Driving the northernmost spur of Israel’s Road 886, it’s hard not be astonished by just how close Israelis and their Hezbollah foes lived to one another before the war that began 14 months ago.
In the panhandle known as the Finger of the Galilee, Road 886 runs south-to-north along the Ramim Ridge, a 3,000-foot-high range in the Naftali Mountains dotted with small Israeli towns and kibbutzim that overlook Israel’s lush Hula Valley to the east and a smattering of Lebanese villages to the west. The road terminates at Misgav Am, a storied Israeli kibbutz right on the border fence that’s closer to the Lebanese village of Udaysah than to any town in Israel.
When I drove the length of this road several days after the announcement of Israel’s ceasefire with Hezbollah — and shortly before Israeli troops entered nearby Syria after the fall of the government there — signs of war were everywhere.
At one clearing in the woods, spent artillery canisters and detritus left behind by soldiers were scattered on the ground. Trees scorched from fires sparked by incendiary exchanges between the two sides were bent at odd angles. The road, chewed up by tanks and heavy military equipment, is full of large potholes and tread marks. Concrete berms stand at points where the military fashioned makeshift routes into Lebanon. A roadside picnic area is a mess of mud, the vestige of a staging ground for military vehicles.
At Kibbutz Manara, where in better times tourists can ride a gondola down the steep ridge to a base station just outside the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, Road 886 is flush with the border. The kibbutz is so close to Lebanon that a Hezbollah fighter could theoretically hear an Israeli baby in Manara crying in their bedroom crib less than 100 yards away.
When I stopped to take some photos, I heard a U.N. vehicle turn on its ignition at a UNIFIL post on the Lebanese side of the fence.
An Israeli house in the northern Israeli border town of Metula, which was damaged by Hezbollah shelling, is seen from the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Israeli border village of Kfar Kila, south Lebanon
The only reason I didn’t feel like I was risking my life was because there were still Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese side. Under the terms of the current ceasefire, Israel has 60 days to move its troops out of the country. The Lebanese villages near the border remain unoccupied and, in many cases, largely in ruins, and the Israeli Defense Forces has warned Lebanese residents that they cannot yet return.
There is no such order in place for Israelis, who for the first time in more than a year can return to their homes in the northern Galilee without the threat of imminent attack from Hezbollah drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), rockets, antitank fire or infiltrations.
But the Israelis who live here for the most part haven’t come back.
“There’s lots of things people don’t know,” Shani Atsmon of Kiryat Shmona said of Hezbollah. Atsmon has been living at a hotel and hasn’t yet returned to the city. “At any second they can come into Israel with paragliders like Hamas did on Oct. 7. Maybe there are tunnels. They’re still at the fences. I don’t want to risk my life. It can come from anywhere — Lebanon or Syria. It’s scary.”
Unlike in southern Lebanon, where roads were jammed with returning residents almost as soon as the ceasefire was announced on Nov. 27, the northern Israeli communities that emptied out due to the war are still ghost towns. There are no schools open, banks are mostly closed, health clinics aren’t operating, and there’s hardly any place to buy food. The government is still paying for evacuees to live elsewhere, and many families with children already have made clear they won’t move back until the end of the school year in six months, at the earliest.
The fall of the Assad regime this month in Syria only adds to the uncertainty. While the Israeli military has conducted an extensive bombing campaign to degrade the offensive capabilities of any future Syrian army, the turmoil in Syria and the fall of Damascus to an Islamist militia is a reminder that threats to the border region of northern Israel are never far away.
“We still don’t have a feeling of security,” said Revital Gabay, a nurse who evacuated from Kiryat Shmona and is living at a hotel outside the city. “I was home on Friday for five minutes to get something and I heard army artillery fire. We know Hezbollah is on the other side of the fence, watching us. We’ll have another two years of quiet and then at some point there’ll be a war and we’ll be sent back to the stone age.”
We still don’t have a feeling of security,” said Revital Gabay, a nurse who evacuated from Kiryat Shmona and is living at a hotel outside the city
I went to Israel’s northern war zone because I wanted to see what it looks like in this liminal period between the apparent end of the long war with Hezbollah and the resumption of normal life. What I found was that while certain frontline communities, such as Metula, have suffered extensive destruction, the area’s main city, Kiryat Shmona, and many surrounding towns and kibbutzim have limited damage.
To be sure, there are wrecked homes to rebuild, burnt forests to restore, crumbling businesses to reconstruct and ruined roads to repair. Israeli government authorities estimate direct damage to Israel’s 82 border-area communities — those in the 4.5-kilometer evacuation zone near the Lebanon border — at over $420 million, including damage to homes, public and private buildings, infrastructure like electricity and water, agriculture, equipment and vehicles. Along with indirect losses, such as compensation for lost revenue — if, for example, a farm couldn’t produce the pomegranates it normally does — the total costs of the war in the north are an estimated $1.4 billion, excluding military expenditures.
And Over 110 soldiers and civilians inside Israel were killed by Hezbollah attacks since Oct. 8, 2023, when the Lebanese terrorist group joined in attacking Israel the day following Hamas’s shocking, brutal attack in the south.
But considering the intensity and duration of the attacks here, the area fared much better in the showdown with Hezbollah than military analysts had predicted — a testament to the effectiveness of Israel’s overwhelming military successes in Lebanon in addition to its homefront defenses like the Iron Dome anti-missile system, air raid alerts, abundant bomb shelters, and, somewhat controversially, the decision to evacuate over 60,000 locals.
The more lasting damage up north, it seems, is psychological — with even graver long-term implications for the future of the Galilee than the war’s physical toll.
More than anything else, residents are traumatized by the fear that what happened in southern Israel on Oct. 7 can happen here, too — if not in the near future then one day years from now, when their children will pay the price.
“We lived here with quiet for 20 years, but we never forgot that they hate us,” Kiryat Shmona resident Zahava Zarad, 61, said of her Hezbollah neighbors across the border in Lebanon. “I want the army to kill Hezbollah without giving them any advance warning. Their little kids today are the terrorists who one day will come to murder my grandchildren. They have to be destroyed in groups, not one by one. That’s the feeling.”
The critical question for Israel is whether the security concerns of those who live here can be assuaged. If not, the northern Galilee will struggle to retain its population, much less attract newcomers, and the area may fall into a downward spiral as families leave, businesses fail and real estate prices crater.
If that happens, the damage from Oct. 7 will last for generations.
“Only those who really love it here will return — or those who have no alternative,” Zarad said.
Bordered by Lebanon both to the west and north, the Finger of the Galilee is particularly vulnerable to enemy attack.
During the war, Hezbollah used rockets and UAVs to attack Israeli targets as far away as metropolitan Tel Aviv, but closer Israeli communities presented the most convenient target of opportunity. The communities here could be reached using short-range rockets, artillery, and a uniquely nimble and lethal weapon against which Israel struggled to defend: antitank shells.
Unlike rockets, which fly in an arc and can be intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system, antitank shells fly straight as a bullet, can be shot using shoulder-mounted systems, often arrive without warning, and can tear through the Israeli safe room shelters known as mamads like they’re a tin can. That meant that any Israeli community with a straight line of sight into Lebanon and within the range of antitank fire — about two to three miles — could be a very dangerous place.
This is partly why Israel’s evacuation order was set to cover any community within 4.5 kilometers (about 2.7 miles) of the border.
The communities that sit atop the Ramim Ridge, some abutting the border, were particularly exposed.
At Ramot Naftali, a picturesque town on the ridge that in normal times is home to about 550 residents, vintner Yitzak Cohen, 75, is one of the few locals who stayed home throughout the war. He owns a boutique winery that produces about 15,000 bottles per year and grows his grapes on a four-acre plot of land in the Kedesh Valley on the west side of the ridge, in full view of the Lebanese villages about two miles away.
“I was born here. I experienced all the wars that were here. This was a very strange war, very atypical,” said Cohen, whose house is right behind the facility where the wine is aged and bottled. “This thing of evacuating all the residents was extreme. I didn’t consent to be evacuated.”
Ramot Naftaly Winery stayed operational throughout the war, thanks to a skeleton crew of Israelis and Thai laborers. They kept working amid sirens, Hezbollah attacks and a seemingly endless rain of shrapnel.
“Every morning you’d find shrapnel here,” Cohen said. “But it didn’t deter us. We kept going.”
