KIBBUTZ MANARA, Israel — Orna Weinberg, 60, moves through her house at night in darkness. Turning the lights on might attract the attention of the Hezbollah fighters just across the border.
For the past 20 days, Weinberg, a farmer and doula, has been living between the thud of Hezbollah missiles and the crack of Israeli artillery. But her overwhelming feeling, she says, is relief — to be home.
Weinberg, a married mother of four, is one of the 60,000 Israelis who were directed by the government after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas to evacuate homes near the Lebanese border when Hezbollah began firing and joined the war. This time, authorities are taking a different approach. “There is no evacuation,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week. “Everyone stays in their home.” The mission now, he said, is “to protect northern communities against raids and anti-tank fire.”
When Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire in November 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces had set the Lebanese-based political and paramilitary force back “decades.” But since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran last month, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel per day.
The militants say they are avenging the death of their patron, Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed on the first day of the campaign. Israeli officials say they’re working to eliminate the group’s military capabilities once and for all.
“Hezbollah poked the bear,” said an Israeli security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive military matter. Israel, the official said, had been committed to a process with Lebanon to disarm the militants gradually.
“This is Hezbollah’s swan song,” Reserve Brig. Gen. Guy Hazoot said. “The organization has become hated within Lebanon. It’s understood that they are fighting for Iranian interests; once the Iranian resources are gone, the organization will collapse in on itself.”
On Wednesday, one Hezbollah missile reached southern Israel, some 125 miles from the border. But authorities, having promised that the IDF would protect residents, have been hesitant to order further evacuations. Now residents in northern Israel are caught in the crossfire.
Reut Maman, 37, lives with her family in Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, about a mile from the border. They’ve spent most of the past three weeks in a bomb shelter. Maman owns a restaurant in the city; these past three years, she has opened and closed it repeatedly.
Maman’s son, Or, 7, began first grade this year. But the lessons have moved to Zoom, and given the fighting, he’s finding it difficult to focus. “At night,” she said, “it is like a battlefield in our ears.”
Now they shower and cook quickly to minimize time outside the shelter. “I want someone from the government to tell me why I was uprooted from my home for two years, only to return to a worse reality.”
“They promised us security, and there is no security,” said her mother, Brorya Danino, 61. Of the 25,000 residents who lived in the city before Oct. 7, 2023, about 15,000 — 60 percent — have returned, according to municipal data.
“As long as you don’t uproot [Hezbollah] by the source, it won’t help,” Maman said.
Weinberg said the residents’ presence in the north “is important for the country, not just for us.” She spoke in her home at Kibbutz Manara, surrounded by the rubble of houses destroyed by Hezbollah missiles since October 2023. Snowcapped Mount Hermon loomed in the background. Hezbollah fighters in the nearby Lebanese village of Mais al-Jabal are so close, she said, they “can see what toothpaste I use.”
Still, she feels as if a weight has been lifted. “Displacement is a huge trauma. We would rather organize shelters here than be distant and scattered.”
While she spoke, artillery rumbled.
The green ridges and lush orchards of northern Israel have been a conflict zone since before Hezbollah’s emergence in the 1980s. The group, an Iranian proxy, took shape during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon.
Israel had invaded neighboring Lebanon in 1982 to counter the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was based there. Hezbollah, which in its 1985 manifesto declared the destruction of Israel a key goal, fought the occupiers. Mounting Israeli casualties fueled a movement back home that led commanders to withdraw unilaterally in 2000.
Weinberg has soft blue eyes and long white hair. Growing up on the kibbutz, she said, she “learned to walk in a bomb shelter.”
Reinforced passageways connect the kindergartens here to shelters. When Manara was founded in 1943, she said, relations with the Lebanese neighbors were good. It was five years before the State of Israel was established, and more than 20 before her birth.
“Water was brought here by mules and wagons from the neighboring Lebanese villages,” she said. “When a water pipe was finally installed here, the local sheikhs joined the celebration.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led fighters streamed out of Gaza and attacked communities in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, Israeli officials say. Israel responded with a military campaign against the militants that has killed more than 72,200 people, Gaza health officials say.
Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into northern Israel in support of Hamas. Since the 2023 attack, Manara has been struck by more than 240 anti-tank missiles.
A strike on Weinberg’s home during the first month of the war led her to evacuate. She was away for two years. “It will take years to reconstruct the destroyed homes,” she said. When Hezbollah resumed firing missiles this month, she was unsurprised. “It isn’t indifference,” she said. She prefers to focus on what remains within her control. “I have no doubt the Lebanese people fear Hezbollah more than they fear me, and they want Hezbollah gone,” she said. “Hezbollah has been destroying Lebanon for many years.”
Israel has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon and forced more than 1 million from their homes, authorities there say. The dead include 79 women and 118 children.
The IDF says it “has eliminated more than 500 Hezbollah terrorists.”
Weinberg said the prospect of an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon “saddens me deeply.” She said the Israeli government should strike a deal with Lebanon. “The thought that the Iranian regime or its proxies can be defeated by military means alone is foolish,” she said. “Our government avoids diplomatic moves and wastes many military achievements.”
Hazoot, the brigadier general in reserve, is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies INSS. He said Israeli operations since Oct. 7, 2023, have significantly damaged Hezbollah, including “taking the Radwan Force’s invasion capabilities off the table.” But “telling the public that Hezbollah no longer exists,” he said, “only led to deep frustration.”
“Israel must ensure there is a buffer zone between the border communities and Hezbollah forces,” he said. Occupying a vast territory, he warned, would exhaust military resources and divert attention from other fronts, primarily Iran.
On Monday, a rocket struck the home of 67-year-old Zehava Telyas in the northwestern coastal city of Nahariya. “We ran into the safe room, and before we could even lock the handle, the missile hit,” she said. Now she was staying at a hotel. It was her birthday. She joked that her husband had taken her there to celebrate.
Telyas, who has lived all her life in Nahariya, said she has no intention of moving. “We’ve been through all the wars. We will get through this, too. We have an excellent prime minister and defense minister. I hope they finish the job.”
A short distance away stood the Galilee Medical Center, which is well-rehearsed to handle mass casualties. It has 450 beds in protected spaces above and underground. Last week, a drone struck its parking lot.
In one ward was George Sayeg, an 83-year-old Arab Christian from the northern town of Kafr Yasif. Sayeg has family in Beirut who eventually left for Canada. “They destroyed Lebanon,” he said. “It used to be a paradise.”
Now, he said, he hoped for a “ceasefire by Easter — Inshallah.”
Rachel Chason in Dubai and Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut contributed to this report.
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