'Families need to feel safe to return': Northern Israel lies abandoned despite Hezbollah ceasefire

The rockets are no longer falling on Kibbutz Dafna, on the border with Lebanon, but people are still staying away

A bombed house in Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, which thousands of Israelis left more than a year ago. Thomas Helm / The National

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A week after Israel and Hezbollah struck a deal to end 14 months of fighting, the only booms heard on Kibbutz Dafna were controlled Israeli military detonations of unexploded ordinance.

The calm was the most striking difference since The National last visited the abandoned community, about 2km from Israel's northern border with Lebanon, just after the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023. Back then the explosions were fiercer, far more frequent and launched by both sides with the intention to kill. Jets were roaring overhead and surveillance drones buzzing.

Now, the only noise was from the nearby road, and even that was relatively quiet. Very few people were returning even though Hezbollah, a once ferocious enemy, has been decimated by Israel's military.

Over the border in Lebanon the scene would have been very different. Despite the Israeli military warning them not to do so, thousands of residents from the south of the country have returned to their homes, to find many no longer standing.

In northern Israel, the situation poses a major conundrum for the government. Some people, particularly those from the region, fear it never will recover. It is a devastating prospect for those who take pride in settling and farming Israel right up to the border, despite the heavy Hezbollah presence next door.

Kibbutz Dafna, which was established in 1939, was full of people like that. At the outbreak of war, with scenes from the October 7 attacks on southern Israel from Gaza fresh in their minds, most of these borderland Israelis made the difficult choice to take their families away, largely to government-funded hotels.

Head teacher Ravit Rosentaal, next to Kibbutz Dafna's school building that was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli air defence system. Thomas Helm / The National

A tiny number have remained throughout, mostly members of the kibbutz's local defence teams made up of residents with army training from mandatory military service. More recently, some community leaders and members with vital responsibilities, such as the farmers, have returned.

Barry Praag, a British-Israeli retiree, returned with his wife in July. “We felt safer here as a couple and weren’t afraid. Either stupid or not, I don’t know,” he said. “We’d had enough of travelling. We’d had enough of not being at home. We have kids and grandkids but nobody is here from our family.”

Mr Praag's situation reflects an important part of the problem for Israel's evacuated communities. The last groups expected to return are young families. They are vital if the northern border communities are going to sustain themselves into the future and maintain the foundational Zionist belief that without Jews either living or farming up to the border, the land is not really Israel.

“We had to show that we’re willing to come back here, that this place isn’t going to stay without people living here,” Mr Praag said, although he fully understands why families are staying away. “They don’t trust the government and they don’t trust [Hezbollah],” he added.

Destruction in Tyre, southern Lebanon. Reuters

A short drive away to a corner of the sprawling kibbutz, which is one of the largest in Israel, head teacher Ravit Rosentaal stood outside a school building that was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli air defence system during a July day of particularly heavy bombardment.

Authorities said the damage was so extensive that the building was unsafe for use, although it hardly matters because there are no plans for the 1,200 students and 130 staff, who normally come from all over the region, to return any time soon.

Most of the students eventually relocated to an industrial park further from the border. “It's not as beautiful and doesn’t have the grounds, grass and nature we’re used to, but at least it was one location most of us could return to as a school,” Ms Rosentaal said.

“We’re very eager to come back, and plan on doing so as soon as we possibly can. In order for that to happen the first thing people have to feel is security,” she added.

The evacuation is having a significant impact on the health of students and staff, according to Ms Rosentaal. She detects in her teenage students “a lot of phenomenons you used to see on the margins of the student body, [but] are now much more prevalent, including alcohol use and all kinds of anxiety”.

Like many northern residents, she thinks the Israeli government may have made the wrong decision when it evacuated the region. While the fear of Hezbollah invading after the Hamas incursion was intense, Israel could have handed the group a victory by essentially creating a depopulated buffer zone inside Israel, something lauded by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Magen Shenhav, orchard manager at Kibbutz Dafna, in an avocado field scorched during a Hezbollah rocket attack. Thomas Helm / The National

Dafna orchard manager Magen Shenhav is one of the many residents divided over the issue. His family are evacuated in Afula, but he had to return to Dafna to manage its farms, a vital source of income along with a slipper factory and a tourism industry that is now completely deprived of business.

Mr Shenhav stood in a scorched section of his avocado farm that was set ablaze during a Hezbollah rocket barrage. The kibbutz lost 40 dunams of land, incurring an estimated 3 million shekels in damage, about $830,000. He said it will take around seven years to get back to normal output.

He misses his family and is frustrated at the lack of communication from the government. “We haven’t heard from the government about plans to protect our work or come back. We hear rumours, but nothing concrete. We need to hear a plan and a schedule. They should have done the math before, not wait for the ceasefire and then start thinking.”

Despite his desire for his family to return, he has been personally affected by the dangers. A close colleague was killed six weeks ago while farming, along with four foreign workers, who are employed widely in Israel's agriculture industry.

“He came from a family of farmers. Me and him had a good connection. We would talk about avocados and oranges, all kinds of stuff,” Mr Shenhav said.

Every person at Kibbutz Dafna that day, exactly a week after the ceasefire with Hezbollah was struck, hoped for the return of their friends and family soon. Each of them also represented exactly why that prospect seems so distant.

None of them were under 40. Mr Praag returned with his wife because, as pensioners, they were tired of being away from home, but he was adamant his family with young children were right not to return for safety reasons. Ms Rosentaal, more than a year after the evacuation, still scrambling to provide services for a traumatised student cohort scattered across the country and the world, had not yet had time to tackle the gaping holes in her original school. Mr Shenhav, despite being a committed farmer, the career most associated with the kibbutz movement and early Zionism, knew most acutely of the pain borderland Israelis risk to maintain the ideals of the movement that kept Dafna going for so long. He was not willing to take that risk with his family.

They all feared that, despite the ceasefire, their beloved kibbutz that has endured so much is still at existential risk.