Stretch of northern border becomes a no-go territory
KFAR YUVAL, ISRAEL >> More than 60,000 Israelis who live far from the Gaza Strip but close to the front line of another spiraling conflict have in recent months been ordered from their homes along Israel's northern border with Lebanon, the first mass evacuation of the area in Israeli history.
In one Israeli border town, anti-tank missiles fired from Lebanon have damaged scores of homes. In another village, holdouts who refuse to evacuate said they avoided turning lights on at night to keep from becoming visible targets. And in a sign of the proximity of the fighters across the border and how personal the simmering hostilities have become, a farmer said he had received a text message claiming to be from Hezbollah and threatening him with death.
The evacuations and an effort in Lebanon to move thousands of civilians away from the border are the result of an intensifying conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia and political organization.
The skirmish along Israel's northern border is being fought in parallel with the more intense war in Gaza, which Israel launched after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack. Now also in its sixth month, the battle with Hezbollah has implications both for the prospects of a wider regional conflict and for the thousands of civilians who live along the frontier.
Israel has responded forcefully to Hezbollah's attacks: Above the hills and valleys of Israel's border with Lebanon, Israeli warplanes rumble overhead. In the recent fighting, at least eight civilians in Israel and 51 in Lebanon have been killed, according to Israeli and Lebanese authorities, as have combatants on both sides.
A recent two-day trip through the Galilee Panhandle — a finger of Israeli territory that juts into Lebanon — and west toward the Mediterranean coast revealed a mostly abandoned landscape stalked by fear and overtaken by nature. This stretch of Israel has become a virtual no-go zone, even to families who have lived in the area for generations. Military checkpoints block access to communities within 1 mile or so of the frontier, and daily life is frozen in a state of anxious suspension.
Residents of the region are split over whether the government was right to order an evacuation. Some say it showed weakness and effectively handed Hezbollah a victory. Others say it has saved countless lives.
Chaim Amedi, 82, a resident of Kfar Yuval, a now mostly deserted village barely 1 mile from Lebanon, has refused to abandon the town his parents founded in the 1950s and evacuate to a hotel. “You don't leave a home,” he said, adding that “hotels are for vacations.”
Hezbollah, the Iranbacked Shiite group that is better armed and organized than its Hamas allies in Gaza, began firing across the border after Oct. 7. The attacks have been big enough to demonstrate the group's solidarity with Hamas, but measured enough so far to prevent provoking an all-out conflict with Israel.
Some days, Hezbollah has fired up to 100 short-range rockets. Israel, in turn, has struck targets up to 60 miles inside Lebanon.
In Kiryat Shmona, normally an Israeli city of about 24,000, about 1,500 inhabitants remain. Many residents, now scattered among 220 hotels across Israel, did not even wait for the government's order on Oct. 20 to evacuate.
The town's banks and malls are closed. The startup companies at the city's burgeoning food-technology hub have left. Only one eatery is open — a modest shawarma and falafel joint catering mainly to soldiers.
Toby Abutbul, 22, the son of the owner, showed reporters video footage of what he said were two antitank missiles landing in front of him in February as he drove along on the city's main road. An air-raid siren sounded only after the missiles struck. A nearby woman and her teenage son were severely wounded, according to local authorities.