Inside the Lebanon-border closed military zone, kibbutz members prepare to start over

Ori Shaked stood in his destroyed studio apartment above his parents’ home on Kibbutz Hanita on Monday morning, surrounded by shards of glass and debris, and, picking up a blackened, charred object, he joked, “My iRobot almost survived.”

The Hezbollah terror group began striking northern Israel on October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas-led terrorists launched a shock attack in southern Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 hostages.

Among the casualties of the Hezbollah barrages was the Shaked family home on the edge of the kibbutz, facing southern Lebanon.

Ori and his parents weren’t there, said his mother, Michal, who was also surveying the wreckage on a rare visit home. She said she and her husband hadn’t wanted to evacuate the kibbutz, where she grew up. But on October 8, a mandatory evacuation was put into place for some 60,000 residents in 32 communities in northern Israel.

The family reluctantly left their home on October 9. The rocket hit four days later.

After more than a year of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, in which 45 civilians and 80 IDF soldiers and reservists were killed, the conflict was halted on November 27, 2024, with a 60-day temporary ceasefire in Lebanon.

Since then, some of the 60,000 evacuees have started to trickle back to their homes.

However, Kibbutz Hanita and Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, as well as several other nearby communities adjacent to the northern border, are still closed military zones. Residents are allowed to come in but they cannot stay overnight. In the mornings, residents accompany construction workers who stay for the day to do repairs on houses that have been uninhabited for more than 15 months.

Nothing left to salvage

On Monday, the air was crisp and cool. Sunlight poured in between the wooden beams that once held up the A-frame roof of the Shaked family house.

Michal looked around the destroyed room as her cat wandered around the wreckage and padded delicately across a shattered window that lay in the middle of the room. Ori spotted his burned computer amid the cinders. Except for a few metal spoons, there was nothing left to salvage.

After the war broke out, the family initially dismissed the idea of evacuating.

“We thought people were needlessly panicking,” she said.

On evacuation day, October 9 of last year, Michal and her husband packed up a few of their things for “three days,” she said. “We thought we’d be gone for three days. We’re still counting every three days.”

On Monday Michal returned to the kibbutz to get more clothes and prepare the house for renovations. She and her husband are staying in an apartment in Tivon, about 40 minutes away.

“We won’t have to flatten the house, but we have to repair everything,” Michal said. The process could take months.

The hilltop kibbutz

Kibbutz Hanita was established in 1938 at the top of a hill right on the border with south Lebanon. Before the war, about 750 people, including children, lived in the kibbutz.

A security fence presses up against the cement border wall that separates Israel from Lebanon and encircles the village. The community is nestled among trees, some burned from rocket fire. In the petting zoo, which hadn’t been damaged, a peacock wandered near chickens in a fenced-in pen.

The roads in the kibbutz are chewed up from tank treads, and everywhere are reminders of the war: sandbags, fallen rocket debris — now collector’s items — and gardens overgrown with weeds after more than a year of neglect.

“We want to return as soon as we can, but there’s no grocery store to buy food and no education system,” said Tal Hasid, a kibbutz member. The nursery school, hit by rockets, needs to be repaired. The electricity works, but the sewage system does not.

“Everything has to be built from zero,” said Hasid.

His family spent nine months in a hotel in Tiberias, which was very difficult, he said, and then they moved to an apartment in coastal Nahariya where “Hezbollah launched rockets at their building.”

“There is a lot of damage, but we think things will be okay here,” Hasid said.

He believes that people will start returning by February, which is when the government’s rent subsidies for evacuees currently are set to officially end. He said that some people have already started rebuilding and renovating. Others might wait until the close of the school year; others aren’t sure if they will return.

Ronit, a kibbutz member who asked that her last name not be used, stood on her tiptoes to peer at the trunk of an olive tree where cyclamen were growing.

“I came back to see the flowers,” Ronit said. “I am planted in this land.”

Ronit was born on the kibbutz, she said. Pointing to a building nearby, she said, “That was where I lived as a baby. Over there is the library and the water tower. I’ve missed all this.”

“Everything is okay, but everything isn’t okay,” she said. After more than a year away from her home, she said, seeing the flowers gives her hope.

Rosh Hanikra

In coastal Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, about 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) from Kibbutz Hanita to the east, Zeev Adini invited this reporter to see the damage to his house, hit by Hezbollah rocket fire in October 2024, soon after the IDF ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.

With a wry smile, Adini said that his house was the only one in the kibbutz to get a direct hit from Hezbollah rockets.

His living room was full of antique furniture and bric-a-brac. He went through his vintage vinyl record collections and held up Don McLean’s “American Pie” album, which had been cracked in half during the attack. He noted that out of all his records, the only one that wasn’t damaged was an album by The Beatles.

The kibbutz grows bananas and avocados and raises turkeys. In the late 1980s, English actor Sacha Baron Cohen lived there for a time.

During this reporter’s visit, the streets were largely deserted and still until a boy rode by on his bicycle — a rare sight.

Adini said that he and his wife aren’t sure they want to move back into their house after they renovate it.

“It isn’t because of the security situation,” he said, looking toward the hill that marks Israel’s border with Lebanon. “We got used to living closer to our children in the center of the country.”

When the rocket hit his house, Adini was away. He said he sent messages to his family and friends and told them not to be upset.

“Let’s put things into proportion,” he wrote in October. “There are hostages in Gaza. The house and everything — it’s all just material objects.”