The most tense day on Israel's border with Lebanon: “It is strange to know that a war will start, but 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, 14 kilometers from the border with Lebanon, making conversation difficult.

They are the fighter-bombers, reconnaissance planes and drones that fly over this Galilee town of about 39,000 inhabitants a day after a rocket launched from Lebanon killed a soldier and injured eight others at the Northern Command military base located next door. entrance.

Between Wednesday and Thursday, Israel responded with dozens of bombings that killed 13 people.

“I like to hear them.

It reminds me that we have airplanes,” Keren Hodaya Alon, 52, says with a smile, at the

kosher

wine cellar that she runs with her husband.

Alon talks to the journalist partly because he doesn't have much else to do.

A group of 25 people had a visit booked, but canceled due to the rockets the day before.

She and her husband, dressed as religious nationalists, keep the winery 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 rear.

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 and forever.

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 prohibited from being cruel to protect our land,” she assures.

If I lived a few miles further north, I would probably tell it from a hotel on the Dead Sea, 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.

As daily border skirmishes began, Israel emptied them to form a sort of buffer zone.

The same is true for Lebanon, which has displaced 100,000 people in the face of the most frequent and lethal Israeli bombings (which have left some 200 dead).

It is a measured give and take that in other circumstances would have led to open war a long time ago, but it does not end up doing so, leaving a bittersweet taste on both sides of the border.

On the surrounding roads, volunteers in

food trucks

give away hamburgers and drinks to the tens of thousands of soldiers deployed.

The further north you go, the more movement of military vehicles.

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah often boasts of having, using only a small fraction of his firepower, so many people in uniform (many of them reservists) hanging on the border.

And 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 themselves from internal criticism for not going all out in defense of their “Palestinian brothers” when the deaths in Gaza are approaching 29,000.

Keren Hodaya Alon, with her eldest son, Yoshua, in her winery in the Israeli city of Safed, this Thursday.Antonio Pita

Soon you may not have to listen to any more criticism.

Not since October 7, when the Hamas attack sparked war in Gaza, have Israel and Hezbollah come so close to open war.

The Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, issued a forceful threat this Thursday: “Hezbollah has risen half a step and we have risen one.

It is one of the ten that we can upload.

The Air Force planes currently flying over Lebanese skies have much more powerful bombs for more distant targets.

We can attack not only 20 kilometers [from the border], but 50, in Beirut or anywhere else.

And act in Beirut as in Gaza […].

And, as the State and the Israeli military have demonstrated in recent months, when we say something it is because we really mean it.”

On Tuesday, the Israeli army killed nine Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad militants in Lebanon.

The next day, the barrage of rockets against Safed arrived, for which no armed group has yet claimed responsibility.

One fell, without causing injuries, next to the Ziv hospital.

The constant 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, the defense system against this type of projectiles.

It is the “half-step” that Gallant refers to.

It represented a qualitative leap because Safed is further from the border and Hezbollah knows that she has not been evacuated.

But not a whole step because they were not mostly against civilians, within the unwritten rules to gain muscle without generating an escalation that has no turning back.

The “whole notch” was raised by Israel this Wednesday and Thursday: dozens of bombings, also more 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

.

They have been the deadliest bombings since October 7.

The tension has been felt during the day in Israel.

In the evacuated Kiriat Shmona, the largest city in the area, alarms have sounded twice in ten minutes due to the launch of around twenty rockets, and a road has closed traffic to civilians.

Also in Safed.

“Do you see this square with tables?” asks Or Attias, a 29-year-old shop assistant in a pastry shop in the most visited part of the city.

“It's usually full of regular customers.

They are about 20 times less than what we had in September, which were mainly tourists from outside and inside, but they are 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.”

“It is,” she summarizes, “like a muted war.”

Doron Cohen in his jewelry store in the Israeli city of Safed, this Thursday. Antonio Pita

Safed is not just another city.

It receives 1.5 million tourists a year - today completely evaporated - for being one of the four great centers of Judaism (along with Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias) in current Israel and Palestine and being associated with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

For the Palestinians, however, it is one of the great examples of the Nakba, the flight or expulsion of two thirds (about 700,000) of those who lived in current Israel, today converted (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 cobblestone stairs that connect ancient synagogues, shops and art galleries with motifs linked to Kabbalah, is usually full, especially with American Jews whose trip is financed by a program.

Among the shops on the popular main street, only one blind can be seen raised.

“You caught me open by chance, I came to finish some pieces and I'm leaving,” says Doron Cohen in his jewelry store with motifs from Judaism and Kabbalah, such as the tree of life or the star of David.

“Of course I'm afraid.

How can I not have it?

Whoever tells you here that they don't have it, is lying.

It is not one army against another fighting on the battlefield.

They are rockets that can fall on us,” he says.

Cohen, 55 years old and with 10 children, says that in the early days of the war he always made sure his car tank was full of gasoline in case he had to leave quickly.

Not anymore.

He now resigns himself to removing pages from the calendar in what he defines as “a strange situation.”

“We live the same, but it is not the same.

Those who have jobs continue to go to work and the children continue to go to class.

You are waiting every day for the war to start.

You know that sooner or later it will happen, but not when,” he adds.

A street in the old city of Safed (Israel), this Thursday. Antonio Pita

In conversations, one year always ends up coming up: 2006, in which Israel and Hezbollah clashed for 34 days.

Many of today's frustrations have to do with then.

The confrontation ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese dead, mainly civilians, and 167 Israelis, mainly soldiers.

But above all with the feeling that Hezbollah had stood up to a militarily superior enemy.

Today it has more and better weapons and men, also seasoned in combat in Syria, where they fight in support of Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Therefore, people want a “final solution,” which in Israel usually means even more strength.

Shuki Ohana is the mayor.

He is not in City Hall, but in the humble headquarters of Likud, the right-wing party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with which he aspires to re-election in the municipal elections that Israel holds on the 27th, after postponing them on two occasions.

They were initially scheduled for October 31.

Safed is full of electoral posters with Ohana's face, with a more relaxed expression than the one with which he chains calls, meetings and interviews with the national media this Thursday.

“We are fully prepared for what happens.

We must provide a solution to the northern area.

What I expect from the army, the State and the Government is that they fix the situation.

There cannot be this trickle [of rockets].”

As?

“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

voluntarily.

“I also prefer that they not evacuate us, but we will have to see how events develop.”

The political solution to which Ohana refers is the one that countries like France and the United States are increasingly pushing against the clock.

There are several proposals, but they have in common to distance Hezbollah up to 10 kilometers from the border and reinforce resolution 1701 of the United Nations Security Council that ended the 2006 conflict and which both some and others fail 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 noted before issuing a warning: “If they increase the confrontation, we will do the same.”

It rains in Safed and, at times, it hails.

Yaffa Sahrur, 67, takes it philosophically on the porch of his house: “In 2006 it did rain rockets.

Now as long as what falls is rain…”

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