In the rolling hills around Nisan Zeevi’s home in Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz less than 2km from Israel’s border with Lebanon, the scars of cross-border fire between Israeli forces and the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah are visible everywhere.
To the east, in Kfar Yuval, the wall of a home struck by a Hizbollah missile yawns open. To the north, fields below the battered town of Metula are scorched black by fires caused by repeated missile salvos. To the west, on the hills above the kibbutz, smoke is rising from a wildfire caused by the latest strike.
The damage is the result of 10 months of hostilities that have taken a heavy toll on northern Israel, with incoming fire from Hizbollah damaging buildings, burning crops, closing businesses and proving deadly for soldiers and civilians alike. Standing in his back garden overlooking both Lebanon and Kfar Yuval, Zeevi has a direct view of the site where a mother and son were killed earlier this year when a missile hit.
The fighting has forced the largest evacuation of a region since Israel was founded more than 70 years ago. Until now, the hostilities have been mostly contained to the areas of northern Israel close to the border. But last week, a suspected Hizbollah rocket killed 12 youngsters on a football pitch in the occupied Golan Heights, sparking outrage in Israel. On Tuesday, Israel hit back, killing Fuad Shukr, a senior Hizbollah commander — who it said had been responsible for the attack — in a strike on Beirut, leaving diplomats scrambling to avert an all-out war.
Many residents now wonder whether they will be able to return to an area that, in nearly two decades of relative calm since the last full-blown war between Israel and Iran-backed Hizbollah, had been part of a push to attract start-ups and other businesses to Israel’s under-developed periphery.
“For the last 17 years we thought we lived in Tuscany,” said Zeevi. “But when missiles started shooting from Lebanon, all of a sudden we realised that with all due respect to the start-ups, the innovation, climate tech, food tech, agtech, we live in the fucking Middle East. And we had forgotten about this.”
Hizbollah began firing at northern Israel the day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in “solidarity” with the Palestinian militant group and to draw Israeli forces away from Gaza. Since then, Hizbollah and Israel have traded fire almost daily, displacing 60,000 people in northern Israel and 95,000 in southern Lebanon. More than 40 people have been killed in Israel in the fighting, and some 470 in Lebanon.
Even before the latest surge in tensions, Hizbollah’s strikes had become an unprecedented strategic challenge for Israel, with the “war of attrition” in the north testing public patience to breaking point and heaping pressure on the government to respond.
There are obvious risks to Israel from a full-blown escalation of hostilities with what is widely considered the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor. Between October and mid-July, Hizbollah deployed only a fraction of its vast arsenal, launching some 6,700 rockets and 340 drones at northern Israel, according to Israeli military data. Yet the impact has still been widespread and significant.
According to the Israeli prime minister’s office, Hizbollah rockets have ignited more than 710 wildfires, which have burnt through 105,000 dunams, or about 105 square kilometres, of land in areas stretching from the Upper Galilee to the Golan Heights.
The biggest disruption has taken place in the 5km band of land south of the border that the Israeli authorities evacuated in the early weeks of fighting, with communities including Kiryat Shmona, Shlomi, Metula, Shtula and Arab al-Aramshe particularly hard hit. Military bases in the region have also been heavily targeted.
Before the hostilities began, Kiryat Shmona was a city of about 24,000 people. Now it is a ghost town: traffic lights blink permanently orange; almost all businesses are closed; roads to the border are blocked by checkpoints. Locals say only 2,000 to 3,000 people remain — a mixture of essential workers and a small number of residents who refused to leave.
Ariel Frish, a security officer at the municipality, said Hizbollah had fired more than 700 projectiles at the city since October 8, including weapons it had not used in previous bouts of fighting, such as armed drones, Falaq 1 rockets, and anti-tank guided missiles. In total, there have been direct hits on 66 buildings, while 1,100 have suffered collateral damage such as shrapnel impacts.
While some of the border area is inaccessible, it is possible to estimate damage using satellite imagery. He Yin, a professor at Kent State University, has analysed infrared satellite images taken since October to map out tracts of land that appear to have been scorched by fires.
Radar imagery from satellites also makes it possible to pick out structures that have suffered damage extensive enough to change their shape as seen from above.
Corey Scher, a researcher at CUNY Graduate Center, who has previously drawn up estimates of the damage to buildings in Lebanon for the Financial Times, has made estimates for northern Israel that can be used to identify the scale and spread of destruction.
Such damage assessment techniques have limitations. The burn-mark analysis can be misled by some agricultural techniques — although the disruption to normal life caused by the conflict means it is unlikely to be significant in this case.
Comparing radar-detected building damage across the border between Israel and Lebanon is difficult because the different building codes, urban density and weapons used on either side of the line may mean the radar is better at picking up damage in some areas than others.
Scher said: “We will miss some damage — especially in areas with standalone structures intermixed with vegetation . . . and we might miss, for example, a structure that is burnt out, but stays standing with an intact metal roof.”
Sites visited by the FT in northern Israel exhibited a range of damage, including some that may have been missed by the radar. On one street, a 107mm artillery shell had punched a hole in the side of a house, before igniting a fire that had burnt everything inside and rendered it unlivable — but without causing a structural collapse visible from the air.
On another street, a heavy Burkan rocket had slammed into the ground in an empty lot, shredding trees, flattening the annex of a house and incinerating cars across the street.
At a kindergarten on Yekutiel Adam, another 107mm shell had left a roughly metre-wide crater in the playground at the foot of a slide and pockmarked the kindergarten itself with shrapnel. The strike took place on November 29, long after Kiryat Shmona had formally been evacuated. But Frish said it underscored Hizbollah’s broader strategy, which was to deter people from returning to the north.
“Hizbollah knew that there would be no-one in the in the kindergarten. But they knew that if you are a parent and you saw this you would never come back to this kindergarten,” he said.
“In Kiryat Shmona, Hizbollah is shooting to create fear and terror. That’s why they are using anti-tank missiles to hit the main road, even though there are no vehicles on it.” Frish argued: “For Hizbollah, there isn’t a bigger win than the current situation.”
Indeed, the past 10 months have already taken a heavy toll on the region’s businesses. Zeevi, who before the war was general manager of the innovation hub at the Margalit Startup City in Kiryat Shmona, estimated that about 30 per cent of start-ups in the eastern Galilee had closed since the start of the war.
“It’s so frustrating, because we built something tremendous. People came from all over the world to see how in a very rural area you can create an ecosystem that develops start-ups and creates high-salary jobs,” he said.
In the family-run Oved’s Kabab in Kiryat Shmona, one of only a handful of businesses still open in the city, Tomer Oved said the restaurant was now running on a volunteer basis to help provide food for emergency personnel and incoming soldiers.
“We don’t care about business — it’s gone down by 55 per cent [since the start of the war] — we view this as service, as giving of ourselves to the war effort.
“There are more important things,” he added, pointing to a picture on the fridge behind him of his cousin, Omri Miran, who was one of the 250 hostages seized from southern Israel by Hamas on October 7. He is still being held captive in Gaza.
The tens of thousands who did not stay in the north have spent the past 10 months in exile in hotels and relatives’ apartments across the country. As the war has dragged on, they have become increasingly frustrated at being unable to resume their lives and piled pressure on the government to take steps to allow them to return — even if that means fighting an all-out war with Hizbollah.
“Maybe in the beginning it was a good decision [to evacuate] because we all thought on October 7 that it would be a matter of minutes until [Hizbollah’s elite] Radwan forces crossed the border. But after a month, three months, it became a strategic mistake,” said Zeevi.
At the start, he said, residents had feared that the government would “normalise” the idea of living there under rocket fire. “Now we are afraid they will normalise the evacuation,” he said.
For now, most evacuees say the security situation remains too dangerous for them to return.
“The hotel isn’t our home. The mental health of people is deteriorating. Physically I’ve never been this sick,” said Edna Ohana, an evacuee now living with her children in the Leonardo hotel in Tiberias, where 70 per cent of people in the hotel are, like her, from Kiryat Shmona. “[But] with all due respect to Zionism, why should I take that risk [of returning]? I’ll only go back once I feel safe.”
A small number of evacuees have begun to return, however. Among them is Ravit Ben Ami, a social worker from HaGoshrim, a kibbutz 3km from the border. She left the community last year because there was no schooling available for her three children after the evacuation. But after months in exile, she felt she had to return with her children.
“I couldn’t work properly, I couldn’t be a mother properly. And I couldn’t be a spouse like I wanted to. Everything was taken away from me: my privacy, my joy, my patience,” she said. “And it started to show: on my kids, on how they behave, on how they react. It’s too high a price to pay.”
But she is doing so aware that life in the north will be very different from how it was before the war. She avoids the roads through Kiryat Shmona for fear of rockets. Most of her friends are not planning to come back. Earlier this week, a man in HaGoshrim was killed when a rocket hit the kibbutz.
At the gate of the picturesque kibbutz, now reinforced with sandbagged concrete firing positions manned by armed volunteer residents, Zohar Lipkin, a HaGoshrim native and retired army colonel, said that although the community was “strong”, some families would not return after the events of the past 10 months.
But those coming back would be prepared, she added.
“Others may come [in their place] but with their eyes wide open,” Lipkin said. “People who bought here didn’t realise [the reality of the situation] and then October 7 happened . . . the people who come back will know what they’re getting into.”
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