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Once a picturesque Israeli mountain resort with panoramic views into Lebanon, Metula is now off limits to civilians. Under fire for months from Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles, every other house has by now been damaged or lies in ruins. Over the past year of fighting, it has been one of the hardest-hit places in Israel.
More than a century old and a storied symbol of early pioneering Zionism, Metula, a pastoral border community and Israel’s northernmost town, juts upward like a finger into Lebanon, which surrounds it on three sides. The roughly 2,500 residents of Metula were officially evacuated a year ago, for the first time since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Now, even as Israeli ground forces pursue Hezbollah’s fighters in southern Lebanon, Metula’s future is in question.
Thirty percent of the evacuees do not intend to return, whatever the outcome of the war, according to the town’s mayor, David Azulai. Those who have gone for good, he says, include many of the families with young children.
“We call it an enclave — encircled to the north, east and west by Lebanon,” he said, adding that up to 90 percent of the houses were exposed, within direct line of sight from the Lebanese villages across the border. One of them, Kafr Kila, is less than a half-mile away as the crow flies.
“There are neighborhoods even we don’t go to,” he said, referring to the two dozen or so members of Metula’s armed civil response team who have stayed behind to guard the town, along with a couple of essential council workers and an influx of soldiers.
On a recent weekday in mid-October, less than two weeks after Israel began its invasion of southern Lebanon, the Israeli military allowed a small group of journalists access to Metula, inside what it has declared a closed military zone, for a rare glimpse of the damage and the challenges facing the town. Military officials accompanied the group most of the time but few restrictions were imposed.
Riding up the winding road to Metula from the mostly abandoned city of Kiryat Shmona, Mr. Azulai cautioned against fastening seatbelts to allow for a quicker exit in the event of a rocket attack. His assault rifle lay against a passenger seat.
Israel and Hezbollah, the heavily armed Lebanese Shiite group backed by Iran, last fought a war in 2006, which was followed by about 17 years of a mostly tense quiet along the frontier.
But residents of the Israeli border communities say they had long lived with a sense of foreboding.
They say they knew they were being watched, having seen people they suspected of being Hezbollah operatives coming up to the border fence and monitoring them. And for years, they had been complaining of strange digging sounds in the night. In 2018, the Israeli military said it had exposed several Hezbollah tunnels running under the border, including at least one leading to Metula from the village of Kafr Kila.
The fear of being overrun came into terrifying focus on Oct. 7 last year, with the Hamas-led assault against southern Israel that the Israeli authorities say killed about 1,200 people, and that prompted the war in Gaza. More than 42,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to health officials there.
On Oct. 8 of last year, in solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions, and then communities, setting off an exchange of cross-border rocket and missile fire and displacing tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border.
Breaking the equation, Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah last month, blowing up hundreds of pagers held by the group’s operatives before killing the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and other top commanders, then sending in ground forces on Sept. 30.
Israel’s stated war goals in Lebanon are to degrade Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, particularly in the area along the border, so that the 60,000 residents evacuated from northern Israel can safely return to their homes.
There is no telling how long that may take, whether through fighting or diplomacy. Since the ground invasion, rockets, mortar shells and drones launched from Hezbollah’s new lines farther north have largely replaced the rain of antitank missiles fired at Metula from the nearby Lebanese villages. The extra distance allows for an additional few seconds’ early warning time and more interceptions, the mayor said, but Israel’s air defense systems are not hermetic.
During the less than two-hour visit, incoming rocket alert sirens sounded twice in Metula, sending everyone running for cover. According to the military, Hezbollah fired at least 16 projectiles at Israel’s northern hill country during that period, and two failed launches landed in Lebanon.
Part of a rocket fired this month remained stuck in the smashed outer wall of a home that, according to Mr. Azulai, had already been hit twice by antitank missiles three and four months ago. Another rocket had crashed through the roof of another home four days before the visit, he said, leaving a gaping porthole in the kitchen ceiling.
The streets of the town were deserted. A yellow school bus stop and orange recycling bins were reminders of the old life there.
Asked what it will take to get at least some residents to return home, Mr. Azulai replied: removing the threat of antitank missile fire, neutralizing all of the tunnels in the area and eliminating all danger of infiltration.
Present-day Metula had its start in 1896, when about 60 families moved onto land purchased by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, a staunchly Zionist philanthropist, from a Lebanese landowner, displacing the Druse tenant farmers who were its previous inhabitants. At first, the town was considered part of Lebanon. In the 1920s, Metula was included within the boundaries of the British Mandate for Palestine, and later, Israel, though some of its farmland remained in Lebanon.
Its location has made it both a bridge and a target. Even before Israel’s previous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and during its subsequent 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, Metula was the main crossing point in the so-called Good Fence, the porous border that Lebanese civilians were permitted to cross daily to seek medical care or to work in Israel. Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s, with help from Iran, to fight that occupation, which ended in 2000.
Lior Bez, a member of the civil response team, is a third-generation farmer in Metula. His grandfather, from Russia, arrived in 1924 and became a local commander of the Notrim, a Jewish paramilitary police force set up by the British authorities in the 1930s to guard Jewish settlements, Mr. Bez said. His grandfather, he added, kept a weapons cache at home for the Haganah, the pre-state Zionist underground.
Mr. Bez’s family runs a heritage center and a bed-and-breakfast in the town. Deeply connected to the land, he said Metula before the war was an intimate community where “everyone knows everyone.”
His mother has been living all year in a hotel in Tiberias, an hour’s drive south. Other relatives are serving in combat units in Gaza and Lebanon.
“Finally, we feel a change,” he said, expressing a relief felt by many residents of northern Israel over the military action against Hezbollah. Like many there, he said he hoped Israel would “be strong enough to enforce the new reality across the border” — meaning the removal of the immediate threats from Hezbollah — even after the war.
In a small “war room” in Metula’s modest council building, staff members constantly monitor screens for signs of hostile activity in the Lebanese villages across the border, alerting the military when they see suspicious movements.
Video footage viewed in the war room showed four antitank missiles being fired within a minute from one of the villages, all hitting one abandoned house in Metula. The antitank missiles pierce the outer wall, then explode inside.
Homes that the mayor said were hit by heavier, Iranian-made Falaq rockets have had their roofs stripped down to skeleton-like rafters, with the blast causing damage to about 15 more houses nearby. On a tour of the town, the mayor took reporters into one house, now partly turned to rubble, that belonged to a collector of antique musical instruments. Some, including an organ, appeared to remain intact; others were destroyed.
In the garden of another ruined house, a row of spindly trees was bejeweled with ripe, red pomegranates. In the next yard, black oranges hung from scorched branches.
Mr. Azulai said his house had been damaged some, but in any case, he said, he was now living in the protected council building.
As he spoke, the wail of a siren rose and filled the air. Moments later, as he crouched in the porch way of a half-ravaged house, the boom of an intercepted rocket reverberated overhead.
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