Northerners are wary of returning to border communities: ‘The ceasefire is rubbish’

KIBBUTZ MALKIYA — Dean Sweetland casts his gaze over a forlorn street in the northern community of Kibbutz Malkiya. Perched on a hill overlooking the border with Lebanon, the town stands mostly empty after residents were forced to evacuate a year ago.

The daycare is closed. The homes are unkempt. Parts of the landscape are ashen from fires sparked by fallen Hezbollah rockets. Even after a tenuous Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, the mood here is far from celebratory.

“The ceasefire is rubbish,” said Sweetland, a gardener and member of the kibbutz’s civilian security squad. “Do you expect me to ring up my friends and say, ‘All the families should come home?’ No.”

Across the border, Lebanese civilians have jammed roads in a rush to return to homes in the country’s south, but most residents of northern Israel have met the ceasefire with suspicion and apprehension.

“Hezbollah could still come back to the border, and who will protect us when they do?” Sweetland asked.

Israel’s government seeks to bring the northern reaches of the country back to life, particularly the line of communities directly abutting Lebanon that have played a major role in staking out Israel’s border.

But the fear of Hezbollah, a lack of trust in United Nations peacekeeping forces charged with upholding the ceasefire, deep anger at the government and some Israelis’ desire to keep rebuilding their lives elsewhere are keeping many from returning immediately.

Some 60,000 northerners remain displaced following months of Hezbollah’s rocket fire. They were evacuated shortly after Hamas invaded the south on October 7, 2023 — killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages — out of fear Hezbollah would carry out a similar attack in the north, and amid persistent rocket and missile fire from Lebanon that began, unprovoked, a day after the Hamas massacre.

The ceasefire, which took effect early Wednesday, came two months after Israel invaded Lebanon in a bid to curb Hezbollah’s attacks. The Iran-backed terror group has said its attacks were in support of Gaza amid the war sparked by the Hamas onslaught.

During the truce’s initial 60-day phase, Hezbollah is supposed to remove its armed presence from a broad band of southern Lebanon where the IDF says the terror group had been digging in for years by gathering weapons and setting up rocket launch sites and other infrastructure.

Under the ceasefire, United Nations observer force UNIFIL and a beefed-up Lebanese army presence are supposed to ensure Hezbollah doesn’t return.

Many residents of northern Israel are skeptical that the peace will hold.

Sarah Gould, who evacuated Kibbutz Malkiya at the start of the war with her three kids, said Hezbollah fired on the community up to and just past the minute when the ceasefire took effect early Wednesday.

“So for the government to tell me that Hezbollah is neutralized,” she said, “it’s a perfect lie.”

Residents fear for their safety in the far north

In Gaza, Israel’s counteroffensive to Hamas’s shock assault aims to eradicate the terror group. But in Lebanon, Israel’s aims were limited to pushing Hezbollah away from the border so northern residents could return home.

Israeli critics say the government should have kept fighting to outright cripple Hezbollah or to clear out the border area, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Lebanese.

“I won’t even begin to consider going home until I know there’s a dead zone for kilometers across the border,” the 46-year-old Gould said.

Some wary Israelis trickled back home Thursday and Friday to areas farther from the border. But communities like Kibbutz Manara, set on a tiny slice of land between Lebanon and Syria, remained ghost towns.

Orna Weinberg, 58, who was born and raised in Manara, said it was too early to tell whether the ceasefire would protect the community.

Perched above all the other border villages, Manara was uniquely vulnerable to Hezbollah fire throughout the war. Three-quarters of its structures were damaged.

In the kibbutz’s communal kitchen and dining hall, ceiling beams have collapsed. The uprooted floorboards are covered with ash from fires that also claimed much of the kibbutz’s cropland.

Rocket fragments abound. The torso of a mannequin, a decoy dressed in army green, lies on the ground.

Weinberg tried to stay in Manara during the war, but after anti-tank shrapnel damaged her home, soldiers told her to leave. On Thursday, she walked along her street, which looks out directly over a UNIFIL position separating the kibbutz from a line of Lebanese villages that have been decimated by Israeli bombardment and demolitions.

Weinberg said UNIFIL hadn’t prevented Hezbollah’s build-up in the past, “so why would they be able to now?”

“A ceasefire here just gives Hezbollah a chance to rebuild their power and come back to places that they were driven out of,” she said.

The truce seemed fragile.

Associated Press reporters heard sporadic bursts of gunfire — possibly Israeli troops firing at Lebanese attempting to enter the towns. The IDF says it is temporarily preventing Lebanese civilians from returning home to a line of towns closest to the border, until the Lebanese military can deploy there in force.

Even in less battered communities, no one returns home

Though the atmosphere along the border was tense, Malkiya showed signs of peace. With Hezbollah’s rockets stopped, some residents returned briefly to the kibbutz to peer around cautiously.

At a vista overlooking the border a group of around 30 soldiers gathered. Just days ago, they would have made easy targets for Hezbollah fire.

Malkiya has sustained less damage than Manara. Still, residents said they would not return immediately. During a year of displacement, many have restarted their lives elsewhere, and the idea of going back to a front-line town on the border is daunting.

The government paid for hotels for evacuees and helped accommodate children in new schools. Gould predicted residents would return to the kibbutz only when government subsidies for their lodging dried up — “not because they want to, but because they feel like they can’t afford an alternative.”

“It’s not just a security issue,” Gould said. “We’ve spent more than a year rebuilding our lives wherever we landed. It’s a question of having to gather that up and move back somewhere else, somewhere that’s technically our old house but not a home. Nothing feels the same.”

It’s unclear if schools in the border communities will have enough students to reopen, Gould said, and her children are already enrolled elsewhere. She’s enjoyed living farther from the border, away from an open war zone.

There’s also a deep feeling that the communities were abandoned by the government, Sweetland said.

Sweetland is one of roughly 25 civilian security volunteers who stayed throughout the war, braving continual rocket fire to keep the kibbutz afloat. They repaired damaged homes, put out blazes and helped replace the kibbutz generator when it was taken out by Hezbollah fire. They were on their own, with no firefighters or police willing to risk coming, he said.

“We didn’t have any help for months and months and months, and we pleaded, ‘Please help us.’”

Sweetland said he will keep watching over the hushed pathways of the once-vibrant community in hopes his neighbors will soon feel safe enough to return. But he predicted it would take months.

Weinberg hopes to move back to Manara as soon as possible. On Thursday, she spotted a former neighbor who was about to leave after checking the damage to her home.

Weinberg grasped her hand through the car window, asking how she was. The woman grimaced and began to cry. Their hands parted as the car slowly rolled out through the gates and drove away.

Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 45 civilians. In addition, 76 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes, attacks on Israel, and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.

Two soldiers have been killed in a drone attack from Iraq, and there have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries. The IDF estimates that some 3,500 Hezbollah operatives have been killed in the conflict. Around 100 members of other terror groups, along with hundreds of civilians, have also been reported killed in Lebanon.