In 1968 the Lebanese government wanted to expropriate thousands of hectares of private land in rural northern Bekaa in order to divert the waters of the Orontes river towards agricultural development projects in the region. The Orontes, a 355 mile long river originating from the eastern part of the Beqaa ran between the rural villages of El Qa’ and Hermel. State officials planned to purchase lands from farmers on both sides of the river to divert its water towards projects managed underneath its comprehensive agricultural development initiative Le Plan Vert. Le Plan Vert was the Shehabist state’s large-scale comprehensive plan to revitalize and develop the agricultural sector. It aimed to provide socioeconomic guarantees and welfare services for Lebanese citizens at the nation’s peripheries. Through it, state planners and experts hoped to bridge socioeconomic disparities between urban areas and the poorer rural interior. However, despite the lofty ambitions of state planners and the claiming that development was the sole path towards nation unity and social justice, I argue that the purpose of these projects was to fundamentally prevent rural flight, halt people from flocking to Beirut, and exert coercive control over the country’s peripheries, regions the state saw as sites where political unrest originated from. By using recently uncovered Lebanese documents from agencies like the ministries of General Planning, Industry, and Agriculture, complemented by looking at newspaper archives, my paper addresses the following questions: what sort of legal machinery did the state set up to facilitate land grabs in rural Lebanon and what were the immediate spatial and material consequences of such interventions? Ultimately my findings suggest that by the end of the sixties government schemes in rural Lebanon eventually led to the opposite of what state planners desired, as land grabs, agricultural development, and infrastructure projects pushed thousands farther away from their villages towards Beirut and its expanding suburbs.