’Hezbollah knows 45% of families in my border community lack shelters’
Residents in Shlomi have about 10 seconds to find shelter should there be an alert, Naaman explained.
By TOVAH LAZAROFFHEZBOLLAH FLAGS flutter along an empty street, at the entrance of Mays Al-Jabal village(photo credit: SETH J. FRANTZMAN)
The moment Shlomi Council head Gabi Naaman received an alert on Monday around 3:41 p.m. of a security incident on Mount Dov, he ordered the 2,200 families in his community to head to home with a heavy heart, knowing that 45% of them lacked such safe rooms in their houses.“Hezbollah knows this,” Naaman told The Jerusalem Post. If Hezbollah was looking for a vulnerable spot on which to fire its missiles, his community would be a likely target, he added.“If war breaks out, there will be hundreds of missiles here within hours,” he added.Residents in Shlomi have about 10 seconds to find shelter should there be an alert, Naaman said.Shlomi is located very close to Israel’s northern border and, as such, is within close range of any Hezbollah missile attack.“Israel’s northern border is Shlomi,” Naaman said. He said he planned to write a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz on Tuesday, asking for help to construct safe rooms in people’s homes.One homebound disabled resident called him to ask, “What should I do?” Naaman told the Post. “I told him to find a southern wall [in his home] and to pray,” he said, adding that it was the best he had to offer.During the past decade, Israel invested all its resources – and rightly so – in its southern border to protect the residents there from Gaza missiles, Naaman said.“Now the time has come to invest in the North,” he said.A government project to construct shelters in the North could also be a vehicle to lower unemployment rates and help the economy, which has been hard hit by the COVID-19 crisis, he added.
On Monday afternoon, Naaman was in the middle of a work meeting in his office when he received the security alert. He was not totally surprised because the IDF told him last week that it was expecting an incident along the northern border.Naaman immediately opened up the 70 public shelters in his community. He then sent orders to the programs in the schools and the nurseries to send the children home. With respect to the factories, he asked that workers be kept in the buildings until the danger had passed.He received an “all clear” within an hour.But Naaman knows this could only be a temporary resolution, even though he feels that between COVID-19 and the economic crisis in Lebanon, it is unlikely Hezbollah wants an all-out war.It only takes one mishap, and “one can go from calm to war in a matter of seconds,” Naaman said.
