Israel’s borders run through one of the most varied small landscapes on Earth: a country 424 km from north to south and just 114 km across at its widest meets Lebanon and Syria in the snow-capped north, Jordan along the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and the Arava desert, and Egypt across the Negev, with the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on its eastern and south-western flanks. Only two of its land borders, with Egypt (fixed by the 1979 peace treaty) and Jordan (1994), are internationally recognized and settled. The line with Lebanon is a UN withdrawal line, the Golan Heights frontier with Syria is disputed, and the boundary with the Palestinian territories rests on the 1949 armistice line, the Green Line, whose final status is still unresolved. What follows traces those lines through the terrain and the communities that live on either side.
Mount Hermon, the Hasbani and the villages of the Blue Line
The northern boundary begins on the Mediterranean at Rosh HaNikra, where white chalk cliffs drop into the sea and waves have hollowed out about 200 m of grottoes. The British cut a tunnel through the headland for the Haifa to Beirut railway; its railway bridge was blown up in February 1948 and the tunnels were later sealed, and a cable car with a 60-degree gradient now takes visitors down to the caves. The Israeli town of Nahariya lies about 10 km south, and a kibbutz named after the headland lies nearby.
From the coast the line climbs east through the hills of the Upper Galilee. It follows the 1923 boundary between the British and French mandates, marked that year with 38 boundary stones along a 78 km line. Because Lebanon and Israel have never agreed a demarcation, the working line today is the Blue Line, which UN cartographers drew in June 2000 to confirm Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. It differs from the 1949 armistice line in about half a dozen short stretches, never by more than 475 m. Israel has built a barrier along its side, much of it concrete wall topped with sensors, and the two countries did agree a maritime boundary in 2022.
At the eastern end the geography gets complicated. The Hasbani River, the major tributary of the Jordan, rises from springs in Lebanon and flows about 40 km through Lebanon’s Wadi al-Taym before crossing the line at Ghajar, an Alawite Arab village of about 2,738 people (2024). The Blue Line cuts Ghajar in two. Its residents chose Syrian nationality in 1932, were counted in Syria’s 1960 census and accepted Israeli citizenship after 1981; Israel has held the whole village since 2006. A few kilometres east, the Shebaa Farms, a strip about 9 km long and 2.5 km wide on a ridge running south-west from Mount Hermon, are claimed by Lebanon, a position Syria supports, and held by Israel, which treats them as part of the Golan.
The Golan plateau and its Druze towns
East of the Hula Valley rises the Golan, a basalt plateau bounded by Mount Hermon to the north, the Yarmouk River to the south and the Sea of Galilee to the west. Hermon’s summit, at 2,814 m, straddles the Syria–Lebanon border and holds the highest permanently manned UN post in the world. The plateau matters for water as much as height: its springs feed the Hasbani and the Jordan.
Syria held the whole plateau until the 1967 war, when Israel captured about 1,170 square kilometres of it: 1,070 of plateau and 100 of Hermon slopes. Israel applied its law there in 1981 and regards the territory as sovereign. The United States recognized that in 2019 and Colombia in 2026; most other states and the UN consider it Syrian territory under Israeli occupation. The line between Israeli-held and Syrian-held ground is the Purple Line, with a UN-monitored buffer zone that Israeli forces entered in late 2024 after the collapse of the Assad government.
Two-thirds of the area was depopulated after 1967, but four Druze communities remain: Majdal Shams, Ein Qiniyye, Mas’ade and Buq’ata. Majdal Shams, on the limestone foothills of Hermon, is the largest, with about 11,264 people in 2024. Israel offered the Druze citizenship after 1981, and until the early 21st century fewer than 10% took it, though applications have risen sharply since the Syrian civil war.
Down the Jordan Valley from Naharayim to the Allenby Bridge
The Sea of Galilee, about 21 km long and 209 to 215 m below sea level, sits on the old frontier. The 1923 Paulet–Newcombe agreement between Britain and France drew the mandate line so that the whole lake, including a 10-metre strip along its north-eastern shore, and both banks of the upper Jordan fell to Palestine, adding 227 square kilometres. After 1948 Syria kept 66 square kilometres west of that line as demilitarized zones, and those 66 square kilometres became the main stumbling block in Israeli–Syrian talks in the 1990s.
South of the Sea of Galilee, the Yarmouk joins the Jordan at Naharayim, “two rivers” in Hebrew. Pinhas Rutenberg built a hydroelectric station here between 1927 and 1933, and its canals turned a patch of land into an island. The 1994 peace treaty confirmed the Naharayim/Baqura area as Jordanian but leased it to Israeli farmers for 25 years; Jordan gave a year’s notice in 2018 and took it back in November 2019.
From here the Jordan River and the Yarmouk form the treaty border. The Jordan, about 251 km long in total, winds through the lowest part of the Great Rift Valley. Further south the river becomes the line between Jordan and the West Bank. The treaty describes that stretch as the administrative boundary with territory under Israeli military government since 1967, “without prejudice” to its status.
The main crossing on this stretch is the Allenby Bridge, known in Jordan as the King Hussein Bridge, near Jericho. At 381 m below sea level it is the lowest fixed crossing over water in the world, and it is the only official crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, the route West Bank Palestinians use to travel abroad by land. It has been rebuilt repeatedly: an Ottoman bridge in 1885, General Allenby’s in 1918, a replacement after the 1927 earthquake, and a new paved crossing built with Japanese aid after 1994.
The Green Line through the West Bank hills
West of the Jordan Valley rise the hills of the West Bank. The Green Line, agreed in the 1949 armistices, curves around them and was explicitly declared temporary rather than a border. Jordan held the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from 1949 until Israel captured it in 1967, and renounced its claim in 1988. Palestinians seek a state along the pre-1967 lines; Israel holds that final borders must be negotiated.
Since 2002 Israel has built the West Bank barrier. Planned at about 708 km, more than twice the length of the Green Line, it runs for 15% of its route along the line or inside Israel and for the rest up to 18 km inside the West Bank, leaving about 9% of the territory’s land and roughly 25,000 Palestinians on its western side. Israel describes it as a security barrier; Palestinians describe it as a wall of segregation, and in July 2004 the International Court of Justice advised that the sections running inside the West Bank, with their permit regime, breach international law.
The Dead Sea and the Arava trough along the Jordanian line
The Dead Sea is shared by Jordan on the east, the West Bank on the west and Israel to the south-west. Its surface was 439.78 m below sea level in 2025, the lowest land on Earth, and it is shrinking fast: 605 km² today against 1,050 km² in 1930. Its main northern basin is about 50 km long and 15 km wide, and at 304 m deep it is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
Below the Dead Sea the border follows the Arava (Wadi Araba in Arabic), a 166 km trough that climbs to a watershed 230 m above sea level before descending to the Red Sea. The southern Arava is hot, dry and almost without rain, and its acacia savanna supports Nubian ibex and caracal. The 1994 treaty was signed at a crossing in this valley on 26 October 1994.
Eilat, Aqaba and Taba at the head of the Gulf
At the southern tip, three countries meet within a few kilometres. Eilat, with about 50,724 people in 2020, is Israel’s only outlet to the Red Sea. Next to it lies Aqaba, with about 148,398 people in 2015, on the 26 km shoreline that keeps Jordan from being landlocked. Across the Egyptian line is Taba. Crossings link all three: the Wadi Araba or Yitzhak Rabin crossing to Aqaba, opened in 1994, and the Taba or Menachem Begin crossing to Egypt, opened in 1982, which handled over a million tourists in 1999. Taba itself was argued over after the 1979 treaty until an international commission awarded it to Egypt in 1988.
Across the Negev from Taba to Rafah
The Egyptian border runs north-west from Taba across the Negev to the Mediterranean. It follows a line agreed by the Ottoman Empire and Britain on 1 October 1906, drawn largely to keep the Ottomans away from the Suez Canal. That agreement let Bedouin of the Negev and Sinai keep their traditional grazing rights across it. Between 2010 and 2013 Israel built a 245 km steel barrier along it from Eilat to the Gaza border.
The last few kilometres belong to Gaza. When Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai in 1982, the city of Rafah was split between a Gazan side and an Egyptian side. The Rafah crossing remained Gaza’s only crossing point with Egypt, while goods moved through Kerem Shalom and people through Erez from Israel. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but kept control of its airspace, its coastline and its land crossings with Israel. During the Gaza war most of Rafah was destroyed, and by April 2025 the city had come under Israeli control.
The water on these lines is covered in our guides to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, the desert south of them in the geography of the Sinai Peninsula, and the countries themselves in Israel’s neighbouring countries.