Kiryat Shmona, near the Israel-Lebanon border: Sitting in her living room chair as her cats nibble on pet food, Luba Gershenzon insists that Hezbollah does not scare her. The Iranian-backed militant group boasts an estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets, making it the world’s most formidable non-state army, according to many military experts. But Gershenzon refuses to let these “bandits” – as the Uzbeki-born grandmother calls them – force her out of her home in Israel’s northernmost city.

Life here, just two kilometres east of the Lebanese border, is eerily quiet now – except for the persistent boom of incoming and outgoing rocket fire. Hezbollah has been lobbing rockets at border towns like this over the past year in what the group describes as an act of solidarity with Hamas’ fight against Israel in Gaza. The vast majority of the city’s 25,000 residents, including its mayor, his wife and children, have scattered to safer locations in the country since the Israeli military announced an evacuation order last October. The fighting here has intensified in recent weeks, after Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and launched a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.

With the city’s businesses, schools and health clinics shuttered, only about 2000 people remain. Most are essential workers, but then there are those like Gershenzon. The diminutive, softly spoken pensioner, 66, projects no bravado, just quiet defiance. She migrated to Israel from Uzbekistan after the Soviet Union collapsed and the central Asian country became increasingly unfriendly for Jews. She loves life in Kiryat Shmona, where rent is affordable and the mountain air crisp.

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Officers from the Israel Defence Force, who regularly stop by to check on her welfare, have offered to help her evacuate to a government-funded hotel room. Instead of the front line, she could be riding out the war in a peaceful tourist hot spot like Tiberias, on the sea of Galilee, or Eilat, a resort town on the Red Sea. No thanks, she says.

Her daughter has also invited her to stay with her family in Tel Aviv. Again, the answer is no. She stays put with her pet cats for company, even though her bomb shelter is not up to modern standards, and the danger has heightened since the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defence system doesn’t necessarily protect citizens in the north, thanks to Hezbollah’s use of low-altitude anti-tank missiles, which are capable of avoiding detection.

“I want only to be at home,” Gershenzon shrugs when explaining why she refuses to abandon her government-funded apartment. What would it take to convince her to leave? “If a missile falls here on the house,” she responds matter-of-factly. Most days she only goes outside to take out the rubbish; her son and daughter deliver her groceries. Her favourite meal to cook: plov, a traditional Uzbek dish of rice, vegetables and meat.

With the war in Gaza consuming Israel and the world’s attention over the past year, the relatively low-level fighting in the country’s north went largely under the radar until recently. That changed last month when the Israeli government officially expanded its war objectives to include securing safe return of an estimated 70,000 evacuated residents who have fled their homes in northern Israel – alongside the destruction of Hamas and the return of remaining hostages from Gaza.

Just a few blocks down the road, it’s clear why Gershenzon’s children want her to evacuate her home. An Israeli reserve officer who guides us through the city shows us a house that was blown to bits by a direct Hezbollah rocket hit. The rocket struck a gas pipe, causing the house to incinerate. Charred pages from Russian-language novels lie strewn across the floor and the walls are black with soot. The house will have to be demolished.

The Israeli government has now declared it intolerable for its citizens in the north to live under the threat of such attacks. Gershenzon has no doubt about who will triumph. “Everything will be all right,” she says, a phrase she repeats like a mantra. “This is a small country, but a strong one.”

‘Welcome back, Israel’

When Liat Cohen Raviv woke up on October 7 and realised that southern Israel was under attack from Hamas terrorists, she texted friends in the south to invite them to join her family at their home in Metula, which abuts the border with Lebanon. The north, she thought, would be a safe haven. Within days the town had been evacuated.

“Looking back, you understand how naive you were,” she says, sipping a coffee at a cafe in Rosh Pina, a town 40 kilometres south of her home in Metula. She and her kids have spent most of the past year in temporary accommodation as they wait for the fighting to die down near the Lebanon border.

Metula is now being used as a staging point for ground incursions into Lebanon and has been deemed a closed military zone. This means only members of the Israeli military are allowed to enter the town, which is coming under intense bombardment from Hezbollah drones and missiles. Half of the town’s 620 homes have been damaged, and one in 10 are destroyed, estimates Raviv, a consultant and passionate advocate for Israel’s northern communities who helped manage the region’s evacuations.

While she says her town is too dangerous to live in, she thinks the Israeli government erred last October by offering to evacuate anyone living within five kilometres of the Lebanon border. “That was the biggest mistake the government has made over the past 12 months,” she says. She believes the mass evacuation has weakened the strength of Israel’s northern communities, which were enjoying an investment boom before the October 7 attacks. Many will now be too afraid to ever return to the area, she predicts.

“Part of the Zionist narrative is holding the land,” she says. “When people first came here, they were coming to a conflict zone; they weren’t coming to Switzerland. We’ve forgotten that.”

Like many Israelis, she delighted when the country pulled off its pager and walkie-talkie attacks against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and the assassination of Nasrallah. “My reaction was: welcome back, Israel,” she says. “This is who we are.”

The escalation of Israel’s fight against Hezbollah, she believes, is long overdue and necessary to ensure Hezbollah no longer poses a daily threat to Israel’s northern communities. “Hopefully, this war will be aggressive and short,” she says. “The world needs to say grace when these people are removed. They are mega villains.”

Hezbollah’s attacks have killed an estimated 26 Israeli civilians over the past year, as well as 22 Israeli soldiers and reservists, according to The Times of Israel. Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 2000 people in Lebanon over the past year, most in the past few weeks, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

At the nearby tables at the cafe in Rosh Pina, Israeli reservist soldiers in their 20s and 30s are enjoying coffee and pastries before heading north to the border. Just a few days ago, they were leading comfortable lives and working in white-collar jobs like tech and finance. Now they have been called to the front line.

“We want to tell the people here they can raise their kids like in a normal country and return to their homes,” a reservist who lives near Tel Aviv says, describing the north as “the most beautiful part of the country”. A fellow reservist says those who have fled their homes are “modern refugees” in their own land.

Their mission to repopulate northern Israel comes with risk. At least 11 Israeli soldiers have been killed during combat operations in Lebanon over the past week, while two soldiers serving in the north died in drone strikes launched by Hezbollah allies in Iraq.

‘They can’t ruin my life’

As we talk to the reservists, an air raid siren begins to wail, giving the cafe’s customers and staff about 30 seconds to run to a nearby bomb shelter. No one appears especially worried. This has become situation normal here over the past year.

Yoram Buchris says he can go one better than Luba Gershenzon. He says she would only leave her home if it was hit by a Hezbollah missile. The home he built for his family in Kiryat Shmona was hit by a Hezbollah rocket three weeks ago, piercing the roof and slicing through the wall next to his bedroom.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Buchris, 64, says while walking down a deserted street near his home. “They can’t ruin my life.”

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The boisterous construction worker, who fought in Lebanon with the Israeli military in the 1982 war, says he believes Hezbollah underestimated Israel’s willingness to respond to its cross-border attacks. “We are the lion and they are the ants,” he says proudly. “Why would an ant attack a lion?”

As well as pushing Hezbollah back from the northern border, he wants Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order airstrikes on oil fields in Iran, which plays a crucial role in funding Hezbollah and last week launched a blizzard of missile strikes on Israel.

“We are the chosen people,” he says of Israelis, evincing no mercy for those on the other side of the border. “They went too far this time.”

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