The Upper Galilee: A Vermont Escape from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv – What Israel Has Learned in the Last Three Years?
There is a strip of land between Lebanon and the Golan Heights known as the Upper Galilee region.
For weeks since Hamas attacked southern Israel, there is no tourists interested in taking a tour of the rolling hills. The kibbutz is almost empty.
Many Israelis think this region is a Vermont-like escape from the bustle of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The scenery and pace of life are beautiful.
NPR has sent reporters to those towns to speak with people who have chosen to stay. Many people feel that without Hezbollah, Israel would invade Lebanon like it has in the past.
Momika Says: “I’m Born in Galilee” and ‘What Has Israel Done About It?” Palestinians and Middle East Security Analysts in Israel
Asked if he thinks about leaving, as so many others have done, Momika pauses then says, “No, not yet, not yet. It’s my place. I was born here.
From the time the kibbutz began in the 1950s, Israelis who settled here faced hostility and tension from some Palestinian and other Arab neighbors, current residents say.
After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, there’s been more shooting, more rockets. The war seems to have ended a positive chapter for the community.
The Galil is the most beautiful region in Israel, according to Marom. “It was developing, developing, developing. It was crazy how beautiful it was. Some people living in kibbutz near the border aren’t planning on coming 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 has a stronger army than Hamas.”
When I ask what Israel should do to give them back their sense of safety, Marom voices an idea shared with NPR by people in the north over and over: Many want a full-scale war against Hezbollah.
The United States and other countries are attempting to contain the conflict in order to limit it to Gaza, where both Israel and Hamas are located.
In the 2006 conflict, 1,300 Lebanese and 165 Israelis were killed. The new war will dwarf the one in 2006 because of Hezbollah and Israel’s right wing politicians, wrote a Middle East security analyst for Chatham House.
“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 the border is too big, too porous to defend reliably.
In the city of Nazareth, a 90-minute drive away from the frontier, people evacuated from northern communities are being housed by the government in hotels.
The Jewish Village of Houla, Lebanon: a tribute to the martyrs of the 1948 Gaza massacre, and a prisoner’s fate
Bergman says that they’ve got more than 300 people here. His entire community is here, men, women and a lot of kids, including his own.
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.
He said that a single Hezbollah fighter being hurt by a thorn is better than a house being destroyed. “If Hezbollah were not here, what happened to us would be worse than what happened in Gaza. 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. The man was one of Hezbollah’s fighters.
“It is an unhealable wound,” Abu Walid said of the massacre. The descendants of the men who died would have made their own village had they 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. Dozens of men were shot dead by Israeli forces when a house they had surrendered to was blown up. The army company commander was found guilty in an Israel court of shooting 15 of them. He was sentenced to one year in prison.
Abu Walid, the Iraqi Border-Hezbollah: A friend’s friend, a friend, and a neighbor
“Your brother or father or neighbor or someone close to you can bear you as a guest one or two or three days,” said Abu Walid. “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?’”
Hamoud’s friend, who asked to be called Abu Walid, the name his friends know him by, said he had so far slept in his home in Houla, a border town that has been even harder hit by Israeli strikes than Kafr Kela.
She climbed into a car crowded with five other women, leaving behind her husband and a friend sitting on the plastic chairs as two cats picked their way delicately around the shards of glass.
“Tomorrow will be a good day, 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 she leaves and he will stay at home. She hoped the cease-fire they were enjoying would last.
The United Nations Border Hezbollah Conflict: A View of the Middle East from a Refugee Center in the Baluchi Regime
“It’s still very much localized,” said Andrea Tenenti, spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon, created to monitor Israel’s withdrawal from the country in 1978.
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.
The wall is stretched for miles along the border at times running parallel to a road where a group of people from Lebanon stepped out of their car and took photos next to hand-painted murals depicting the heroes of the Palestinians.
The view of Suleiman’s roof is a picture of the history of the Middle East. The blue posts are close to the UN-delineated blue line drawn in 2000 to determine whether or not Israel withdrew from Lebanon following its 18-year 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 prominent political player in Lebanon and is also the most powerful security force. Although Hezbollah is not universally supported throughout Lebanon, the Shia Muslim movement has particularly strong support in the south.
Source: Away from Gaza, homes in south Lebanon bear the scars of Israel’s other front line
Eleven-year-old Suleiman’s house in Nabatieh, Lebanon, was hit by Israeli airstrike
In the kitchen, jars of homemade hot pepper sauce and thickened yogurt balls in olive oil now covered in plaster sit next to a sink filled with glass shards. Cheery red pot holders hang from the twisted door of the oven. There is a set of prayer beads on the floor.
Suleiman said his grandparents had left for Lebanon days before the first airstrike hit their building. Fire raced through the apartments, scorching the walls and melting blades of metal ceiling fans.
Many Lebanese villagers live in sight of Israeli towns on what older people still remember as Palestinian land. 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.
Agence France-Presse and Hezbollah both say that 92 of their fighters have been killed in the cross-border attacks. Israeli news reports say at least 10 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed by Hezbollah strikes.
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 rather they call me a coward a thousand times than say once, ‘God rest her soul,’” said Ghareeb, who has four children and 13 grandchildren. “Now it’s become like a ghost town around me here. No neighbors are around anymore. I just need someone to be with me.
While she was in another village, Ghareeb’s home was hit. She said that she goes back there every night because she is lonely and afraid, but with only her husband by her side.
A section of the black double doors, which are flanked by white stone pillars, has been destroyed at the main entrance to the house. There are broken glass and plaster on the red velvet sofa cushions. The kitchen and bedrooms downstairs are filled with rubble.
He had been working in construction in Africa for five years, so he could build his dream house here. It was hit by Israeli shelling just prior to the start of the cease-fire. 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. Less than a hundred yards away from his house, the cease-fire was accompanied by a halt in almost all attacks across the Lebanon border.
The quiet village along the Israeli border with Lebanon has become a dangerous location for both Hezbollah and Israel since the war in Gaza began.