign visitor: peacekeepers, UN personnel and the international community surrounding them.

The force tasked with helping maintain security became, at the same time, part of the economic landscape of the population among whom it operated. Now the relationship is approaching its end. UNIFIL is scheduled to cease operations at the end of 2026, although discussions continue over what international mechanism, if any, might eventually succeed it. Meanwhile, southern Lebanon remains dangerously unstable. Even after the June ceasefire allowed families and businesses to return to Tyre, renewed violence has demonstrated how uncertain the recovery remains.

When one of the most important sources of livelihood in a city, a question arises that is not merely security-related, political, or economic. It’s a moral one. Can an organization that maintained such a deep economic relationship with its surroundings – and effectively turned this unique destination into its resort town – be a completely neutral peace keeper?

About the writer:

The author, Motti Verses is a seasoned hotel expert, traveler, writer, and videographer, and formerly served as Head of Public Relations for Hilton Hotels & Resorts in Israel. Today, as a travel writer and hospitality trends analyst, his insights and experiences are regularly featured in leading Israeli media outlets.

*Feature picture: UNIFIL peacekeepers overlooking the coastline of Tyre and the Rest House resort, southern Lebanon. AI-generated illustration.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).