Elad walks through the center of the city, a little hesitant, like someone venturing into water that is still too cold. “There is usually a lot of life here. But it has been empty for a year. And I got used to this silence”says the 39-year-old carpenter, exploring Kiryat Shmona on Wednesday, November 27, the first day of the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
City of 25,000 inhabitants located in the north of the Hebrew State, 2 kilometers from the Lebanese border, it is part of the area left by 60,000 Israelis, evacuated since October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah attacked Israel. “in solidarity with the Palestinians”after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas the day before, in the vicinity of Gaza.
Since then, Kiryat Shmona has not been abandoned, but lives in a kind of suspended time, waiting to be awakened by the return of its inhabitants. For fourteen months, Hezbollah fired rockets at a city that became militarized. Israeli soldiers remain in the city’s schools and park their vehicles in one of the main shopping centers.
Strongly built, with brown hair, Elad, who does not want to reveal his last name, lives in the kibbutz of Kfar Szold, a ten-minute drive away from the evacuated area; He came to recognize the effects of a rocket that fell the day before, in this neighborhood where his grandparents own an apartment. The projectile blew out some windows of the shopping center and left fragments in several buildings. Below, cars speed by on the main road, deserted and wet. In these first hours of the ceasefire there is no sign of the return of the evacuated residents.
The sound of gardening tools.
Elad came often, during these fourteen months of war, to see the state of the city. “I was going in, I was going out. But this time I stay a little longer. We will see if the ceasefire holds. But I don’t think you can improve much. It is not just Israel that decides. We are not alone in the region. I hope, in any case, that this is the beginning of a process that allows the return of the displaced.”Elad said with a half smile.
The rocket saved his grandparents’ apartment. Enter there for the first time in fourteen months. Everything’s fine. The electricity works. There were no leaks. It is as if the tenants He had left the accommodation the day before. Suddenly, on the other side of the ridge overlooking Kiryat Shmona, bursts of heavy machine guns resound. But that’s not enough to erase Elad’s half smile. The gusts stop and, soon, other noises take over, those of the tools of the gardeners who have come to prune the hedges and collect the leaves. Not with a view to a possible return, but as part of a regular interview, says Mohammed Higazi, a resident of Tamra, a nearby town where 35,000 Palestinians from Israel live. He simply wants the return of peace, and above all public order, within an Arab community devoured by endemic crime, which the Israeli authorities allow to flourish.
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