The most tense day on Israel’s border with Lebanon: ‘You know that sooner or later war will start, just not when’

It is the most tense day in four months on Israel’s northern border, and a background noise dominates the city of Safed, just under nine miles (14 km) from the border with Lebanon, making conversation difficult. This is due to the fighter-bombers, reconnaissance planes and drones that are flying over this town of some 39,000 inhabitants in the Galilee region a day after a rocket launched from Lebanon killed a soldier and injured eight others at the Northern Command military base located nearby. Between Wednesday and Thursday, Israel responded with dozens of airstrikes that killed 13 people. “I like to hear them. It reminds me that we have airplanes,” says Keren Hodaya Alon, 52, with a smile at the kosher wine cellar she runs with her husband.

Alon talks to the journalist partly because she doesn’t have much else to do. A group of 25 people had booked a visit, but they canceled due to the rain of rockets the day before. She and her husband, who are dressed as religious nationalists, keep the business open “out of ideology,” she explains. “Just as soldiers sacrifice their lives for the people of Israel, the least we can do is preserve a certain routine in the rearguard. Even if we only sell one bottle a day,” she says. To put an end to the drip of projectiles, she proposes acting in Lebanon as in Gaza: “We need a tough war. One that is the definitive one. We are in the Middle East and we have to speak the language of the Middle East. Play with those rules and show them that we are crazier than them. It seems that only we Israelis are not allowed to be cruel to protect our land,” she says.

If this couple lived a few miles further north, they would probably be telling this story from a hotel on the Dead Sea, in Eilat or Jerusalem, where up to 80,000 Israelis from 28 towns a little closer to Lebanon remain evacuated since shortly after the war began. When daily border skirmishes began, Israel emptied this area to create a sort of buffer zone. The same is true for Lebanon, which has displaced 100,000 people to protect them against the increasingly frequent and lethal Israeli bombings (which have left some 200 people dead). It is a measured give and take that in other circumstances would have led to an open war a long time ago, but it has not yet done so, leaving a bittersweet taste on both sides of the border.

On the surrounding roads, volunteers give away hamburgers and drinks from food trucks to the tens of thousands of soldiers deployed in the area. The further north you go, the more movement of military vehicles you see. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah often boasts of having so many people in uniform (many of them reservists) watching the border despite having used only a small part of his firepower. And also of having forced a massive evacuation, with the psychological and economic damage that entails. “Otherwise, those soldiers would be in Gaza,” he said in one of his speeches. It is a way of shielding himself from internal criticism for not going all out in defense of their “Palestinian brothers” when the death toll in Gaza is approaching 29,000.

Soon he may not have to listen to any more criticism. Not since October 7, when the Hamas attack sparked the war in Gaza, had Israel and Hezbollah come so close to open war. Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, issued a forceful threat this Thursday: “Hezbollah went up half a step, while Israel went up a full one, but it’s one step out of ten. The Air Force planes flying currently in the skies of Lebanon have heavier bombs for more distant targets. We can attack not only at 20 kilometers [from the border], but also at 50 kilometers, and in Beirut and anywhere else,” said Gallant. “And act in Beirut as in Gaza […]. And as the State of Israel, the defense establishment, and the IDF have proven in recent months, when we say it we mean it.”

On Tuesday, the Israeli army killed nine Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad militants in Lebanon. The next day, there was a barrage of rockets against Safed, for which no armed group has yet claimed responsibility. One fell, without causing injuries, next to Ziv hospital. A steady rain has been filling the hole with mud. All the projectiles were apparently directed against unpopulated spaces or specific targets and, surprisingly, were not intercepted by the Iron Dome, Israel’s defense system against this type of projectiles.

That is the “half a step” that Gallant was alluding to. It represents a qualitative leap because Safed is further from the border and Hezbollah knows that it has not been evacuated. But it is not a whole step because the rockets were mostly not aimed at civilians, as part of the unwritten rules about flexing one’s muscles without generating an escalation that would have no turning back.

The “whole step” was taken by Israel on Wednesday and Thursday: dozens of bombings, deeper inside Lebanese territory, which have killed 13 people, 10 of them civilians. Two victims of selective assassinations have been identified as Ali Muhammad al Debes, a senior commander of Radwan, Hezbollah’s elite force, and Hassan Ibrahim Issa, his number two operative. These have been the deadliest bombings since October 7.

The tension has been felt in Israel. In the evacuated Kiriat Shmona, the largest city in the area, sirens went off twice in 10 minutes due to the launch of around 20 rockets, and a road was closed off to civilian traffic.

The tension was also palpable in Safed. “Do you see this square with tables?” asks Or Attias, a 29-year-old assistant in a pastry shop in the most visited part of the city. “It’s usually full of our regular customers. That’s about 20 times fewer customers than those we had in September, which were mainly foreign and domestic tourists, but they are the reason why we have continued opening. Yesterday it was also full, even when the rockets fell. But then [when hours later Israel reported the death of the soldier] they saw what had happened and today practically no one has come. This is like a muted war.”

Safed is not just another city. It receives 1.5 million tourists a year — completely gone these days — as it is one of the four great centers of Judaism (along with Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias) in modern-day Israel and Palestine, and associated with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. For the Palestinians, however, the city is one of the great examples of the Nakba, the flight or expulsion of two-thirds (about 700,000) of those who lived in modern-day Israel, today converted (along with their descendants) into millions of refugees. Among them is the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. His family fled Safed to Syria during the Nakba when he was a teenager.

The old city, full of alleys and cobbled stairs that connect ancient synagogues, shops and art galleries with motifs linked to Kabbalah, is usually full of people, especially Jewish Americans whose trip is funded by a program. Among the shops on the popular main street, only one storefront blind is raised. “You caught me by chance, I just came to finish up some pieces and I’m leaving again,” says Doron Cohen inside his jewelry store, which showcases motifs from Judaism and Kabbalah, such as the tree of life and the star of David. “Of course I’m scared. How can I not be? Whoever around here tells you that they’re not scared is lying. It is not one army against another army fighting on the battlefield. These are rockets that can fall on us,” he says.

Cohen, a 55-year-old father of 10, says that in the early days of the war he always made sure to have his car’s tank full of gasoline in case he had to leave quickly. Not anymore. Now he is resigned to removing pages from the calendar in what he defines as “a strange situation.” “We are living the same way, but it is not the same. Those who have jobs continue to go to work and the children continue to go to school. You are waiting every day for the war to start. You know that sooner or later it will happen, just not when,” he adds.

In conversation, one year always comes up: 2006, in which Israel and Hezbollah clashed for 34 days. Many of today’s frustrations have to do with that event. The confrontation ended with the death of over 1,000 Lebanese people, mainly civilians, and 167 Israelis, mainly soldiers. But above all with the feeling that Hezbollah had stood up to a militarily superior enemy. Today Hezbollah has more and better weapons, as well as men who have been seasoned in combat in Syria, in support of Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Therefore, people want a “definitive solution,” which in Israel usually means deploying even more strength.

Shuki Ohana is the mayor of Safed. He is not to be found in City Hall, however, but in the humble headquarters of Likud, the right-wing party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with which he hopes to get re-elected in the municipal elections that Israel will hold on the 27th, after postponing them twice. They were initially scheduled for October 31. Safed is full of campaign posters showing Ohana’s face with a more relaxed expression than the one he had on Thursday, as he handled back-to-back calls, meetings and interviews with the media. “We are fully prepared for whatever happens. We must provide a solution to the northern area. What I expect from the army, the state and the government is for them to fix the situation. There cannot be this trickle [of rockets].” But how to do that? “If the political solution is not successful, we have to go to a military one.” The mayor clarifies that evacuation “is not yet on the table” and that “very few” people have left the city of their own free will. “I would also prefer for the city not to be evacuated, but let’s see how events develop.”

The political solution to which Ohana is alluding is the one that countries like France and the United States are increasingly pushing for against the clock. There are several proposals on the table, but they all have in common the requirement to push Hezbollah up to 10 km (6.2 miles) from the border and reinforce Resolution 1701 of the United Nations Security Council that ended the 2006 conflict but which both sides have failed to comply with. In his speech on Tuesday, Nasrallah charged against the idea behind the proposals: “All the delegations that have come to Lebanon in the last four months have a single objective: the security of Israel, to protect Israel […]. When the attack on Gaza ends and there is a ceasefire, the fire from the south will also stop,” he said before issuing a warning: “If they increase the confrontation, we will do the same.”

It is raining in Safed, with the occasional hailstorm. Yaffa Sahrur, 67, takes it in stride on the porch of her house: “In 2006 it really rained down rockets. Now, as long as what falls is rain…”

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