The three anti-tank missiles that smashed into the council office were the last straw for Eitan Davidi.
The council leader in Margaliot, a small Israeli town near the border with Lebanon, which faces off against Hezbollah daily, cut off contact with Israel’s government and told the troops who had converted an empty red-roofed agricultural settlement into an army barracks that they had to leave.
Teetering on the edge of the UN armistice line with Lebanon, Margaliot has decided to fend for itself after nearly eight months of intensifying warfare with the Lebanese militia. “We are closing the settlement’s central command, and the settlement’s gates,” Davidi told reporters. “There is no entry or exit to the settlement, not to anyone — including the army.”
• Rafah latest: Israeli airstrike didn’t cross red line, says US
Margaliot’s dispute with the government dates back to an outbreak of bird flu two years ago, a financial loss they were never compensated for. Today, however, they accuse Israel’s government of keeping the north of the country in a state of flux during what appears likely to be a war with Lebanon.
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The heaviest fighting in almost two decades with the Shia Lebanese militants has dragged on for months amid growing warnings that attacks would intensify. On Friday, for example, Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, gave a televised speech in which he promised “more surprises” for Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
“Davidi says it will close to the army, but all this comes from frustration at the end of the day, we’ve been left out in the cold for eight months,” said Ofir Yehezkeli, deputy mayor of Kiryat Shmona, the city next door to Margaliot. “Hezbollah is taking advantage of the situation, playing a game of doorbell. They touch the line, then they run back without crossing it, and we do the same. But there’s a price for that, and we’re paying it.”
As the war in Gaza returns to the intensity seen in the early months of this year, Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, is following suit. In April, after Ramadan and the collapse of ceasefire negotiations, both Israel and Hezbollah struck deeper inside each other’s territory.
When Israel entered Rafah in early May, the anti-tank attacks on northern Israel turned into barrages of rockets. “You can see that the amount of attacks almost doubled in the last week. It was pretty stable for a long time at around 50 attacks every week, and now it’s around 90,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sarit Zehavi, who lives five miles from the border and runs a think tank focusing on Israel’s northern security.
“We see more damage now as well, because it’s the beginning of the summer. So every rocket that falls in an open area lights on fire. Of course, that goes both ways, you see this in Lebanon as well,” she said.
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More than 150,000 people have been driven from their homes on both sides of the border. Seven Israeli civilians and 15 soldiers have been killed along with about 300 fighters on the Lebanese side of the border, mostly Hezbollah but also Palestinian militants who operate there with the consent of the Lebanese militia.
Earlier this month, days before Israeli tanks advanced into Rafah, Israel’s chief of staff warned that the country was preparing for an offensive in the north. “You are doing an excellent job of operational defence in the north, and we are preparing for an offensive in the north,” Herzi Halevi told a reservist brigade at an undisclosed location near the border.
But some of Israel’s reservists are unconvinced, accusing Israel of stalling in Gaza and putting off what they see as an inevitable confrontation with Lebanon.
“The dallying in Gaza has been inexcusable. They pulled most of the army out months ago, before the job was done. They should have finished their activities there, and then left some soldiers to mop up — something that will take months if not years — and then send the rest to Lebanon,” a reservist sniper, who asked to remain anonymous, said before he headed back on duty next week.
“It will only happen when Netanyahu finds the chutzpah. But the man is incapable of making hard decisions. We should have gone into Lebanon a long time ago,” the soldier said.
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Netanyahu visited reconnaissance fighters on the border on Tuesday, promising once again to return residents to their homes.
He said: “This commitment is one of the objectives of the war and we are not conceding it… I would tell the citizens of Israel: This is the Iron Wall of the state.”
Israel’s army has been demonstrating its readiness for war, conducting exercises that simulate ground operations of an invasion of southern Lebanon — an area Israeli forces left in 2000 after almost two decades of war — such as practising “movement in complex terrain, advancement along mountainous routes, the activation of multi-faceted fire and combat in a built-up, urban area,” according to a military press release.
But it cannot act on it without the approval of the government, which on Monday released a long-awaited billion-dollar plan to rebuild and develop the north, without providing an action plan.
The war cabinet minister and opposition leader Benny Gantz has threatened to leave the government next week and return to the opposition if residents were not returned to their homes “by September 1”, the start of the school year.
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A commander of Israel’s northern front said that the evacuated civilians must return home, whether a diplomatic solution comes before or after all-out war with Hezbollah.
“I have to bring a strategic goal and that will create a security reality that will enable the return of the northern civilians’ home. Whether the diplomatic solution comes before a war or after a war is a decision not to be made by the IDF but by the political echelon,” said the commander. “We’re ready for it. The IDF has spent months preparing for the expansion of the war in the north in every sense of the word, preparing more targets, preparing an operational plan that fits, and preparing our troops on the ground.”
The commander added: “The hourglass is ticking. You have over 53,000 civilians not in their homes because of an Iranian proxy standing on our borders looking to harm us. We have no other choice.”
