by Dana Halawi
BEIRUT, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Khadija Hamdan, a 27-year-old Lebanese woman, recently uploaded her photos of paragliding over the country's southern picturesque villages on social media sites and soon received dozens of questions about the sport that has started to gain popularity in southern Lebanon.
"The area is thirsty for such activities after years of neglect because of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict in the (southern) part of the country," the young woman told Xinhua.
Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed political party and militant group in Lebanon, fought a month-long war in 2006 that ended in a UN-sponsored cease-fire. Since then, the Lebanese-Israeli border has largely remained quiet apart from occasional skirmishes.
Kassem Saad, a 50-year-old Lebanese expatriate residing in the Netherlands, now visits his home country every few months to enjoy paragliding at a newly opened site in the southern town of Jbaa.
"Paragliders are eager to learn about new places to try their favorite sport, and they usually brag about flying over new towns," said Saad, a veteran paraglider for more than 16 years, adding he is planning a trip to Lebanon in October along with 10 other paragliders from the Netherlands to fly over the south of Lebanon.
Saad agreed that the establishment of the new paragliding site in southern Lebanon gives the impression that the area has become secure after the long years of Lebanese-Israeli conflict.
"We've always had the impression that southern Lebanon is a military area, but with such a site, tourists will be more excited to visit the country's southern towns," he said.
At the newly established paragliding site that lies on top of a flat spacious hill overlooking a sprawling valley in Jbaa, the supervising team told Xinhua that the challenging sport allows people to discover nature from above and gives them the pleasure of flying over airspace.
Hassan Khalil, a director of the team, expressed his surprise at the increasing interest from Lebanese citizens and expatriates in paragliding who visits the site to try the sport.
"Not only people in the (Lebanese) south want to try this new activity, but also people in other parts of the country who gather here for paragliding," he said, adding the region's "distinctive beauty" viewed above will definitely help attract tourists.
Jamal Zeidan, another director of the team, said the paragliding site brings a significant tourism shift in southern Lebanon and is expected to attract hundreds of air adventure fans.
"The land here offers a take-off point located in the middle of a model runway that can be considered one of the most important flight runways in Lebanon and the Middle East, and it allows the take-off process for large numbers of gliders," he said.
Ahmad Ghamloush, the head of Jbaa municipality, told Xinhua that it took three years to establish the paragliding site complete with all necessary legal licenses and facilities.
"Built at an altitude of 900 meters, this site will attract tourists to southern Lebanon, stimulate the economic cycle and create job opportunities for the young generation," Ghamloush said, adding the area is equipped with restaurants, motels, entertainment venues, and archeological sites dating back to the Ottoman Empire.
