Some in the north of Israel want a war with Hezbollah
Lehavot Habashan in the Upper Galilee: Where I’m Born? How I Am Born in Lebanon, where I am from, and where I want to be
LEHAVOT HABASHAN, Israel — It’s a spring-like day in the Upper Galilee region, a strip of northern Israeli territory between Lebanon and the Golan Heights.
This afternoon — and for weeks since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel — there are no customers, no tourists interested in guided trips through the rolling hills. The kibbutz is almost empty.
This region is viewed by many Israelis as a Vermont-like escape from the bustle and churn of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There are beautiful farms and kibbutzim, lush scenery and a slower pace of life.
While Israel evacuated a large area near its border after the war in Gaza began, villagers in Lebanon were left to decide if they should seek safety elsewhere.
Momika paused, “Not yet, not yet,” when she was asked if he thought about leaving. It’s where I want to be. My home, I was born here.”
The most beautiful place in Israel: ending a hopeful chapter in the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese army — a Palestinian resident’s perspective
Current residents say that Israelis who came to kibbutz in the 1950’s faced tension from some Palestinian and Arab neighbors.
There have been more rockets and shooting after Hamas attacked Israel. The community seems to have ended a hopeful chapter in the war.
“The Galil is the most beautiful place in Israel,” Marom says, using the Hebrew name for the region. It was being developed. It was so beautiful that it was insane. Now people who live in kibbutz near the border are not planning to come back.”
“It could be the same, the same event here in the north,” he says, before suggesting that an attack here could be even worse than Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people and took more than 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. “Hezbollah is a stronger army than Hamas.”
When I ask what Israel should do to bring them back their sense of safety, Marom says many people in the north want a full-scale war against Hezbollah.
And the United States and other countries are scrambling to contain the conflict, hoping to limit it to Gaza and the already bloody fight between Israel and Hamas.
Israel occupied the south of Lebanon for 18 years. Fighting flared again into war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia. Since then, despite sporadic attacks, this region of southern Lebanon, with its rich soil and olive groves, has been stable enough that many villagers built sprawling homes on land they have farmed for generations.
“We think that they have a lot of power and more ways to attack us and hurt our community here in the north,” says Ben Shushan, age 24, a reservist from the northern city of Haifa. “So it really feels like protecting my home.”
Many Israelis who consider the Upper Galilee home told NPR the Israeli army’s presence is comforting but not enough. They say that the border is too big and porous to defend reliably.
In a city close to the frontier, the government is housing people from the northern part of the country.
The killing of a young lebanese soldier in Houla, Lebanon, during the 1948 Israeli-Israeli cease-fire
“We are here already five weeks, a little bit more than 300 people,” Bergman says. His entire community is here with men, women and a lot of kids.
He says after seeing what happened during the Hamas attack, and how slow Israel’s army was to respond, he’s thinking about leaving the north for good to protect his family.
“Even if the house is destroyed, that’s better than a single Hezbollah fighter being hurt by a thorn,” he said. What happened to us in Gaza would be worse if Hezbollah were not here. But Israel could not do anything because we have Hezbollah.”
He said he planned to try to repair his house, he hoped with the help of Hezbollah, which in 2006 compensated villagers for damage to their homes caused by fighting.
The next day, Dec. 1, the cease-fire was broken. Abu Walid, reached by phone, said his aunt and son were killed in their home, buried in rubble when an Israeli airstrike hit their house in Houla. Hezbollah claimed the young man as one of its fighters.
“It is an unhealable wound,” Abu Walid said of the massacre. He mentioned that the descendants of the dead men would have made their own village if they had lived.
His town, Houla, is known to almost every Lebanese school child as the site of one of the deadliest massacres in the 1948 war that created Israel. The men were killed when Israeli troops blew up a house where they had surrendered. The army company commander was found guilty in an Israel court of shooting 15 of them. He ended up serving one year in prison.
“Between the Jews, and the Israelis…” Abu Walid’s house in the northern border of the village of Houla
Abu Walid said that you can stay with your brother or father for one or two or three days. “Then it’s better to stay in your home to preserve your dignity and your relationships with people.”
“These past 45, 46 days I have stayed there,” he said. “Of course you get calls from your children, your buddies, your brothers saying, ‘Get out of there. What are you waiting for?
The friend of Abu Walid, who asked that he be called “Abu Walid”, said that he had slept in his house in the border town of Houla, which had been hit worse by the Israeli strikes.
Her husband and a friend are sitting on the plastic chairs in the car, as the two cats approach the shards of glass.
Tomorrow, God willing, “things will improve and there will be a cease-fire and we can come back and not leave,” she said. “Really we don’t know what to do, where to settle … We are lost.
He said that Ghareeb would leave to go to her daughter’s house but that he would stay at home. She believed the cease-fire would become permanent.
Lebanon’s border: a time capsule of Middle East history as seen by the U.N. and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon
The United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon was set up in 1978 to monitor Israel’s withdrawal from the country.
The spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers along the border said while the attacks between Israel and Hezbollah have become more targeted and precise, with explosive drones and more sophisticated rockets, the conflict along the border is still contained to the border areas.
A family from Lebanon took a photo next to hand-painted murals about the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the border with Israel, on a day when the wall ran parallel to a road.
The view from the roof of Suleiman’s home is a time capsule of Middle East history. Just a few hundred yards away are blue posts that mark the United Nations-delineated “blue line” drawn up in 2000 to determine whether Israel had completely withdrawn from Lebanon after its 18-year-long occupation.
The United States designates all of Hezbollah a terrorist organization, while the European Union considers its military but not political wing as such. Hezbollah is the most powerful security force in Lebanon, while being the most prominent political player. Hezbollah is not universally supported, but the Shia Muslim movement has strong support in the south.
Source: Away from Gaza, homes in south Lebanon bear the scars of Israel’s other front line
Hezbollah, Israel, and the Cross-Border Attacks on a Shia Muslim Family in the Nearby Village of Nabatieh
There are jars of homemade hot pepper sauce and yogurt balls in the kitchen, next to a sink filled with glass shards. Cheery red pot holders hang from the twisted door of the oven. A set of turquoise prayer beads lies on the floor in the rubble.
Next door to Hamoud’s house, Ali Suleiman, a 22-year-old university student, took advantage of the temporary cease-fire to start repairing his grandparents’ apartment building. The two-story building housing their extended family was built over many years by money his grandparents made in Kuwait. Now, it is so heavily damaged, he and a friend were taking sledgehammers to knock down a wall that is no longer stable.
Many villagers in Lebanon live near Israeli towns that are associated with the Palestinians. One of the casualties of the war, along with the dead and wounded, has been the belief by Lebanese families that despite the chaos of their country, they could build lives here.
Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim movement, says 92 of its fighters have been killed in the cross-border attacks, while Agence France-Presse also counts the killings of at least 17 civilians, including three journalists. According to Israeli news reports, at least 10 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed.
When the attacks between Hezbollah and Israel began on Oct. 8, most of the family decamped to the home of the daughter Ghareeb is staying with in the village of Nabatieh. But it was so crowded that most found other places to stay and, like many of the thousands of families who fled the border region, they are scattered throughout Lebanon.
“I’d prefer they call me a moron a thousand times, rather than say ‘God rest her soul,'” said the man with four children and 13 grandchildren. “Now it’s become like a ghost town around me here. There aren’t any neighbors anymore. I want someone to be with me.
Ghareeb was staying with a daughter in another village when her home was hit. She said she goes back there every night not just because she is afraid, but with only her husband for company, she is lonely.
At the main entrance to Hamoud’s home, part of the elegant black double doors flanked by white stone pillars has been shattered by the blast and lies in pieces in the yard. Inside, part of the ceiling has caved in and plaster and broken glass cover the red velvet sofa cushions. The kitchen and bedrooms downstairs are filled with rubble.
He had worked in construction in Africa for five years, away from his family, he said, to save money to build his dream house here. It was hit by Israeli shelling just before midnight ahead of the cease-fire that began on Nov. 24. He was asleep upstairs when the metal tore through the first floor.
One of them is Ibrahim Hamoud, 72, who sat on a plastic chair on a patio covered with broken glass two weeks ago, on what turned out to be the last day of a weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip. He is a few hundred yards away from his home, so the temporary cease-fire was accompanied by an almost total halt in attacks across the border.
When the war in Gaza began, the peaceful village along the Israeli border with Lebanon found itself in the middle of a war between Israel and Hezbollah.
