Jason Burke
The Guardian / July 16, 2024
Few remain in Rosh HaNikra, a seaside kibbutz on Israel’s northern front, as war with Hezbollah looms.
Kfar Rosh HaNikra – The leafy streets of Kfar Rosh HaNikra are still and silent. This is not just a consequence of the sweltering July heat. The kibbutz is just a few hundred metres from the disputed boundary that separates Israel from Lebanon, at the westernmost point of what Israelis call their northern front in the ongoing war.
The kibbutz’s 1,000 residents were evacuated immediately after the surprise attacks launched into southern Israel from Gaza by Hamas on 7 October, killing 1,200, mostly civilians, and abducting 250.
Nine months later, all but half a dozen remain, others are scattered across northern Israel, staying with relatives, in rented apartments or hotels.
“They say they don’t want to come back home because they don’t feel secure,” said Janet Tass, 73, who left with the others last year but returned to her small home just a month or so later. “The feeling of missing this place was so deep and terrible I couldn’t stand it.”
With war possibly looming between Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has advanced posts on the ridge just north of Kfar Rosh HaNikra, few are hurrying home.
For months, the militant Islamist organization has fired mortars, missiles and rockets and sent drones on bombing runs into Israel, mainly targeting the communities just south of the UN-controlled boundary line. The attacks have killed 16 soldiers and a number of civilians.
In response, Israel has bombed and shelled villages where Hezbollah has its forces and assassinated senior commanders with airstrikes. Israeli strikes on Lebanon since October have killed 450 people, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also at least 97 civilians. Almost 100,000 have been forced to flee their homes.
The deadly exchanges have stopped just short of all-out war. Neither side wants such a conflict at this moment, analysts say, although all agree escalation now threatens. Israel has drawn down forces in Gaza and is creating conditions for the more than 60,000 Israelis displaced from communities along the boundary with Lebanon to return home.
Many in Israel point to the end of this month – after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a high-profile trip to Washington – as the moment when war might come.
Senior Israeli generals have announced they had signed off on a plan for an offensive to drive Hezbollah from the border, while the militant group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has warned of a war “without rules and without ceiling”.
Some observers say they believe it is unlikely Netanyahu will risk a new conflict against an enemy that experts say is far more capable and potentially destructive than Hamas. The truth is no one knows when a what could be a devastating conflict might occur, or how to avert it.
“Nobody wants a war – not Israel, not Hezbollah, not Iran – but it’s very difficult to see how you can solve the situation without one,” said Prof Danny Orbach, a military historian at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Kfar Rosh HaNikra anchors Israel’s long and fiercely disputed boundary with Lebanon, which winds from the coast across the hills and then north to the mountains of the Golan Heights. The main coastal road heading north and a nearby naval base reinforce its strategic significance.
The kibbutz has been touched by all of Israel’s conflicts. It was founded in 1949 on the site of a Palestinian village whose inhabitants had been forced to flee in the wars surrounding the creation of Israel. Residents fought in 1956 and then in the six-day war of 1967.
When Palestinian armed factions set up their bases in southern Lebanon in the early 1970s, Rosh HaNikra found itself in the line of fire.
“I remember putting my children to sleep and then carrying them to the bomb shelter,” said Tass, who moved to Israel permanently from her London home just a year or so earlier, attracted by the socialist and environmental principles typical of a kibbutz lifestyle.
Israeli reprisals for such raids caused destruction in Lebanon and inflicted significant civilian casualties. In 1982, Israeli forces poured across the border in search of their elusive antagonists, besieging and shelling Beirut.
A low-level insurgent war followed, then a big conflict in 2006 that ended in stalemate and a tense relative calm that was broken last October.
Tass was walking her dog on the hill behind the kibbutz and learned the news when she got home. Reluctant to follow instructions immediately, she and her family left for a daughter’s home in a kibbutz farther south after five days.
“I have lived here 53 years and seen many wars but had never been told to leave. We were devastated by what happened in the south,” she said.
But Tass lasted only a month with relatives before deciding to return home with her husband, 91-year-old uncle and dog. The vast majority of Hezbollah attacks have hit targets farther west and the few around Rosh HaNikra, most recently two weeks ago, have done little damage.
“It was shocking to us to leave,” she said. “But most people from the kibbutz, even those without children, say they just don’t feel secure enough to come back”.
This is a challenge for Netanyahu. Israeli officials have said they want children displaced from the north to be able to enroll in their own schools there when the academic year starts in September. Economic losses are mounting with activity suspended at farms and businesses along the boundary with Lebanon.
Tourists no longer make their way to the famous beaches and grottoes near Rosh HaNikra, or Nahariyya, a town just south of the kibbutz, where the streets are instead crowded with uniformed reservists making their way to Israeli army units preparing for a conflict.
Tass said she was now resigned to a possible war and its consequences.
“I don’t get on the floor now when there is an alarm. At my age, I might not get be able to up again,” she said. “If I was abducted or captured, I would want them to leave me. I don’t want anyone getting killed to save me.”
Jason Burke is the International security correspondent of The Guardian
