Displaced residents fear returning home amid concerns Israel’s agreement leaves them vulnerable and Hezbollah resurgent.
By Gabrielle Weiniger
(November 27, 2024 / Times of London) The reasons not to return are clear for Rachel Amar, an evacuee from the Israeli border town of Kiryat Shmona where, only hours before Binyamin Netanyahu announced the ceasefire in Lebanon, a Hezbollah rocket hit a bus station.
Sitting in one of Tel Aviv’s finest beachfront hotels as she weighed the news of Israel’s truce and the prospect of returning home, Amar had doubts. “What are we doing here? This agreement doesn’t give us security,” she said. “We are so close [to Lebanon]. I keep imagining October 7 will happen to us — it’s a matter of luck that it didn’t.”
Amar, 59, a hotel worker and single mother of three, is not alone in her concerns. Though many have welcomed a pause in the war that has claimed at least 73 Israeli troops, fears remain that Hezbollah will rise up again.
“I’m not going back even when they say we can,” she said. “We’ll have to have a weapon and a lock on our safe room and full security. I am alone with the children, so I’m afraid to go home.”
Israel and Hezbollah have until the end of January to pull back their fighters from southern Lebanon and fully implement the ceasefire agreement that came into effect Wednesday morning. During that time, residents of the border towns can, in theory, return to their homes.
But after 14 months under heavy fire, their villages and towns abandoned in ruins and turned military staging grounds, it’s not clear what is left for them to go back to and whether they will agree to go back at all.
Survivors of the October 7 attacks and many of those who evacuated the north and south of the country have been supported by the organization IsraAid. Yotam Polizer, the chief executive, said: “The anxiety, trauma of those who lost their loved ones, their homes — they have been refugees inside their own country with no idea when they’ll go back, if it will be safe again.”
A security source familiar with the agreement said it would be enforced “by force” to prevent another land incursion like October 7, when Hamas militants broke through the border fence and streamed into Israeli communities, massacring the residents.
Amar said that her brother, who lives in Metula on the northern border fence, would not be returning at all. Both their towns lay in ruins by Hezbollah rocket and missile fire. She blamed America for pressuring Israel to sign an agreement too early.
“Israel didn’t finish what they were supposed to do. It’s not Bibi’s fault,” she said, using Netanyahu’s popular nickname. “After his speech to the nation yesterday announcing the deal, I had faith. He had no other choice [than to sign the agreement], because America stops us from carrying on in Lebanon,” adding that she hoped Netanyahu was waiting for a change in the U.S. administration to “deal with Iran, enemy number one”.
While 68,500 people were evacuated from the north in the earliest days of war, with several thousand in hotels across the country, 11,000 residents chose to stay behind, according to the research group the Taub Centre. Israel Sabagi, a chicken farmer from the agricultural border community of Dovev, said he awoke to the news of a ceasefire with a heavy heart.
“Our soul has been damaged. Our community has been destroyed. My daughter, my eldest won’t come back to the moshav. It’s very, very, very hard,” he said, adding that he wished the government would buy them out so he could move away from the border.
“It’s not a ceasefire full stop. We should have carried on fighting, giving them our all, because now they’ll only come back again,” Sabagi said, referring to the return of the Lebanese militia to the border — a phenomenon that occurred in the decades after the 2006 Lebanon war, flying in the face of a UN agreement which ended hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel based on the creation of a buffer zone.
“Who is going to check when people from Lebanon are heading south? How will they know if it’s Hezbollah, or just a simple farmer? They’ll rebuild themselves overnight and come back for us. Our country did not do enough,” he said.
In a survey by the Israeli Channel 12, half of the public said the fighting ended without a clear victor, signaling an uncertainty about what the ceasefire meant and why it came about at this time.
“They’re [Hezbollah] already starting to come back. There’s no one to stop them. We don’t trust the Lebanese army to stop them. To sign that kind of agreement, it’s too fast. Of course we want to return to our lives, we’ve had enough, but we want to come back to security. This isn’t secure,” Sabagi said.
There is no known plan for the return of northern residents to their homes, where villages are ghost towns with no healthcare facilities, schools, grocery shops or basic civil services — nor any potential income, where much of the industry there was based on long gone tourism.
“I think they need to feel and decide when it’s safe for them to return. Each place is different,” an Israeli security official said. “It’s their decision. There are also a lot of government issues with their return, reconstruction and damage that happened because of Hezbollah. When they feel safe, they will come back home.”
Smoking a cigarette over her daily morning coffee and reading the newspaper, the former music teacher Yona, 80, said she’d be happy there would be no more air raid sirens from the north but that there was a huge question mark over the ceasefire.
“I want to see the north bloom. I want to know for sure, what is the fate of the residents returning home? What is the fate of those on the other side, the Lebanese civilians, if they return to live there? May they have a normal border. They all deserve Hezbollah not to be there anymore.”
This article was originally published in the Times of London and can be viewed here.