‘History repeats itself’ as South Lebanon Army veteran, Israeli killed side-by-side

NAHARIYA — Nir Aloni stood in his backyard early Wednesday morning and held up a piece of the Hezbollah rocket that fell on a warehouse in the adjacent property, killing his next-door neighbors the day before.

The terror group fired dozens of rockets and drones at northern and central Israel shortly before 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, striking Ziv Belfer, 52, and Shamoun Najm, 54, in Nahariya.

Belfer lived in a house on the property. Najm was a carpenter who had a carpentry workshop in the abutting warehouse. The two men, who were friends, were together in the warehouse when it suffered a direct hit. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

“There was a loud boom, smoke, and fire,” Aloni’s wife, Tsipi, told The Times of Israel. She said she rushed into the protected room in her house as soon as the sirens went off.

Nahariya residents have 15 seconds to reach a protected area after the sirens go off. A spokesperson for the IDF Home Front Command told The Times of Israel that the sirens “went off in the time they were supposed to.”

“The explosions came 15 seconds after the sirens,” Tsipi confirmed. But Belfer and Najm didn’t reach the shelter in time. Tsipi pointed it out, not too far from the warehouse.

Tsipi said that sometimes they hear the “booms from afar, go into the shelter, and then there’s a siren, which means it has reached Nahariya.”

“Ziv always goes to the shelter,” Belfer’s sister, Avital Friedman, told Hebrew media. “It hurts because if there had been time, he would have gone to the shelter.”

According to the Israel Defense Forces, 10 rockets were launched from Lebanon in the attack, some of which were intercepted while others struck inside towns in the Western Galilee or open areas.

The attack came hours after a Hezbollah drone struck a kindergarten in the Haifa suburb of Nesher. No siren went off in the area, but no one was hurt in that incident because staff rushed the children to a bomb shelter seconds before the impact after hearing a faint siren elsewhere.

Belfer, who was single and had no children, owned a cafe, Tuk-Tuki, in Haifa.

Najm, who leaves behind two adult children, was a member of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), which fought against Hezbollah and other terror groups before Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. He fled immediately after the IDF pulled out of the security zone in May 2000, and has lived in Israel since then.

Jonathan Elkhoury, a public speaker and Israeli advocate whose family were also SLA members, knew Najm.

“History repeats itself,” Elkhoury wrote in a statement. “As it happened in the past, once again, SLA members and Jews fall side by side, under a common threat.”

“It was a Hezbollah missile launched from Lebanese territory,” Hana Nora, Najm’s brother-in-law, told Ynet news. “I want to emphasize that the majority of Lebanese do not want wars with Israel. Our family is paying a very heavy price.”

During Tuesday afternoon’s attack, another two men in their 30s were lightly hurt by shrapnel in another impact in Kibbutz Kabri, about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) away, the Magen David Adom emergency service said.

The warehouse is in the Trumpledor Neighborhood of northern Nahariya, less than 2 kilometers (1 mile) from a high-rise residential apartment building that suffered a direct hit from Hezbollah’s explosive-laden drones on September 9. Nobody was hurt in that attack.

A strange new normal

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the neighborhood, lined with one-family houses behind Nahariya’s new public gardens, seemed strangely back to normal. A postman went from house to house, delivering mail. A man stopped his car in front of Belfer’s house and asked neighbor Tsipi Aloni if that was where the rocket fell.

When Tsipi nodded, the man replied, “[Let there be] only good news,” and drove off.

Another neighbor, who preferred not to give her name, said the explosions were “frightening.”

“But I have to earn a living,” she said as she headed toward her car to go to work.

Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. That war began on October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, slaughtered some 1,200 people, and abducted 251 people to Gaza.

Some 60,000 residents were evacuated from northern towns on the Lebanon border shortly after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught due to fears Hezbollah would carry out a similar attack.

The attacks on northern Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 43 civilians. In addition, 62 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.

Last year, soon after Hezbollah started its rocket attacks, Tsipi said that her family added a bomb shelter to a house on the property where their son, his wife, and their two-week-old baby live.

“The baby was born in the bomb shelter,” Tsipi said. “I look forward to being able to walk the baby in a stroller down the street, but right now, it’s too dangerous.”

She said that her other children, who live in Ramat Gan and Austria, “tell us to come,” but she and her husband won’t leave.

“We love to be in our home,” she said, even as rockets sounded as we spoke in the near distance.

Although she said she is “calm by nature,” she said that the current reality is very difficult.

Her father-in-law purchased the property as a working commercial farm 50 years ago, she said. The couple no longer grows produce commercially, but they have a vegetable garden with “a kale plant that has become a tree,” she said, along with bananas, oranges, and exotic fruit.

Nir, an agronomist, said he was in his office in Tel Aviv when someone sent him a message immediately after Tuesday’s attack asking if the rocket had fallen close to his house. He left his office and immediately drove home.

“The street was closed, and we were told to go inside our houses,” Tsipi said. “Soldiers walked from house to house, asking if we were okay, making sure that everyone was accounted for.”

“Ziv was a good neighbor,” Tsipi said. “He was always helpful.”

She paused.

“Life goes on,” she said as her husband stopped by a tree to pick two oranges to give to this reporter. “Look at how the sun is shining.”