The Red Alert incoming rocket siren wailed again Monday afternoon shortly after 5 pm in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, but few residents were there to hear it.
Most have evacuated to areas around Tiberias; Mayor Avichai Stern says they still come to work each morning, but by 4 pm the city is a ghost town.
Kiryat Shmona is an 11-minute drive from Metula, Israel’s northernmost city. It’s about five and a half miles (11 kilometers), but it’s only a heartbeat away when it comes to rocket fire.
Hezbollah is winning the war of attrition in the Galilee: just ask the mayors of Kiryat Shmona and Metula.
On October 6, 2023, Stern led a city that was home to about 24,000 residents. Since October 8, 2023, just 2,000 residents remain in Kiryat Shmona.
In Metula, municipality head David Azulai was responsible for 1,800 residents living right on Israel’s border with Lebanon — but just a handful were left after October 8th, when the Hezbollah terrorist organization, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, joined the war launched against Israel the previous day by Iran’s proxy in Gaza, Hamas.
Most of Metula’s residents evacuated along with others along Israel’s northern border. The town is surrounded on three sides by Lebanon. But despite the pleas of the Beirut government hoping to avoid an all-out war, Hezbollah — which has created its own state-within-a-state south of the Litani River — appears to be calling the shots on both sides of the border. Israel has not yet begun to really wage war against Hezbollah, in deference to the ongoing pressure exerted by the United States and its international partners.
Meanwhile, Kiryat Shmona and Metula — along with other border communities — are staggering under the ceaseless daily rocket fire and explosive drones sent their way from Lebanon. Often, there is no warning.
“The system still has some limitations. That’s one of our frustrations. It’s one of the lessons we are learning from this experience as we go along. The system is not 100 percent,” IDF Home Front Command Colonel Dudu Peretz told JewishPress.com on Sunday in an on-site interview.
Some of the rockets trigger a Red Alert warning siren but many — far too many — other rockets and missiles manage to evade Israeli radar, striking the communities with no warning at all. In particular, shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and 107 mm missiles evade the radar most of the time.
“The range is very short. That’s another reason. The window within which to reach shelter is just 10 seconds, sometimes even less. But I can also show you places where the missile hit and the siren only activated after the impact,” Stern pointed out.
“Usually, it’s the 107 mm missiles – the small ones – that evade the radar. But sometimes they fire a combined barrage of larger rockets together with the smaller rockets and the combat drones, and at the end they succeed and cause damage,” he said.
Stern pointed to a relatively small hole on the outside wall of a home near city hall to explain the size of the “small” missile; inside, the home was completely destroyed and will have to be leveled and rebuilt.
Hezbollah-launched explosive drones target the city daily; rocket fire is a near-daily occurrence as well, Stern said.
“Unfortunately this happens almost every day, sometimes several times a day and sometimes in other areas in the northern sector, but every day there are explosive drones, there are anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). Every day there are three or four houses that are destroyed on average,” he told JewishPress.com.
Four hundred homes in the city have been directly struck. Of those, at least 60 have been totaled and must be razed and built anew — but that figure does not include shrapnel damage to windows and vehicles and infrastructure. “There are thousands of those,” Stern added.
The challenge faced by all the heads of northern Israeli communities is how to keep their communities going until help arrives: help, meaning funding for restoration and rehabilitation but first and foremost, defense. In this case, defense also means all-out war with Hezbollah to stop the war of attrition that is slowly killing Israeli sovereignty and all that implies, in the north.
It’s an uphill battle at best.
There are 24 towns in the region, including 14 that have been evacuated. Eight more have not been evacuated, but officials are now trying to decide whether to evacuate those towns as well, as the likelihood of a real war with Hezbollah looms closer.
Most of those who remain in Kiryat Shmona are municipal employees, or members of security teams or IDF personnel, but some are also city residents who simply won’t leave their homes.
“There are quite a few who refused to leave, who are long-time Zionists,” Stern told JewishPress.com. “But the general routine in the city involves thousands of evacuees who come every morning from around Tiberias to work during the day, and at 4 pm they all leave.
“If you come here at 4 pm, you’ll see absolutely nothing,” he said.
Many factories and other businesses likewise have moved their operations to areas where they don’t have to worry about having to protect their workers – and their businesses – from the daily rocket fire and combat drones raining down on Kiryat Shmona.
Some of the city residents and some from Metula have already found homes elsewhere, in “safer areas,” while others still living in government-funded hotels aren’t sure they’re coming back. Families with children worry about their children facing rocket fire during the school day, but every family now worries about facing rocket fire in the early morning, and at night.
Northern Israel is “in the process of a disengagement,” Azulai warned. “Those who do not understand what has happened here in the last 11 months, Benjamin Netanyahu and the government of Israel ‘disengaged’ from the Galilee – precisely what happened in [Gush Katif’.”
The Metula leader told the gathering that as a right-wing Israeli, he is deeply disappointed in what has happened to his town and those around it.
“We are completely cut off. And yet the government is a right-wing government, most Israelis are right-wing politically, and I cannot understand how, with this government – the most right-wing government in the history of the state — we have reached to this low point.
“There are no people here. There are no communities here. Our government does nothing,” Azulai said. “No one will return to this place, and certainly not if there is a diplomatic agreement. No one will come back!
“For a year, we have had no communities here. All of Metula is scattered throughout the country,” he lamented. “We need to stop talking and start taking action.”
Stern pointed to the government-funding fortifications in the south as an example of what could help his city and others in the north.
“Sderot is a perfect model, in my opinion,” Stern told Knesset members during a meeting on Sunday at his office. “All the schools in Sderot are fortified at this point. If there is a Red Alert siren while the children are in school, the students are told to go under the tables, and they don’t need to run anywhere.
“In the 10 seconds we have here, our students are racing the missiles; if their classes are on the third floor, for instance, they must run down three flights of stairs to reach the shelter in the building. And sometimes they don’t even have 10 seconds,” Stern said.
“We have 1,400 students in our biggest high school, a three-story building. What can a student in a third-floor classroom do within that ten second window? We have a bomb shelter in the basement. But can a student make that run in 10 seconds?” Stern said he understands why his residents are rethinking their options; but he wants to change that picture.
“Why aren’t our schools fortified like those in Sderot?”
