'Now Is the Time of the Sword': Israelis Brace for the Big War in the North

HANITA, Israel—It's been more than six months since Hamas terrorists rampaged through southern Israel, but here along the northern border, Oct. 7 never really ended.

On Oct. 8, Hezbollah picked up where its ally and fellow Iran-backed terror group left off, launching a barrage of rockets, missiles, and artillery shells at Israel from Lebanon. While Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza has enabled most of the some 130,000 Israelis who were evacuated from the south to return to their homes, nearly all of the 50,000 or so evacuees from the northern border area have remained displaced, according to government data obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The Biden administration has increasingly sought to restrain Israel's military response to Oct. 7, which the president has characterized as "over the top" and driven by rage. For war-weary Israelis, though, the crisis in the north has once again shown that their fight is much bigger than Gaza—and will not in there.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has vowed there will be no quiet in the north until Israel stops fighting in Gaza. Hamas leaders have similarly made ending the war a condition for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages who were taken on Oct. 7. At the same time, both groups, along with their patron Iran, have recommitted themselves to Israel's destruction.

"We need to get used to the fact that we will have to wage war on several fronts simultaneously because this is the Iranian strategy," Orna Mizrahi, the former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, told the Free Beacon. "The Americans don't want a regional war. Nobody wants war. But for most of Israel's political and military leadership, the question is not if but when we will need to wage a full-scale war in the north."

Top Israeli brass have said the Israel Defense Forces will, if necessary, finish the war to topple Hamas alone and forcefully remove Hezbollah from the northern border.

In the meantime, northerners wait. During a recent two-day trip across the length of the evacuation zone, which extends about three miles from the border and includes 43 communities, frustration and fear were the consensus.

Soldiers patrol Israel's Route 899. (Andrew Tobin)

"Why is there a tank in my neighbor's yard?" asked Yoram Yitzhaki, a 58-year-old businessman, in an interview at his house in Hanita, an evacuated kibbutz that overlooks both the Mediterranean Sea and Lebanon. "Why is the army hiding behind our backs?"

"We are not strong enough," added Yitzhaki, one of about 10,000 holdouts who refuse to evacuate the north, per the government data. "We like to say we are strong enough. But no, we are not strong enough."

Amit Alfer, 57, a former IDF reconnaissance officer turned shiatsu therapist, struggled to contain his anger over Israel's unprecedented abandonment of the north, a region his family helped settle in the years before Israel's founding. Alfer must pass through two IDF checkpoints and fill out a spreadsheet to visit his evacuated kibbutz, Rosh Hanikra. The road to his house is pockmarked with katyusha rocket blasts and tanks tracks. The coastline where he jogs and free-dives is clogged with trenches and barbed wire.

"All of this should be up there," Alfer told the Free Beacon, gesturing up the beach toward Lebanon. "Israel cannot protect us, the pioneering settlements in the north. They managed to protect the south, but here, they just told us, ‘Run! Run because we cannot protect you.’"

On the evening of Oct. 7, Alfer recalled, he received a phone call from an old army buddy, now a brigadier general, telling him to take his wife and children and leave. The friend, whom Alfer asked not be identified, said Hezbollah was poised to launch a long-planned Oct. 7-style attack of its own.

"Promise me now, you will leave and not come back for a month," the general said, according to Alfer.

Ofer Moskovich, 58, a farmer from Misgav Am, said that in the days after Oct. 7 IDF officials informed his community that Hamas planned to target them first in an invasion of Israel.

"Most of the people are afraid to go back now in this situation," Moskovich told the Free Beacon. "We're afraid of the tunnels."

Moskovich said he and his neighbors had in recent years heard drilling noises under their homes in the middle of the night. He said the IDF checked the kibbutz for underground tunnels from Lebanon—which Hezbollah has planned to use to attack Israel, according to military intelligence—but the residents never learned the results of the investigation.

The IDF did not provide comment.

Moskovich said he advised his three adult daughters not to come back to the north for at least a few years. He predicted that up to a quarter of northerners, particularly young families, would not immediately return.

But Moskovich has traveled into the evacuation zone nearly every weekday for the past month to work his avocado farm, and he said he would move home as soon as the government gave the go-ahead, preferably following an internationally backed diplomatic agreement with Hezbollah.

"We don't need any more wars," he said. "We don't need any more dead soldiers."

The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank at Tel Aviv University earlier this month found that 92 percent of Israeli Jews strongly support the war goal of toppling Hamas. But the public's views of the conflict in the north are more complicated. Sixty-eight percent want a more aggressive military campaign against Hezbollah—42 percent "even at the cost of regional war." Half would seek to limit the fight to Hezbollah.

"There's a desire to focus on the south and finish what we wanted to do with Hamas in Gaza," said Mizrahi, a senior researcher at the INSS. "Then, we can look to the north, maybe not now, maybe in a few months, maybe in a few years. It all depends on what will be with the Iranians."

Yitzhaki just hoped his wife—who relocated to a kibbutz near Haifa with his eldest daughter and visits him on the weekends—would soon feel safe enough to move back to Hanita. In the meantime, he was holding on to a plot of land he bought for his eldest daughter in the kibbutz.

"It's up to her, but of course I want her here," he said.

Alfer, on the other hand, said he could not keep his family in the north if Israel did not invade Lebanon to change the security situation. But he expressed confidence it would not come to that.

"We made a paradise here—a fragile paradise—and it will be again," he said. "But now is the time of the sword. So let's make it the time of the sword, in the south and north."

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