A man uses his phone to film the plumes of black smoke following a rocket attack fired from Lebanon along the Israeli border on Saturday. (Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)
SHLOMI, Israel — Frustrated by 11 months of rocket exchanges and failed cease-fire talks, many of the Israelis who were evacuated from communities on the border with Lebanon - and some who defied orders and stayed - say they back another war with Hezbollah, even as some concede that an all-out fight might not guarantee a safe return home.
“I think the Israeli army until now has been too patient,” Shelly Liss Barkan, 60, told The Washington Post on Saturday. The schoolteacher is one of the 300 or so residents of Shlomi, a small town near the border with Lebanon, who have refused to leave, she said. “I’ve lost my patience. Anyone who is a terrorist should be just murdered. It’s enough. How can we live like this?”
As the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates, displaced Israelis are at the center of the military’s rhetoric. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week added the safe return of northern evacuees as a declared aim of the war, alongside dismantling Hamas in Gaza and bringing home the Israeli hostages who are held there. Netanyahu told White House envoy Amos Hochstein last week that Israel would do “whatever is necessary” to achieve the goal.
Israel pummeled Lebanon on Monday with airstrikes that killed 492 people and wounded more than 1,600, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, in the deadliest day for Lebanon in the past year of Israel-Hezbollah hostilities. The ministry did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel said that it had warned civilians to leave and that it struck 1,300 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
Liss Barkan welcomed the attack. “May Lebanon be burned to the ground,” she said late Monday.
Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, has stepped up its attacks against Israel in support of Hamas, its ally in Gaza. Militants led by Hamas streamed out of Gaza on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people in Israeli communities near the enclave and capturing 250 hostages.
Israel has responded with a military campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, displaced most of the survivors and crippled the enclave’s medical, emergency and communications systems. Israel is under intense international scrutiny over the war’s civilian toll. Gazans have no shelters or air defense systems.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, has said he would stop firing rockets if there were a cease-fire in Gaza. But negotiations remain deadlocked, and the militants in recent days have vowed to continue launching rockets in what the group’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, called a “new phase” in the conflict.
Israel has evacuated some 67,500 people from cities and communities in the north since the start of the war, according to the Taub Center, a research group. Around 11,000 have chosen to stay. Thousands more have left communities around Gaza.
Front-line Israeli communities such as Metula and Manara have been hit so badly that many residents have no homes to which they can return. Across the forested, rocky mountains of the north, residents of eerily empty towns and kibbutzim told The Post that they felt neglected by the government, buoyed by the now broadening conflict - and insistent that the status quo here will not hold.
Most of Shlomi’s 8,000 residents evacuated to state-subsidized houses and hotels in cities such Jerusalem and Tiberius, or to the homes of family members, Liss Barkan said. Of the 300 or so who remain, about 100 serve in local government or armed security, she said.
In between air raid sirens and the booms of outgoing fire and occasional rocket strikes, Shlomi is relatively quiet. When the sirens do go off, Liss Barkan stands in a stairwell in her aging building, not the communal safe room in the basement. A Gazan worker was renovating the shelter at the start of the war, when Israel canceled all permits and he fled.
Shelley Liss Barkan, 60, a schoolteacher, is one of the few residents in Shlomi who did not evacuate from her home. (Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)
Even as more Israeli troops are deployed near Shlomi, some evacuees have begun returning home. Limor Zinor, 49, and her daughter, Shoham, 18, tired of living in a hotel in Haifa, returned to their apartment here in June.
Zinor’s 29-year-old son is a paratrooper. He served in Gaza, she said, and expects to be sent north next.
Shoham’s phone beeped: rocket alerts for Kiryat Shmona and other towns. Not Shlomi. She shrugged.
“I hope there will be” a war, Limor Zinor told The Post on Saturday. “So there is quiet.”
Reached after the strike on Monday, she said she had “no pity” for Lebanese civilians killed in Hezbollah-controlled areas.
Annabelle Wagner, 42, and her husband, Lior, 48, packed their car with winter clothes. They return to Shlomi about once a month, she said, to “pick up some things, to do some cleaning and run.” Eventually, “we will return home,” she said, but their two young children, born and raised here, “are afraid.”
Across the border, Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon have displaced more than 111,000 people, the United Nations said last week. On Friday, Israel assassinated top Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil in a strike that killed dozens of people, including civilians.
Hezbollah rockets have killed 48 people in Israel, most of them military troops, the Israeli prime minister’s office said Sunday.
The deadly attack of exploding beepers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members last week in Lebanon, widely attributed to Israel, boosted spirits here.
“Morale is really high,” said soldier Noam Tibbet, 22. “We understand what we are doing.”
Tibbet was carrying his weapon and pacing while waiting for a bus in Kiryat Shmona, a ghost town since its evacuation in October.
Tibbet was on his way to his tank unit in the Golan along Israel’s border with Syria, he said. A conscript, he fought in Gaza early in the conflict and then was sent to the border with Lebanon.
Until now, he said, “we can’t really respond” in the north. “It’s been really frustrating.”
At the Upper Galilee Regional Council’s fortified emergency center, Dana Moran Ravid, 50, and her team are prepared. They monitor six screens with 360-degree views of the area, maps tracking sirens and Israeli news. The civilian-run center is responsible for 29 regional communities, 14 of which have been evacuated.
When sirens sound, team members connect with local authorities and emergency responders to assess any hits, casualties or damage.
Moran Ravid has three children, the eldest of whom is in the army. She has thrown herself into the emergency center, she said, because the Oct. 7 attack showed that Israelis “also need to know how to protect ourselves.” She compared the exchange of rockets over the northern border to a table tennis match.
“I believe that we have to end this,” she said. “I wish that it was through an agreement,” but “everything must be done so that the border is quiet.” As she spoke, there were more beeps. Air raids in the Golan.
But for many displaced people to return, she said, they will need assurance that an agreement with Hezbollah will be enforced.
“There needs to be security all the time, not just the day they come back,” she said.
In Kiryat Shmona, about 25 to 30 percent of evacuated residents have returned on their own, most to nearby communities and some to still-evacuated kibbutzim, said Giora Salz, the head of the Upper Galilee Regional Council. He worries for their safety.
“The government is neglecting those people,” he said. “The army, the [Israel Defense Forces], are not giving us what they should give, which is full security.”
Since the two countries went to war in 2006, Israel has developed its Iron Dome antimissile system, and Hezbollah, backed by Iran, has acquired a more sophisticated arsenal. That conflict ended with a buffer zone.
On Sunday, one rocket made it through the Iron Dome to strike the Religious Zionist community of Moreshet in Lower Galilee, damaging houses.
One belonged to the parents of Itai Abekasis, 37; he had evacuated there from Kiryat Shmona with his wife and children.
Friends from his IDF unit helped him board up the blown-out windows. He hurried them to finish because they had to return to their base.
“There is no doubt” there will be a war, he said. “I don’t see another option.”
