When Karin Nathans Gefen was evacuated with her children from Kibbutz Matzuva on October 18 due to possible attacks by Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, she said that the “worst thing of all” was the uncertainty of their situation.
Gefen, one of more than 120,000 residents who have been evacuated from communities near the border in northern Israel, is now staying in a hotel in Tiberias with her two children (a third is doing a year of Sherut Leumi [National Service]), while her husband, Ran, a reservist, remains on the kibbutz, where he serves as part of the emergency standby squad.
Uprooted, having to live in one room in a hotel, driving long hours to her job – those factors are difficult enough. But to Gefen, living in the unknown is the most challenging.
“I don’t know how we can ever go back to the kibbutz,” she said, which is not much more than 2 kilometers from the northern border. “We don’t feel safe there. How will we ever have a sense of security?”
While not all northern Israel towns and settlements have been evacuated, residents across the region feel unsettled and uneasy as they struggle to accept what’s become the new normal.
Life after October 7 for the evacuated
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have launched hundreds of rockets, drones and anti-tank missiles into northern Israel, in support of Hamas amid the war in Gaza. In the past week, there has been a dramatic uptick in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah since Israeli airstrikes killed several top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders. Residents have no idea when – or if – they can ever return to their homes, some of which have been destroyed in Hezbollah attacks.
Gefen said that residents of five kibbutzim from the Mateh Asher Regional Council, where a total of eight settlements have been evacuated, are now lodged at the same Tiberias hotel. They’ve set up a gan and a nursery school and have banded together to hold activities for children.
“It’s a real community; we’re all here together. But it isn’t home,” said Gefen, 47, who was born on Kibbutz Matzuva and has lived there her whole life.
“It breaks my heart when I see how the kibbutz now looks so abandoned,” she said. “And I don’t see how the situation is going to change.”
Her older daughter rides a bus for more than an hour each way to study with her former schoolmates, but they are no longer in their usual school, which is too close to the border. Even students who have not been evacuated feel a sense of upheaval.
“A lot of students have lost their direction,” said Rami Glaser of Shavei Zion, whose son, Alon, is in eighth grade. Middle-school students from the moshav have been transferred to a different school where they can study only in the afternoons; elementary students use the school in the morning.
“For kids who find it difficult to study, now it’s really difficult for them to stay motivated,” Glaser said. Some teachers are in the reserves, and there is nobody to replace them; others have been evacuated, so they can’t come teach; still others leave school early when their child or spouse gets a sudden leave from fighting in Gaza.
Glaser said that parents try to protect their children but they still know “something serious is going on.” The entrance to the beachfront moshav is now lined with sandbags, concrete barriers, and guards. And the beach is closed indefinitely. Glaser and his wife, Esti, take their two children on day trips to get them away from the region, “trying to show them normal life.”
“But I see that so many kids have lost their self-confidence in every aspect of their lives,” Glaser said.Ordinary routines are no longer taken for granted.
Saeed Saeed, who manages the avocado groves in Rosh Hanikra on the northern border, said that he and his staff try to go to work each morning as usual, “but then the army tells us to stop because it’s too dangerous.” In December, Saeed said, he worked only five days the entire month.
“We can’t care for the trees, so they aren’t healthy,” Saeed said, a fact that will damage next year’s crop. He can’t harvest the avocados, either, and they’re left hanging on the trees. But most worrisome to Saeed is how he’ll protect his family members, who live in Sheikh Dannun.
“Every explosion is frightening,” Saeed said. “My granddaughter is so scared, even though her father – my son-in-law – is a reserve soldier.
“Hezbollah rockets don’t make a distinction between Arabs and Jews,” he said, pointing out that in the 2006 Second Lebanon War, 13 Arab civilians were killed by Hezbollah Katyusha rockets.
So far, Hezbollah forces have killed nine soldiers and four civilians.
Saeed also said there are only two regulation bomb shelters in his village; one at the school and the other in the senior citizens’ center. Most of the houses in the village were built in the 1990s, before the new type of bomb shelters were required.
“No one is safe,” Saeed said.
Despite the mandatory evacuation of Metulla, and even when the town was declared a military zone, Helen Bar-Lev, an 82-year-old artist and poet, didn’t want to leave. Bar-Lev, who has lived there for the past 16 years, wanted to stay in her own house, with her cats.
“More or less everybody had left before me,” Bar-Lev said.
Head of the Metulla Local Council David Azulai picked her up from her house on October 17, after the mandatory evacuation was already in place, and drove her out of the town’s gate.
“I didn’t want to go, because I didn’t think that any place in Israel was safe,” Bar-Lev said. At first, she, too, stayed in a hotel in Tiberias, but since then she has found an apartment to rent in Karmiel.
“It’s very traumatic to move at this age,” Bar-Lev said. With the aid of a social worker, she has finally sorted out “a lot of the bureaucracy.” Still, she isn’t sure her house will still be standing after the war, or if she’ll be able to sell it, or if she’ll feel safe enough to move back to Metulla.
Hezbollah “fires on houses in Metulla deliberately,” Azulai said. Some 140 houses have been partially damaged, and about 10 houses have been destroyed.
“In the south, the IDF is fighting,” Azulai said. “But in the north, the IDF hasn’t gone 1 centimeter into Lebanon.”Since early December, the IDF has started destroying much of Hezbollah’s forces and assets within firing range of the northern border. But, Azulai said, “Hezbollah keeps attacking, and we’re on the defensive.
“We don’t want a war,” he said. “We want the United Nations Resolution 1701 – signed by Hezbollah in 2006, which stated that the terrorist group must stay north of the Litani River – to be implemented.”
“Right now, citizens can’t come back here,” Azulai said. “It hurts. It’s very painful.”
He has stayed in Metulla since the war began with the emergency standby squad and a few citizens who haven’t left. But, he wonders, with Hezbollah forces so close, residents might never feel safe there again.
“I loved living in Metulla,” said Ari Singer, who was evacuated from Metulla with his girlfriend, Shoham Shlomi, a student at Tel Hai College. “But since October 7, I think about what could have happened if Hezbollah fighters had infiltrated the border or come in through tunnels, like Hamas did in the South. It would have been even worse here because there’s only one road into town, and it would have been completely closed off.”
Even before October 7, Hezbollah terrorists would shine laser lights at people in Metulla at night, Singer said. “Whether it was a sniper, someone trying to blind you while you’re driving, or just trying to intimidate you, it was very distressing.”
He would love to move back to Metulla “because it’s the most beautiful place in Israel,” but only if Hezbollah is pushed north of the Litani.
AT THE outbreak of the war, Galilee Medical Center General Director Prof. Masad Barhoum instructed the hospital’s medical teams to move critical departments, followed by other in-patient wards, to the protected underground complex.
In addition, the medical center outfitted a second trauma room in the emergency department to treat trauma patients wounded on the northern front.
“We are maintaining a very high level of preparedness in order to respond appropriately to a significant escalation on the northern border,” said Dr. Tsvi Sheleg, deputy director.
There’s traffic, shoppers, and people sitting in cafés along the main boulevard in Nahariya. But Shoshana Varga, a lifetime resident, said “everyone is tense and alert.”
“The war has started, even though it hasn’t started officially,” said Varga.
She works as a caretaker in the home of Bina Markowitz, 91, who has difficulty walking. When sirens went off at the start of the war, she and Markowitz had to take shelter in the stairway of the apartment building since they didn’t have enough time to reach the ground-floor bomb shelter.
“We left Nahariya in 2006 because we didn’t want to be in a bomb shelter 24 hours a day,” Varga said. “And that was only one month. This war is going to be worse.”
According to a Nahariya City Hall spokesman, the municipal administration holds meetings early each morning in conjunction with the army and security forces, and then administrators decide on the schedule for the city’s schools.
Shops and businesses remain open, the spokesman said, but they close earlier than usual.“The streets are empty in the evening,” Varga said.
Yet after work is the only time that landscape designer Fikri Yihie can go to the gym at the country club in Kibbutz Evron, near his village of Mazra’a.
“I work out so I don’t think too much about the war, the hostages, and all the people who were killed,” Yihie said. He doesn’t let his eight-year-old son watch the news on television for that reason.
“I don’t want him to see all this,” he said. “I want him to just be a child and play with his friends.”