Reporter's Notebook: Israel’s coastal region under 11 months of war

The rolling hills along the coast of northern Israel are a mix of normalcy and wartime strictures, where the mountains and hills of the Galilee spill out to the Mediterranean Sea. From the top of the hills, one can see all the way to Rosh Hanikra on the border with Lebanon, and down to Mount Carmel and Haifa, where the bay becomes a long arc that spreads to Acre.

Along this coastline, the Mateh Asher Regional Council takes up almost 50 km. from the Lebanese border to areas near Haifa’s bayside suburbs. This council oversees 32 communities, most of them Jewish, in the rural and suburban areas outside of the cities. However, the council is under the same threat as the areas that it adjoins such as Nahariya, or the Druze and Arab villages that are just to the east on the line of hills that form a kind of rampart overlooking the plains near Acre.

On Thursday, this area came under attack by barrages of Hezbollah rockets. Some fell among trees and hills between Ya’ara and Matzuva, two small communities situated less than a kilometer from the Lebanese border.

As the rockets fell, the Director of Security and Emergency Services, Ishai Efroni, was speaking in a room dedicated to securing this area in the regional council building. The building has become essential during the conflict; it is here so that he can coordinate efforts when rockets fall.

This is a microcosm of the challenges facing northern Israel and all the communities within 20 miles of the border. While Israel evacuated some communities in October, some remain. Hezbollah has increased its attacks and their range in recent weeks.

That means that rockets fall in areas that are not evacuated; it means that drones are a constant threat. 

Efroni detailed the scale of the challenges his regional council faces. Eight communities within the council area were evacuated in October with 34,000 civilians in total. “We have 21 schools and 100 kindergartens and we evacuated eight- to-10,000 people from near the border. We created new schools for the evacuates,” he says. Some 1,000 students were evacuated. This is just some of the 60,000 Israelis who remain evacuated from the North and some 14,000 students who started this school year away from home. They are now facing a second academic year in this situation.

Mateh Asher Regional Council head Moshe Davidovitz said, “The residents of the North are living under constant fire. If, at first, we were forced to grow accustomed to rockets on evacuated towns, it has now become a daily occurrence, targeting a civilian population that is not evacuated – and throughout the entire North in general. If this isn’t ‘normalizing’ the situation, then what is? People are saved from death every day here by sheer luck. How much longer can this continue? Where is the government?”

The complexities of running a council in the North

The issues facing this council are multi-layered. Families fear for their children who attend school in areas where rockets are fired. Even though schools have protected areas, people still will run to pick kids up early if there are attacks, which occur approximately every few days. Many areas lack enough protection. 

For instance, there are areas on the border that lack sufficient bomb shelters. Efroni detailed the challenges that homeowners and individuals face when they want to add a safe room or purchase one off-the-shelf to put near their house. He estimated that these safe rooms cost around NIS 100,000, but they can vary depending on how they are constructed and where they have to be placed. If you are in a hilly area, you’d need to flatten an area to set them up. It seems that businesses have mushroomed in this sector to provide safe rooms and other types of security equipment to fill the gaps that are needed. Israel has invested in this, but so have foreign donors.

The threats facing this area are clear. While I was speaking to Efroni, there were rockets fired from Lebanon and sirens sounded in a dozen communities. The sirens send people to shelters and then it’s important to coordinate to see where the rockets fell, if anyone is injured, and to put out any fires. Within 10 minutes or so, small plumes of smoke appeared near Ya’ara and Avdon, the forests alight.

Here, there is both a sense of urgency and one of routine. A sense that the routine of securing the area has become a well-oiled machine with dedicated professionals who know their jobs; the product of 11 months of war. Efroni said that it is important not to put people in a panic, that they don’t feel so much like they are in a war zone. 

In Hurfeish, a Druze town in the Galilee that I visited later in the day, the new concrete migunit that have been put on the main streets are painted in the colors of fields and clouds; one of them has an Israeli and Druze flag on it. The protected shelters that were put in these areas earlier in the war are usually all white.

Efroni said his regional council needs more than 200 additional miguniyot, 500 safe rooms for communities very close to the border, and another 500 or more for communities further from Lebanon. These are the current areas of conflict: the conflict zone is about seven km. from the border, while the evacuated area is 3.5 km. from the border.

Additionally, not everyone who was supposed to evacuate has left; some have returned, sometimes whole families. The Bedouin Arab village of Arab al-Aramshe, located on the border, also did not evacuate; 1,700 people continued to cling to their land. Many Jewish communities did evacuate, but security teams made up of IDF reservists have remained.

Efroni hoped that he would get more safe rooms and shelters in the coming months. So far, he said gets a few shelters per month. They come in bits and are used to secure schools. The region is also focused on little things, like making sure communities can pick the weeds and clean up the areas that made them feel abandoned, to make things seem normal and not forlorn.

The goal is to bring the residents back eventually. The fear of a Hezbollah invasion, as was the case back in October 2023, has now passed – today it is the rocket, drone, and missile threat.

However, people want to see Hezbollah removed from the border. They don’t want the situation as existed before October 7, when Hezbollah sat on the border openly and arrogantly walking back and forth looking into Israeli communities. 

What is required now is a long-term plan for this area and a solution that brings people back. Efroni spoke passionately, all while juggling calls from first responders. He knows the challenges here intimately, having served in the Second Lebanon War and living in one of the evacuated communities. His spotlight on this regional council and its challenges are part of the larger story of northern Israel under the cloud of Hezbollah’s threats.