In November, Avi Avraham and his wife left their home in Northern Israel’s Kiryat Shmona to attend a wedding. Moments later, a missile blasted through their third floor, shattering the windows — in effect wrecking their life as they knew it.
They and their son moved south to safety and have been living as evacuees ever since, at a hotel paid for by the Israeli government in the hills of Birya, Israel, halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Lebanon border.
“To live in hotels is not a solution,” said Avraham, in Hebrew, speaking to CBC through a translator. The 72-year-old retired bus driver’s family has lived at the hotel for seven months, and there is no clear plan for what’s next.
“We don’t know what will happen. That puts us in an unpleasant situation.”
Kiryat Shmona sits just three kilometres from the border in northern Israel. Most of the 22,000 residents have left.
Avraham is one of the tens of thousands in both Israel and Lebanon who’ve been displaced by the volley of cross-border missiles launched by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in Lebanon, and by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Israel, in a conflict that observers say has long been threatening to escalate into a full-blown war.
Defending the northern border
In recent days, talk of further defending this northern border has been rolling off the tongues of both Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, before his Sunday trip to Washington, D.C., and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a Sunday interview with Israel’s Channel 14.
“After the intense phase [in Gaza] is finished, we will have the possibility to move part of the forces north. And we will do this,” said Netanyahu. “First and foremost for defensive purposes. And secondly, to bring our [evacuated] residents home.”
Hezbollah has been exchanging strikes with Israel almost daily since the war in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7 after a Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, with the aim of pulling Israeli forces away from the embattled Gaza Strip.
Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says that with the longer range weapons and drones Hezbollah is now using, “the margin for error is becoming smaller,” and the conflict is edging toward a full-scale war “without either side deciding that they really want it.”
He says there’s no way to really guarantee security for displaced Israelis to go back to their homes.
“The problem is, once again, as it is in Gaza, what are you trying to achieve? What is the end state that you want to achieve? And I don’t think we’ll be able to reach a stable end state by military means.”
The end of the conflict can’t come soon enough for Yakov Naftali, another resident who’s been evacuated and is living at the hotel in Birya.
“I think that the situation as it is, honestly, has been stretched to the real brink of the capabilities,” he said in Hebrew.
Naftali, 62, held out at his home in Margaliot, nestled along the Lebanon border, until this March when his six sisters and four children finally convinced him it wasn’t safe to stay.
