Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said he will discuss Lebanon’s maritime borders with UN Secretary General Ban Ki‐moon, who will begin a three‐day visit to the country on Friday. Lebanon and Israel, both keen to extract oil and gas

resources from beneath the Mediterranean Sea, are at odds over where the boundary between them lies.

However, there is little Ban can do to resolve this dispute. The UN treaty that governs a state’s rights to offshore resources (known as UNCLOS) stipulates that any disagreements between states have to be worked out by the parties themselves—a difficulty in this case as Lebanon and Israel are technically still at war and have no diplomatic relations....continue reading