‘Everyone knows something’s going to happen’: fears of a new war on Israel’s border with Lebanon

For the Israeli communities evacuated from the country’s far north in the aftermath of 7 October, there is no longer any doubt about whether full-scale war with Hezbollah in Lebanon is going to happen. For most people, the only question is when.

Nissan Zeevi, 40, has spent the past six months working as a first responder in Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz that grows apples and avocados. His wife and two young boys are living near the Sea of Galilee and are yet to come home; it’s just him, bulldog Joy, and his M16 rifle, keeping an eye on the Lebanese villages and Hezbollah outposts clearly visible from the garden, just a few kilometres away.

“The Iron Dome was a strategic mistake,” the agro-tech entrepreneur said during the Observer’s visit on a hot dry day last week, referring to Israel’s state-of-the-art air defence system, first deployed in 2011. “It normalised rockets hitting Israel, it gave us the feeling of security. But feeling secure is not the same as being secure. After 7 October we woke up.

“We can’t put off decisions any more. Everyone knows something is going to happen, because we have to push Hezbollah back to be safe.”

The day after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its devastating attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting another 250, Iran-allied Hezbollah joined the fray, firing rockets and mortars at the exposed villages and farms abutting the UN-controlled Blue Line that separates the two countries.

In the first days after Israel began its retaliatory offensive in Gaza, US president Joe Biden dissuaded Israel’s war cabinet from also launching a preventative ground offensive on Hezbollah that could trigger a regional conflict. Instead, on Israel’s northern front, the two sides have found themselves fighting a war of attrition, but the situation is unsustainable and getting more dangerous by the day.

About 60,000 people living in northern Israel were given evacuation orders and another 20,000 left of their own accord, damaging harvests and shuttering businesses. Weeds have grown tall in deserted gardens and parks. On the Lebanese side of the border, approximately 100,000 people have fled their homes, but without government funding to stay in repurposed hotels or holiday apartments. No one, on either side, knows when they will be able to safely return.

“We can’t go back if Hezbollah stays on the border,” said Shai Mor Yosef, 40, who was helping his daughter Adele with her maths homework in the lobby of their temporary home, a shabby hotel in Tiberias. “We didn’t do anything. They started this.”

The entire region is home now only to an eerie quiet, punctuated by the blare of air raid sirens, rockets, artillery, missiles and drones. Back-and-forth fire between Hezbollah and Israel has killed 16 Israeli soldiers and 11 civilians, as well as 71 Lebanese civilians and about 500 fighters from the powerful Iran-allied group and other factions. Estimates suggest that more militants in Lebanon have now been killed than in the last Lebanon war, fought over 34 days in the summer of 2006.

Hostilities are now ramping up more quickly as the two sides fire deeper into each other’s territory. Hezbollah fighters have tried to infiltrate the Israeli side of the Blue Line on dozens of occasions, and on 15 April, for the first time, the Israeli military confirmed that four of its soldiers had been injured during an operation inside Lebanon.

Iran’s first ever direct attack on Israel two weeks ago, carried out in response to the bombing of a consular building in Damascus, has only reinforced the sense for northerners that the Hezbollah threat must be removed. The Shia movement is Tehran’s most potent proxy force and has built up a formidable arsenal since 2006. It would certainly be involved in any future wider war.

Zeevi and about 4,000 others are now part of a group called Lobby 1701, named for the UN resolution that ended the 2006 war. It required Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani river, which runs parallel to the Blue Line – but they never complied.

The group has lost faith in diplomatic efforts spearheaded by France and the US to avoid a new war, he said, and are taking matters into their own hands, pressuring Knesset committees not to forget the plight of the displaced northern communities.

Lobby 1701 wants the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to create a 10km buffer zone in Lebanese territory which will keep their communities out of reach of anti-tank missiles. Zeevi and others are also toying with the idea of bringing their families home, before the government says it is safe to do so, to force the issue. Everyone is willing to pay the price of a major war, he said.

“We can’t abandon the Galilee – it would be the worst Israeli defeat in history,” he said. “And think about it: if you lose the Galilee, then the centre, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they become closer to the threat.”

Polling from earlier this year suggests that the majority of Israelis believe a war with Hezbollah is necessary for people displaced from the north to go home. What is less clear is whether the public fully understands the consequences of taking on a much more powerful enemy than Hamas.

Israelis are used to western standards of living, but infrastructure such as power stations, water supplies and transportation would be Hezbollah targets. The impact on Israel’s strong economy would be immense.

Lebanon, a country of six million scarred by sectarianism and under the de facto control of the Islamist movement, is in the grips of a dire financial crisis; its people are in no position to bear the brunt of another war. The Observer’s conversations with Beirutis over the past few weeks suggest that the Lebanese still believe the cross-border hostilities can be contained, as Hezbollah does not want to antagonise its base.

For the time being, what happens in the north is dependent on the trajectory of Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite international calls for restraint, including from Israel’s closest ally, the US, the IDF appears to finally be gearing up for its long-threatened offensive on Rafah.

The town on the Egyptian border is the only corner of the Palestinian territory that has not seen fierce ground fighting and where more than half of the population of 2.3 million has sought shelter in a war that has killed 34,000 people.

An Israeli ground operation there is likely to cause thousands of civilian casualties and further disrupt meagre aid deliveries. Protracted ceasefire talks mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar have gained traction again in the past week or so, but it remains uncertain whether any truce and hostage release deal can be struck that would spare Rafah from an Israeli offensive in the next few weeks.

The IDF is loath to stretch troops across two major fronts, so a wider operation in the north is unlikely to come before Rafah’s fate is decided. For its part, Hezbollah has vowed to continue fighting until Israel completely withdraws from Gaza.

In the rundown hotel in Tiberias, Enav Levi’s family, from Moshav Zar’it, right on the Blue Line, were playing cards by the pool and snacking on watermelon in the hot weather. Her four children are now in a local school, the 36-year-old said; her husband has stayed behind as a first responder, and overall, things could be worse.

“Of course we are not going home soon,” she said. “The war hasn’t even started yet.”