“I think it will take another year before we can return home” to Kiryat Shmona, a northern Israeli town near Lebanon, predicts Menachem Sharon. Like other residents displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire, he expects a new war against the pro-Iranian movement in the neighboring country.
The daily exchanges of fire between the Lebanese Islamist movement and the Israeli army have intensified sharply in recent days.
“It gives the impression that we might go to war, but then we can go home,” says Mr. Sharon, who has been a refugee for several months in Yokneam Illit, in the region of Haifa, the country’s third city.
Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip between Hamas and Israel, after the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, Hezbollah has been firing projectiles at Israel, claiming to act in support of its ally Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza.
Tens of thousands of residents in the north near the border have been evacuated, and there are still nearly 60,000 internally displaced people, according to official data. There are growing calls for them to be allowed to return home.
Uncertainty
“We have a mission here that has not been accomplished and that mission is to change the security situation and bring people back to their homes,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on September 10.
Since then, the Israeli army has stepped up airstrikes targeting Hezbollah sites in Lebanon. Large-scale bombings on Monday left at least 558 dead, according to Lebanese authorities, the heaviest toll since the last war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that his country could not “tolerate shooting at its people” and that it was determined to act for the return of people evacuated from the north. The army said the operation against Hezbollah would continue and expand.
“It could end in a month, in eight months or in two years, we can’t know what will happen,” says Mr. Sharon, a 29-year-old teacher who has moved nearly ten times, changed jobs and changed his daily life since the start of the war in Gaza.
If he “still wants to go back” home, he anticipates difficulties: “repairing the infrastructure”, chasing “cockroaches or rats” from the evacuated houses, and securing the region.
“No one guarantees me that what happened on October 7 last year will not happen again in the north,” he said, referring to the Hamas attack in southern Israel that left 1,205 people dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians killed on October 7, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data including hostages killed or killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
“Emotional Mountains”
Torn between the same desire to return to her old life and the conviction that everything has changed, Didi, a woman who did not want to give her name, settled in the community of Klil, about thirty kilometers south of her home in the kibbutz of Adamit, close to Lebanon.
“I’m not afraid at all, but it’s depressing to wait,” says the 44-year-old theater and yoga teacher. “I don’t think anything will ever be the same again in Israel, because what happened is too crazy.”
Like many in the country, war seems inevitable to him.
“Even though it’s sad, it’s still a good thing that Israel is waging this war and it had to happen anyway,” Didi said, adding that she doesn’t have “the solution.”
Adding to the general apprehension, rocket fire from Lebanon and interceptions by Israeli air defenses fill the sky with dull detonations, while military planes roar.
Ido Reuven, a 27-year-old tour guide, also fled Kiryat Shmona to seek safety, and the village where he rents an apartment, Givat Avni, was hit by a rocket on Monday.
“The coming days are going to be difficult, but we have to hope that everything will go well,” he said, describing a daily life that is “an emotional roller coaster.”