Residents returning to Israel’s decimated far north worry their neighbors won’t come home

MANARA — Hagar Ehrlich returned to her kibbutz on the northern border with Lebanon on Sunday, for the first time after 14 months of war. It was a sunny, uncannily quiet afternoon, just four days into the 60-day ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah.

Ehrlich, who along with her neighbors was ordered to evacuate from Kibbutz Manara after Hezbollah began firing projectiles at Israel on October 8, 2023, sat with her son, some family friends, and a few snacks at a small folding table outside her damaged house. It sits on the edge of the kibbutz, right on the border with Lebanon, directly across from Mays al-Jabal, a Lebanese village that is a Hezbollah stronghold.

“The damage on the kibbutz is unbelievable,” she told this Times of Israel reporter. “I just feel terrible.”

The kibbutz is one of the war’s hardest-hit communities in the north. Out of its 155 buildings, 110 have been damaged by Hezbollah rockets and anti-tank guided missiles. The smell of smoke blankets everything and the once-verdant kibbutz is littered with destroyed cars, shattered houses, and blackened trees. There is damage to the electricity, sewage, and gas lines. The dining hall and nursery school suffered direct hits. The kibbutz is in ruins.

Hagar, 72, was born and raised on Manara, where her father was one of the seven kibbutz founders in 1943. Her son, Noam Ehrlich, manages Beerlich Beer, a family brewing company. He used to manufacture the specialty beer in their kibbutz home.

After the war began, he moved the brewing to the northern city of Karmiel. Even though he has no idea when he’ll be able to set up his beer manufacturing in Manara again, on Sunday he planted the company’s flag on the hilltop in front of his house and looked over his shoulder at Lebanon.

“So they can see we came back,” Ehrlich said.

Temporary ceasefire

The US-brokered ceasefire deal halted 14 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which began when the terror group began firing in solidarity with Gaza on October 8, 2023 — one day after the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel that left 1,200 murdered and saw the kidnapping of 251 into the Strip, sparking the ongoing war. The relentless Hezbollah missile and drone attacks from Lebanon forced the displacement of some 60,000 residents of northern Israel.

The ceasefire sets out a 60-day transition period, during which the IDF will withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon while the Lebanese Army will deploy some 5,000 troops south of the Litani River, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel. Hezbollah is banned from operating south of the river, several kilometers from the border.

However, kibbutz members doubt that the Lebanese Army will be able to stand up to Hezbollah. It’s only a matter of time, they said, before Hezbollah, a powerhouse in Lebanese politics and a sworn enemy of Israel, starts building up its arsenal and attacks Israel again.

On Friday, Israel Defense Forces Northern Command chief Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin told the mayors of Israel’s displaced northern communities that they could begin rebuilding communities damaged by Hezbollah’s attacks.

The residents will not be asked to return home until February 1, 2025, according to a news report.

But Naor Shamia, head of Manara’s local emergency team, said that due to the intense damage wrought upon the kibbutz, he and some of the other 300 or so residents are not sure when they can return. They are unable to estimate how much damage there is and when they will be able to move back and restart kibbutz life.

What is clear, however, is that “it’s a matter of raising enough money to rebuild,” Shamia said. “The government promises to help, but it won’t be enough.”

Shamia said the kibbutz is planning to reopen its educational system in September 2025 so that people can move back with their families at the start of the school year.

“But will people with young kids return?” he asked rhetorically.

Shamia took this reporter into a kibbutz home that was destroyed by Hezbollah rockets. Through what was once the kitchen window, Shamia looked out at southern Lebanon’s picturesque rolling hills that belie the danger that may still be lurking.

In 2011, Hezbollah created its special forces Radwan Unit, which was specifically tasked with crossing into Israel in future conflicts and causing as much destruction as possible. The group released a video in 2020 showing Radwan members training and firing weapons at targets representing Israel in a pointed warning to the Jewish state.

During the past 14 months, Hezbollah operatives fired on Manara and other Israeli communities from within the homes and villages of south Lebanon, including Mays al-Jabal.

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.

Nothing has changed in Hezbollah’s ideology, Shamia said.

“This war isn’t over,” he said pointedly. “This is just a ceasefire. A temporary ceasefire. It will take a few years for Hezbollah to build up its weapons again.”

An 11-kilometer-long, nine-meter-tall concrete border wall was built along the Lebanese border in 2018.

Until Hamas’s October 7 attack, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel in a murderous rampage, Shamia said that kibbutz members never thought about infiltrations from Lebanon.

“We thought the army would always protect us,” he said. “But what will happen when the army withdraws from Lebanon? Today, we can be here and we’re not in danger. What will be in a year?”

There was the sound of an explosion. Across the border, a plume of smoke rose.

“That’s the sound of the ceasefire,” Shamia said with evident cynicism. He presumed it was the IDF carrying out strikes against Hezbollah members who were violating the agreement.

Since the ceasefire took effect, the IDF has struck active Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon and thwarted efforts to deliver Iranian weapons to the terror group via Syria. It has fired warning shots in several areas in southern Lebanon to disperse Hezbollah operatives attempting to reach no-go zones near the border, and on Saturday night, soldiers of the Paratroopers Brigade spotted a group of armed Hezbollah operatives close to a church in southern Lebanon, a site previously known to have been used by the terror group. The troops opened fire on the terrorists and killed them.

On the walk through the kibbutz was Eddie Azran, director of waste management of the Upper Galilee Regional Council, which includes Manara.

Azran, who makes stained glass as a hobby, examined a piece of glass on a window sill that had curled from the heat of rocket fire.

“It takes 1,000 degrees Celsius [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to bend glass,” Azran observed. “You can imagine how much heat there was.”

Out of the 29 communities in the Upper Galilee Regional Council – an area that stretches for 300,000 dunams, or about 116 square miles — Azran said that 14 were evacuated during the war.

“People are visiting now to see all the damage” their homes have sustained, Azran said. “Will they come back? Their kids have started new schools in other places. They’ve already started new lives.”

We lost our sense of community

Before the ceasefire deal was signed, Avichai Stern, mayor of nearby Kiryat Shmona, wrote on Facebook, “I don’t understand how we went from total victory to total surrender,” referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slogan for the war against Hamas. “What will our residents return to? To a destroyed city without security or a horizon?”

Yet on Sunday morning, workers had begun sweeping Kiryat Shmona streets, trimming trees, and removing debris left from rocket attacks around the northern city of 23,000 residents about two kilometers (just over a mile) from the Lebanon border.

There were 383 buildings damaged in Kiryat Shmona. In October, a couple was killed in the city in a rocket attack while they were walking their three dogs.

Israeli authorities have previously estimated property damage in northern Israel to be at least NIS 1 billion ($275 million).

Almost 90% of the city was evacuated, but Prosper Azran, Eddie Azran’s cousin and a former Kiryat Shmona mayor who served three terms from 1983 to 1997, stayed for ideological reasons. His mother’s house and two cars on his property were destroyed. Many of the houses in the neighborhood have been scarred by shrapnel and rocket fire.

“The government should never have evacuated people from their homes,” Azran said as he sat in his garden, where clementines and oranges hung heavy on the trees. Stray cats wandered around. His neighbors had all left, he said, and he was taking care of 11 cats.

“The war should have been brought to the enemy, and instead, we allowed it to be brought to us,” Azran said.

For 14 months, he said, the city was struck by Hezbollah rockets, often several times a day. So close to the border, he said he heard the explosions first and only afterward heard the sirens.

“We have less than zero seconds to reach a protected area,” Azran said.

“When the city was evacuated, its residents were spread to 400 places around the country,” he said. “We lost our sense of community.”

He is concerned that the abandonment of the north will cause “irreparable damage to businesses, factories, and our economy.”

Israel’s food supply has been severely impacted, he said, with lost crops, orchards, chickens, and cows.

About 55,000 acres of forestry, nature reserve, parks, and open lands in northern Israel and the Golan Heights have been burnt down since the start of the war, Israeli authorities say.

Azran worries that many residents won’t return to the north out of concern for their safety.

The birds have returned, however, he noted.

“I didn’t hear birds for 14 months,” he said. “They must have been frightened during the war because of all the explosions.”

Azran tilted his head to listen to the chirps.

“They must have heard of the ceasefire,” he said.