Bombs against rockets: the tension that does not cease on the northern front between Israel and Hezbollah

“You can only die once. “It better be in my land,” whispers Hazel Mazguit, 50, next to her house in Yordeij, a village in the town of Arab el Aramshe, which is barely 300 meters from the Blue Line, the tense dividing line between Israel and Lebanon. Mazguit has left his wife and her five children in Nazareth, 70 kilometers to the south, to take care of a poultry farm. “Park behind the house, it's safer,” she recommends as she points to the observation tower of the pro-Iran Hezbollah militia that hovers over the concrete border wall. “They don't shoot hard, projectiles and rockets almost always fall in uninhabited areas, but you never know,” recites a cautious man's mantra. In the west, towards the Mediterranean, the dry detonations of Israeli artillery coincide with the beginning of the Sabbath at dusk on Friday. “They must have detected movements of the Lebanese guerrilla and they are scaring them away with cannon fire,” he shakes his head, unable to hide a grimace of horror.

On a forested mountain in Daheyra, on the Lebanese side of the border, a column of smoke rises. In parallel to the war in Gaza against Hamas, which is about to reach its 100th day, Israel and Hezbollah are experiencing their longest conflict on the Blue Line since the Israeli army withdrew 24 years ago from southern Lebanon, and the longest. bloody since the war that confronted them in the summer of 2006. Both sides seemed to be fighting a low-intensity conflict, until the death in Beirut of Hamas number two, Saleh al Aruri, in a drone attack attributed to Israel, On the 2nd, it unleashed a spiral of confrontations that was on the verge of unleashing a large-scale conflict.

A week ago, a deluge of dozens of rockets caused serious damage to the electronic surveillance antennas of the Israeli air control center in Meron, on the eastern part of the border. It was Hezbollah's “preliminary response” to the selective assassination of Al Aruri. Another precision operation by an Israeli drone claimed the life on Monday of Wisam Tawill, head of the elite Shiite Radwan force and close associate of Shiite party-militia leader Hasan Nasrallah.

For much less, another war would have started under different circumstances. In Lebanese territory, 170 people have died in the last three months, of which 150 are Hezbollah militiamen or exiled Palestinian allies. In Israel, another 13 have died, mostly soldiers.

Farmer Mazguit watches the syncopated attacks of Israeli artillery from the door of his house while cursing the weeks he spent in a hotel in Nazareth, displaced with his family far from their green hill in Galilee because of the war, like 100,000 other inhabitants. from the northern border area of ​​Israel. Among them, the 60,000 from the city of Kiryat Shmona, sandwiched between Lebanon and the Syrian Golan Heights. In southern Lebanon, a similar number of residents have fled to the north of the country.

Arab el Aramshe, adjacent to the dangerous border, is a ghost town with 90% of its more than one and a half thousand inhabitants missing. They have escaped the crossfire of bombs and rockets that hangs over their heads. They are all Bedouins, Arabs with Israeli nationality, heirs of the Palestinians before the birth of the Jewish State in 1948. Like the works of their new mosque with paralyzed golden domes, time seems stopped in this rocky place, on the densest slope of the forests of the Upper Galilee.

The escalation of war reached its peak on Tuesday, when a wave of drones loaded with explosives entered Israeli airspace from Lebanon. Most of the drones were shot down by anti-aircraft defenses, but one of them exploded in the middle of the headquarters of the Northern Command of the Armed Forces in Safed, southeast of Meron, in a Hezbollah offensive with few precedents. Military spokespersons assured that there were no casualties, although the material damage was enormous. A few hours later, the commander of Hezbollah's southern Lebanese drone squadron, Ali Hussein Burji, was killed by a missile.

Eye for an eye. Since then both parties seem not to want to tempt themselves with more case belli and they may have settled the pending accounts. Hezbollah and Israel have returned to the routine of exchanging rocket and drone attacks, on the one hand, and retaliating with artillery and aviation bombardments. This Saturday, the army's press service detailed that Friday's artillery fire observed in the border area was directed against a Hezbollah commando equipped with Russian-made Kornet anti-tank rockets, the most lethal weapon on the ground of the Lebanese Shiite militia. . The scenario on the northern front has returned to the usual this Saturday: rocket launches that hit deserted areas in the north of Galilee and replicas of Israeli cannons against the alleged launching points. Aircraft also frequently bomb Hezbollah's usual command centers in southern Lebanon.

Builder Hussein Yuna, 40, who has just returned to Arab el Aramshe from Nazareth, parks his quad at the door of the only open shop, where Ahmed Masal, 57, and his wife Laila, 51, still serve coffee and sell food. “I was tired of living with my family in a hotel room,” says Yuna, “and here I have no shortage of work.” He has returned with his three children, but the town school remains closed.

The road leading there is deserted. On the outskirts of Nahariya, the main coastal city of the Upper Galilee, a first checkpoint indicates that you are entering a military zone. Barriers and checkpoints occur along the route, until the detour of the winding climb that leads to the border, where a permanent military detachment is based. The marks on the asphalt reveal the massive presence of the heavy Merkava IV battle tanks.

Ahmed Masal has barely moved from Arab al Armshe since the start of the conflict in Gaza. “The first weeks of the war were horrible, rockets kept falling,” he remembers, “now everything seems relatively calmer; “We have become accu
stomed to explosions almost always occurring very far from the town.” The merchant looks at his wife with concern before recognizing that there are few air-raid shelters in the town, and the neighbors protect themselves in the basements of their houses. “Yes, we have some shelters, but the distance from the firing point is so short that we only have about three seconds to take shelter,” she laments. “Although we are not very afraid, there have hardly been any injuries in our town.”

130 kilometers of fences and walls

While her husband attends to a group of army reservists who buy food before heading to their positions in the Blue line, Crisscrossed with fences, barbed wire and walls for 130 kilometers, Laila Masal serves thimbles of strong black coffee flavored with cardamom. Like many others, they have Bedouin relatives across the border. “It seems as if the ego of the military and political leaders prevented them from reaching an agreement to stop the violence, when it is clear that none of them want to start a war,” he complains.

The White House special envoy for Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, who last year mediated the achievement of a treaty to delimit the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon, in an area with important gas deposits, has traveled in recent days to Jerusalem and Beirut to meet with senior officials. Hochstein said on Friday in the Lebanese capital that it is “urgent to reduce tension in the south,” although he acknowledged that “a definitive solution [para pacificar la frontera con Israel] It is not foreseeable at this time.”

Laila Masal reveals that the week before October 7, when Hamas launched a large-scale attack against Israel on the Gaza border, she approached the border to greet some Bedouin relatives from southern Lebanon. “The soldiers always gave us permission,” she recalls, “and although we can talk through internet applications, we like to see each other's faces from time to time, even from afar.” “They're not going to shoot us from the other side,” says farmer Hazel Mazguit, almost on the same international divide, “but it's better not to look out too much.”

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