'We are on our own': Israel's northern residents on their hopes and fears after the ceasefire

Two days after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect, Kiryat Shmona was still a ghost town. Shops were shuttered. A high-rise apartment building in the center looked abandoned.

Unmanned military vehicles were scattered around Israel’s northernmost city, situated just 5 km. south and 2 km. east of the border with Lebanon. Before the evacuation, it was home to some 20,000 residents. Now, only the faint buzz of drones swirling high above filled the eerily quiet streets.

On October 8, 2023, the Islamist terrorist organization began launching rockets and artillery at border communities in the North, displacing more than 96,000 Israelis living within firing range. In Kiryat Shmona, dozens of family homes were directly hit and over 1,000 more damaged. Schools, kindergartens, and the central bus station were also struck.

Hezbollah framed the attacks as an act of solidarity with Hamas, who led an assault in the South of Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and abducting 250 to Gaza. According to the IDF, Hezbollah had planned to unleash similar carnage in the North. Israel responded with drone strikes and artillery fire, preventing further attacks but also displacing more than a million Lebanese and killing at least 3,768, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not differentiate between Hezbollah terrorists and civilians.

For 14 months, an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza was Hezbollah’s condition for ceasing its attacks, which have claimed the lives of 45 civilians in Israel’s North. But after the IDF decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership in September and launched a ground invasion in October, the terrorist organization softened its demands, and a 60-day ceasefire was brokered, with the war in Gaza far from over.

At least in Gonen, prewar population 372, a kibbutz on the northern border just outside the pre-ceasefire evacuation zone, life is slowly returning to normal. Past the yellow gate protected by a lone, armed guard, past the burned-out Syrian tank from the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Ayelet Lev, 50, was sitting at home in her kitchen, looking out the window at the backdrop of the Lebanese mountains. “This view is one of the reasons I love living here,” she says triumphantly.

Casualties of war 

AFTER OCTOBER 7, her family evacuated to the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee). Lev called her dog’s name, Louis, and a one-eyed terrier jumps onto her lap. “We say he’s the first war casualty in this family,” she jests. He was attacked by another dog after the relocation.

Lev, her husband and four kids lasted a month at the Kinneret before moving back to Gonen. “I said, we’re staying, I don’t care,” Lev recalls. “I will never leave here, even if more rockets fall. It’s my house and I love it,” she adds defiantly. And then the tears started. “People who stayed here really felt the war” – the sirens, rocket barrages, explosions, and hours spent in safe rooms.

When asked about the recent ceasefire, Lev took a deep breath. “It’s complicated,” she says. “On the one hand, I want this war to stop, because every soldier who lost his life is one too many.” Her 18-year-old son is about to enlist. “I don’t want him to go there or to Gaza.” And her 12-year-old daughter has been left afraid by the constant barrage of rockets. But on the other hand, she says, many soldiers have told her that they want more time to finish what they started – referring to dismantling Hezbollah’s rich arsenal along the border. “You can never trust Hezbollah,” she says.

Yet for Lev, the worst thing about the past 14 months was not the rockets but the emptiness of the Galilee. “Everything is abandoned. Friends were evacuated to hotels and are still afraid to come back,” she says. Some are reluctant to take their children out of the new schools they have been relocated to, in order to move back. Her own decision to return was not out of bravery, Lev says, but because she cannot think of living anywhere else.

It’s not difficult to see why. Despite two military helicopters circling overhead and the occasional deep boom in the distance, even after the ceasefire, Gonen is an idyllic place. Vast swaths of green fields are crowned by mountain ridges. The air is fresh, the kibbutz community close-knit. It provides a sense of familiarity and, paradoxically, perhaps even security. Lev drives around it in a golf cart.

Before the war, Lev worked with people with special needs and trauma, assisting them in finding employment or starting businesses. But after a rocket fell on her office and her clients were evacuated, she was left without a job. Now, she volunteers, giving massages to soldiers stationed nearby. “I am so proud to be part of this community, this country,” she says. “Since the war, I have met such brave people.”

Lev is just one of many volunteering in the North. In Lahavot Habashan, a neighboring kibbutz, some 350 cooks set up an impromptu kitchen to feed up to 1,000 troops. Tables stacked with canned goods sit above crates filled with eggplants and bread. “I’m here for the good food,” grins one young soldier with a pita in his hand. “We don’t know if Hezbollah will hold the ceasefire, but we’re ready,” says another.

Liat, 55, seemed to be in charge of the operation. “They are away from home and I have to be a mother to them,” she says. But the money raised to fund the kitchen is drying up, Liat explains.

When asked whether military catering is not the responsibility of the government, her tone became noticeably irritated. “You want to talk about what the government should do? The government should bring the hostages home, but instead they are only thinking about themselves.”

Liat was particularly critical of Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife. “She is now claiming she is a victim of terror because protesters fired a flare near her house,” she says in disbelief. “I teach pottery, and one of my students is from Metulla, at the Lebanese border. She visited her house yesterday for the first time since the ceasefire, and it’s destroyed. She is broken. There’s nothing left. And Sara Netanyahu wants to be the victim here?”

It’s a frustration felt by many along the northern border. The fallout from October 7 has ushered in a new, ambivalent reality, one marked by equal parts hope and despair.

“Since the war, my bond to the region has become stronger,” says Nitzan Lavi, 38, sitting at home in the 700-strong community of Kfar Szold, a kibbutz just north of Lev’s home in Gonen, “but also my bond to being Israeli and being Jewish.”

Lavi’s father immigrated to Israel from Iraq. Now she works in hi-tech. And her generation was the one that began to forget just how fragile everything is, she says. “We thought we could live in London, in Berlin, anywhere, but since October 7, we have come to understand that this just isn’t the case.”

'We are on our own here'

But Kfar Szold is far from a safe haven. As Hamas and other terrorist groups stormed the Gaza border on October 7, Lavi wondered whether her community would be next. As the ensuing war began, Lavi, her partner and two boys sought safety elsewhere further south.

After a month, they returned home, along with many other kibbutzniks. Residents of Kfar Szold, just outside the evacuation zone, received no government help, Lavi criticizes. “We are on our own here.” For some, financial considerations played a role in their return, unable to sell their homes in the foreseeable future due to the war.

The community grew closer together as a result, Lavi explains, opening a local pub and distilling its own arak. The kibbutzniks also set up an education center, where volunteers teach kids. “We also celebrated Passover together as a kibbutz, for the first time in 20 or 30 years.” Lavi finds it heartwarming how her community has come together, during the hardest of times. “Maybe we’re finding our way back to what a kibbutz once was, to this feeling of solidarity,” she says.

After the ceasefire announcement, one of the first things Lavi and her partner did was to go for a walk with their dog along the nearby Banyas River, one of their favorite spots. It was a return to normality after so many months of sirens. But the 20 small concrete bunkers installed since October 7 and dotted around the kibbutz are a continuous reminder that this rural tranquility can be broken at any minute, in an area in which residents have just seconds to seek shelter after rocket fire.

“It wasn’t the feeling of relief that we were all hoping to have,” Lavi says of the recent ceasefire announcement, which her nine-year-old son, scared, had eagerly awaited. Lavi also remains skeptical of the UN peace keeping force UNIFIL, which had failed to prevent Hezbollah from rearming along the border, and which she says she does not trust. “There wasn’t a moment of celebration and excitement. It’s not over. It’s definitely not peace.”

The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, just days old, has already been broken several times. On Monday, the terrorist organization fired rockets at Mount Dov on the Golan Heights, citing Israeli breaches of the ceasefire. Israel, which responded on Monday with a wave of airstrikes throughout Lebanon directed at rocket launchers, says it had been targeting Hezbollah terrorists breaching the ceasefire themselves.

“From a security perspective, we highly appreciate the military achievements of the IDF in Lebanon,” says Sarit Zehavi, a reservist lieutenant colonel in the IDF and founder of the NGO Alma, which specializes in security policy on the northern border. “But we are afraid that these achievements will be eroded very quickly.”

Zehavi warns that Hezbollah will use the ceasefire to rearm and recover, eventually posing a similar threat as before. Zehavi, who herself lives just 9 kilometers from the Lebanese border, stresses the need for a complementary diplomatic agreement that ensures the Lebanese government truly has a new approach to Hezbollah, which operates as a highly armed shadow state within the country.

“But the main address here is not Beirut,” Zehavi adds, “but Tehran.” Hezbollah was established in the 1980s under the auspices of the mullah regime in Iran, which has provided it with ample funding ever since. “Only once Iran is no longer involved in Lebanon will there be more hope for peace in the region.”

Zehavi is at least happy that her daughter can finally return to her school after the ceasefire. “But especially those with children won’t return just yet,” she says, “at least not during the current school year,” which does not end until June 2025.

Yael Cohen and her family cannot imagine moving back to their home in Kibbutz Eilon, just 3 kilometers from the Lebanese border, at least not for the foreseeable future. Having grown up there, Cohen was well acquainted with the usual skirmishes along the border. But on October 7, 2023, she, her wife and nine-year-old son barricaded themselves in their bedroom, terrified that the scenes along the Gazan border could also be repeated in the North. The next morning, they were evacuated to Jerusalem.

“We were terrified, but we felt lucky,” Cohen, a 38-year-old volleyball coach, recalls. Lucky to have escaped, to have survived. After five months at her parents’ house, they relocated in March 2024 to the suburbs of Seattle in the US. “We feel good here,” she says via telephone. Her son had to start English from scratch, but quickly integrated at school.

As news of an impending ceasefire broke, Cohen did not take it seriously, she says. “And I still don’t.” Although some residents are now returning to Eilon, she no longer feels safe there. In Seattle, Cohen and her family sleep safe and sound, she says. “A bubble has burst, and it changes everything.” Even if she one day hopes to return.