Hezbollah rockets force thousands to flee their homes near the Lebanese border… And if a second front opens, no one is quite sure Israel would be victorious, RICHARD PENDLEBURY reports

At the top of the ridge, fresh fingers of smoke rise against the brilliant blue sky. One in particular swells and grows as the flames at its base advance across the parched hills. The artillery is back at work. The Israeli-Lebanese border is on fire.

Since “Black Saturday,” when Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,300 Israelis and took more than 200 men, women and children hostage, the eyes of the world have been focused on southern Israel and the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Gaza, and many Israelis are surprised by the delay. But here on the northern border, there is a real danger of a much bigger conflagration if this daily battle with the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based Hezbollah group turns into all-out war.

I remember standing on a deserted boulevard in the nearby seaside town of Nahariya and watching an Israeli helicopter gunship hover off the coast as it fired missile after missile into Lebanon. That was seventeen years ago, when Israel and Hezbollah last went to war.

The months-long conflict, which saw thousands of Hezbollah rockets launched across the border with little effect, ended in a bloody stalemate that left Lebanese infrastructure and border towns in ruins and Israel more than a little shell-shocked by the resistance it encountered on the ground .

Since then, Hezbollah’s elite forces have been further hardened in Syria’s ongoing civil war. But perhaps the bigger threat to Israel now lies with the group’s arsenal of about 150,000 missiles, which according to sources here has vastly improved since 2006 in terms of precision, range and destructive power.

Where Hezbollah rockets once did little more than harass, they can now bring down targeted high-rise buildings in cities deep within enemy territory. It’s a real Blitz of the 21st century.

The two sides are currently exchanging grenades and anti-tank missiles. Settlements further inland have already been evacuated due to a possible Hezbollah intervention.

Israeli Defense Force (IDF) drones whine overhead, and some of the 300,000 newly mobilized Israeli reservists drive by in army Humvees, rather than the commuter hatchbacks they used just three weeks ago during rush hour in Tel Aviv drove.

This is a hotspot in every sense. If a second front were to open here, the forest fires could spread across the entire region. And no one is any longer completely certain that Israel will emerge victorious, as it has so often been in the past.

Thanks to the military and intelligence failure of October 7, the old, unshakable faith has disappeared. A word is used that was once foreign to the Israelis. That word is ‘fear’.

As we drove north, between banana and avocado plantations and the Mediterranean Sea, flocks of white pelicans flew overhead, beginning their winter migration to Africa.

Such an escape is beyond the reach of the roughly two million noncombatant Palestinians trapped in Gaza, where several thousand have reportedly already been killed in retaliatory Israeli airstrikes.

But around 200,000 Israeli citizens – out of a population of less than ten million – have managed to flee their homes and become refugees in their own country, following the massacres of Hamas and the growing threat of Hezbollah.

While hotels and private homes are open to them throughout Israel, nowhere is considered “safe” anymore.

The two sides are currently exchanging grenades and anti-tank missiles. Settlements further inland have already been evacuated due to a possible Hezbollah intervention

About 120 refugees – half of them children and mainly survivors of Hamas raids – are sheltering in the Garden Hotel in the northern port city of Haifa, about 40 kilometers from the Lebanese border.

Many of them are seriously traumatized. One family attended ten funerals in three weeks.

Noam is a 21-year-old boy from a moshav, or village, near the Gaza border. She is still in deep shock. “It started at six in the morning with sirens and we went to our bunker and locked ourselves in,” she said.

‘We found out via WhatsApp that the terrorists were in our village. I started getting messages from friends in the area begging for help, and I started to realize that we might not make it.”

Without any help from the IDF, the civilian security team from Noam’s village managed to hold the Hamas terrorists at bay for hours. But other nearby Jewish communities were overrun.

Noam’s younger sister has lost eight of her nine school friends, she says.

What will happen next? The answer is starting to become known. “I always trusted that the military could protect us,” Noam says. ‘But I don’t know anymore. I also don’t know how many people want to return to our moshav. Everything is destroyed there; it has ceased to exist.’

What about the bombing of the Gaza Strip?

Her expression hardens. ‘I know I can’t live next to those people anymore. It can’t go back to what it was.’

Vered is with a psychologist at the hotel when we arrive. As a single mother, she hid from Hamas in her home with her three children – Sarah, six, Orhai, two, and five-month-old Amit – for two nerve-wracking days.

The family lived next to the police station, three kilometers from the Gaza border.

When Vered comes out of her counseling session, she wants to tell her story.

“On Saturday morning we woke up to the sirens, I picked up my baby and went to the shelter,” she remembers.

“After a while, I went back home to get diapers, water, and some snacks. And then I heard the gunfire.”

She called the police, but no one answered. The police were already fighting – without success – for their own lives.

“We stayed where we were and I could hear the battle raging,” Vered continues. ‘But on Sunday morning we had no water and electricity, and then the police station fell into the hands of Hamas.

Where once Hezbollah rockets did little more than harass, they can now bring down targeted high-rise buildings in cities deep within enemy territory

‘The terrorists started working from door to door, they were in my backyard. They knocked on my door. I was very scared and we had to stay very, very still and calm to survive.’

How did she do that?

‘I kept giving my kids snacks and letting them watch cartoons on my phone with no sound. Endless milk for Amit, so no arguments that could lead to our discovery.

‘I had serious fears. I struggled to function – even as a mother – but no help came. I felt abandoned.’

What now? Same answer.

‘I will never go back. Hamas is like the Nazi Holocaust stories. But it happened at my house. Now I have to function as a mother during the day. But at night it all comes back to me. It’s hard to deal with.’

Shani Adi is the daughter of the hotel owner. Before October 7, she was a website designer in Tel Aviv. Now she coordinates the care of the hotel’s refugees.

“They came in buses – just with the clothes they were wearing – rich and poor, all in the same condition,” she remembers.

‘The first day here was chaos. We tried to calm them down and, as if what had already happened to them wasn’t enough, we sounded rocket sirens warning of Hezbollah. I’ve never heard children cry like that before. Israel is suffering.”

I ask her how she is doing.

“I’m scared, just like everyone else here,” she says. ‘We have water stored at home. My fiancée is in the army in the Gaza Strip.’

She pauses for a moment to keep her composure. “We are in a crazy situation with the enemy all around us. Sorry, if I talk (more), I cry. There is so much hatred against Jews on social media. Haifa will not be safe if Hezbollah joins the war.”

The Lebanese border is just over 32 kilometers away. Armed soldiers patrol the hotel 24 hours a day, not because the military thinks it will be attacked, but to reassure survivors who felt they had been abandoned by them on October 7.

Haifa’s main hospital has just opened three underground floors to better protect patients from a Hezbollah blitz.

For some Israelis, the events of Black Saturday have brought back terrible memories from what seemed like a distant past. We are invited to afternoon tea by Maya and Zvy, a remarkable couple living in a small town near Nazareth.

Zvy was born in Barcelona to Russian parents and emigrated here in 1944.

Maya, 91, was born in France, where she, her mother and three brothers lived when the German occupation began.

As Jews they had to wear yellow stars. Worse was to come.

In 1941, a friend of her mother offered to take one of the children to the relative safety of the Vichy zone, which was not then occupied by the Nazis.

Her mother chose nine-year-old Maya, who spent the rest of the war in the countryside pretending to be a Christian child.

It saved her life.

Back in Paris, her mother and three brothers were arrested by the Germans and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were murdered.

Maya shows me their photos on the wall of her house.

“What happened on October 7 reminds me of what I experienced, but it is even more terrible because I was a child at the time and did not fully understand what was happening or the depths of the Germans’ brutality,” she says.

“I never felt the fear that people felt three weeks ago. I always thought my mother and brothers would come back to me.’

Maya is a former kibbutznik who has always followed the politics of the left and believed in coexistence. She has many Arab friends.

“But I didn’t know there was such hatred as I saw this month.”

When we leave it is dusk. Birds sing in the olive trees, there is a full moon with Mount Carmel in a beautiful silhouette.

Maya and Zvy embodied love and kindness. It’s hard to believe that a brutal war is being fought not far away.