MARGALIOT — Walking between the rows of bare kiwi trees on his family farm in Margaliot on a recent Wednesday, Hezi Mena, 43, surveyed the gnarled, grey branches and raised his hands in despair.
Spring was in the air but there was no sense here that nature was making a comeback. Instead of flowers and greenery, Mena’s 10-dunam (2.5-acre) grove had the blighted feel of a neighborhood in ruins. He bent down to examine an irrigation line chewed up by jackals and then pointed to burnt metal debris from a fallen Hezbollah rocket.
A year and a half ago, the land had been brimming with life, with large fuzz-covered kiwis growing on healthy branches with broad green leaves.
But months of attacks from across the nearby border had destroyed Mena’s grove, along with other farms across the north, the rocket-scorched land abandoned by people and bees alike.
Since a ceasefire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group took effect on November 27, farmers have begun to return, faced with the daunting task of repairing the damage and rebuilding the once fecund landscape. At the same time, there are fears that the tenuous truce will fail to hold — two days after The Times of Israel visited Margaliot, two rockets fired from southern Lebanon landed in a nearby field.
Mena’s orchard, which his parents planted in the 1970s, lies less than a kilometer from the hills that mark the border between Israel and Lebanon.
As he examined the branches of a tree, he wondered out loud if it was “finished,” or if there was a chance it could be brought back to life.
A lone blossom on a branch caught his eye. He stopped and reached for it.
“This is the first blossom I’ve seen here so far,” the farmer said. “This gives me hope.”
Hezbollah-led forces began firing into Israel on October 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas and the war that the allied terror group had sparked in Gaza with its invasion of the south a day earlier. For nearly a year, rockets, missiles and armed drones bombarded communities on a near-daily basis, with those closest to the border, like Margaliot, taking the worst of it.
Immediately after the attacks began, Mena, his wife, their two daughters, and his mother Alegria joined the approximately 60,000 other residents from 32 communities in northern Israel to evacuate the area.
It would be over a year until they would be able to return. When Mena came back following the ceasefire, he found his orchard “in ruins,” he recalled. Neat rows of healthy trees had been transformed into dry brambles covered in rotting fruit and dead vines snaking wildly over weed-covered grass.
The farmer was ready to “give up and shut the orchard’s gate,” until a group of volunteers showed up from HaShomer HaHadash, a non-profit agricultural organization that has launched an initiative to assist northern farmers in rehabilitating their fields and groves.
Working alongside Mena for 11 days, the volunteers helped plant 110 new kiwi saplings to replace some of the trees that had died during the war.
“They gave me the energy to continue working,” he said, “But it’s still a catastrophe. I have to start all over again.”
Buzz in the air
About 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of Kibbutz Ayelet HaShahar, third-generation beekeeper Telem Galili was checking a dozen beehives donated by the start-up beehive company, Primal Bee, in partnership with HaShomer HaHadash.
The new beehives were just a small addition to the approximately 75 million bees under his care, who are kept in colonies of around 50,000 each spread across some 1,500 hives.
The apiary was started by Galili’s grandmother Itka in 1921 and has run continuously for over a century, in times of peace and war, including the latest round of fighting with Hezbollah.
Though the kibbutz was attacked several times during the war, it was far enough from the border that it was not evacuated, which allowed Galili to continue providing bees to farmers around the north.
“Even in danger of rocket attacks, we loaded hives onto trucks at night to bring them to farmers to pollinate their avocado and fruit orchards,” Galili said.
Without the bees transferring pollen between the flowering blossoms, there would be no new fruit on the trees.
Asaf Shachar, the head beekeeper at Primal Bee, said the fighting had been very “stressful” to the bees.
“The war caused havoc on the ecosystem in the north,” said Shachar, who met Galili at the kibbutz to inspect some of the beehives that had been donated to replace hives that were burned or damaged in the fighting.
He noted that the insects were an essential part of the habitat, supporting cultivation but also increasing natural resources, such as clover, while helping spread wild plants and grasses to cover the land.
“Bees are crucial pollinators for about 30% of the food supply around the world,” Shachar said. “Without bees, there will be a lot more desert.”
A Primal Bee hive is taller than a traditional wooden beehive, resembling a file cabinet. Made of thick Styrofoam, the hive’s temperature is regulated to 35° Celsius (95° Fahrenheit), the optimal heat for queens to lay eggs.
As thousands of bees buzzed around, Galili and Shachar inspected the hives and the honeycomb without any protective equipment.
“If you don’t bother the bees, they don’t bother you,” Galili said.
There to the end
Located some 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from the Lebanese border, the Western Galilee moshav Even Menachem had been among the communities evacuated during the war. But Moti Salhov had dug in, defiantly refusing the military’s orders to leave.
“The only way I’ll be evacuated is in my coffin,” the 64-year-old said.
For over a year, Salhov had lived and tended his lands in what was officially a closed military zone, despite being within easy reach of Hezbollah’s anti-tank missiles, short-range projectiles used by the terror group to menace communities near the border.
On March 2, the Home Front Command allowed residents to return to their homes.
However, an active emergency response team still guards the moshav’s front gate, and the area is still closed to visitors.
Salhov said that some residents will wait until the end of the school year while others might never return, and he doesn’t blame them.
“If I had young kids and I found a good job somewhere else, I’d stay away,” he said.
The view of South Lebanon from Barak’s Berries Farm in Even Menachem, Western Galilee, on March 23, 2025. (Diana Bletter/Times of Israel)
But Salhov is tied to the land. He grew up on the moshav and has spent his whole life there, working as a farmer. He used to grow peaches, nectarines and pears but 10 years ago, he and his oldest son Barak got into berries instead.
The farmer walked around the 17 dunams (four acres) of Barak’s Berries farmland, pointing out raspberries, blackberries and blueberries bursting with pink blossoms and ripening berries, along with a row of passion fruit.
During the summer, with rockets and missiles still a daily threat, volunteers had joined him on the kibbutz to help him harvest the fruit.
“People came from as far away as Jerusalem to help,” he said. “It warmed my heart. They all told me that if I were here, working, then they could come help me.”
Sirens went off all the time, but the sole bomb shelter nearby, a temporary structure at the gate of the farm, took “at least 90 seconds” to reach, a full minute longer than the time allotted by the Home Front Command to reach safety before impact.
“There was no chance we’d get there in time so we lay on the ground,” Salhov recalled. “Shrapnel fell all over.”
As of early April, it had been over 120 days since the last time a siren blared on the moshav, but Salhov has no illusions about the future.
“We can’t afford to be naïve,” he said.
The berry farmer turned to look at the nearby border, looming just over his shoulder.
“We have to be realistic,” he said. “As long as Israel is here, they will never accept us and there will always be war.”
The Times of Israel Community.
