“You can only die once. “It's better to be in my country,” whispers Hazel Mazguit, 50, next to her home in Yordeij, a village in the city of Arab el Aramshe that is barely 300 meters from the Blue Line, the tense dividing line between Israel and Israel Lebanon. Mazguit left his wife and five children in Nazareth, 70 kilometers south, to look after a poultry farm. “Park behind the house, it’s safer,” he recommends, pointing to the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia’s observation tower that hovers over the concrete wall. “They don't shoot hard, projectiles and rockets almost always fall in uninhabited areas, but you never know,” recites the mantra of a cautious man. To the west, towards the Mediterranean, the dry detonations of Israeli artillery coincide with the start of the Sabbath at dusk on Friday. “They must have discovered movements of the Lebanese guerrillas and are scaring them away with cannon fire,” he shakes his head and cannot hide a horrified grimace.
A column of smoke rises from a forested mountain in Daheyra, on the Lebanese side of the border. Parallel to the war in Gaza against Hamas, which is about to reach its 100th day, Israel and Hezbollah on the Blue Line are experiencing their longest conflict since the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon 24 years ago and the longest war they have faced in the faced in the summer of 2006. Both sides appeared to be fighting a low-intensity conflict until Hamas' number two, Saleh al Aruri, died in Beirut in a drone strike attributed to Israel. On the 2nd, a spiral of confrontations erupted that was on the verge of triggering a large-scale conflict.
A week ago, a barrage of dozens of rockets caused severe damage to the electronic surveillance antennas of Israel's air control center in Meron, in the eastern part of the border. It was Hezbollah’s “preliminary response” to the targeted assassination of Al Aruri. Another precision mission by an Israeli drone on Monday claimed the life of Wisam Tawill, head of the elite Shiite Radwan force and a close associate of Shiite party and militia leader Hasan Nasrallah.
Under different circumstances, another war would have started for much less money. 170 people have died on Lebanese territory in the last three months, 150 of whom were Hezbollah militiamen or exiled Palestinian allies. Another 13 people died in Israel, mostly soldiers.
The farmer Mazguit watches the syncopated Israeli artillery attacks from the door of his house while cursing the weeks he spent in a hotel in Nazareth, where he and his family, like 100,000 other residents, are far from their green hill because of the war Israel's northern border area was expelled in Galilee. Among them are 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 where 90% of the more than one and a half thousand inhabitants have disappeared. They escaped the crossfire of bombs and rockets hovering over their heads. They are all Bedouins, Arabs with Israeli nationality, heirs of the Palestinians before the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. Like the works of their new mosque with paralyzed golden domes, time seems to have stood still in this rocky place on the densest slope of the river forests Upper Galilee.
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The escalation of the war reached its climax on Tuesday when a wave of explosives-laden drones 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 armed forces' Northern Command headquarters in Safed, southeast of Meron, in a Hezbollah offensive with few precedents. Military spokesmen assured that there were no injuries, 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 rocket.
Eye to eye. Since then, both parties no longer seem to want to be tempted into further casus belli and may have considered the outstanding issues to be settled. Hezbollah and Israel have returned to the routine of exchanging rocket and drone attacks on the one hand and retaliating with artillery and air strikes on the other. This Saturday, the army press service said that the artillery fire observed in the border area on Friday was directed against a Hezbollah commando armed with Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles, the Lebanese Shiite militia's deadliest weapon on the ground . The scenario on the northern front was once again the usual: rocket launches hitting deserted areas in the northern Galilee and replica Israeli cannons against the supposed launch points. Hezbollah's usual command centers in southern Lebanon are also frequently bombed by aircraft.
Farmer Hazel Mazguit, next to his house in Arab el Aramshe, one of the houses closest to the Lebanese border. Edward Kaprov
Construction contractor Hussein Yuna, 40, who has just returned to Arab el Aramshe from Nazareth, parks his quad bike in front 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 in a hotel room with my family,” says Yuna, “and there is no shortage of work here.” She has returned with her three children, but the city school remains closed.
The road there is deserted. On the outskirts of Nahariya, the main coastal city of the Upper Galilee, an initial checkpoint indicates that you are entering a military zone. There are barriers and checkpoints along the route, until the diversion of the winding climb that leads to the border, where a permanent military unit is stationed. The markings on the asphalt reveal the massive presence of the Merkava IV heavy battle tanks.
Ahmed Masal has rarely left Arab al Armshe since the Gaza conflict began. “The first weeks of the war were terrible, rockets kept falling,” he remembers, “now everything seems relatively calmer; “We have gotten used to the fact that explosions almost always take place very far from the city.” The businessman looks at his wife worriedly before realizing that there are only a few air raid shelters in the city and that the neighbors are in the cellars of their houses protect. “Yes, we have some shelters, but the distance from the shooting range is so short that we only have about three seconds to take shelter,” he laments. “Although we are not very afraid, there were hardly any injuries in our city.”
130 kilometers of fences and walls
As her husband serves a group of Army reservists who are buying groceries before heading to their positions along the Blue Line, 80 miles (130 kilometers) of fences, barbed wire and walls, Laila Masal serves small pieces of strong, flavored black coffee Cardamom. Like many others, they have Bedouin relatives across the border. “It seems as if the egos of military and political leaders are preventing them from reaching an agreement to end the violence, even though it is clear that none of them want to start a war,” he complains.
White House special envoy to Lebanon Amos Hochstein, who last year brokered the conclusion of a deal to demarcate the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon in an area with important gas reserves, traveled to Jerusalem and Beirut in recent days to meet with him to meet senior officials. Hochstein said in the Lebanese capital on Friday that it was “urgent to reduce tensions in the south,” although he acknowledged it was “a final solution.” [para pacificar la frontera con Israel] That is not foreseeable at this point.”
Laila Masal reveals that in 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,” he remembers, “and although we can talk via Internet applications, we like to see each other's faces from time to time, even from a distance.” “They won't tell us from each other “Shoot side,” says farmer Hazel Mazguit, who finds herself on almost the same international divide, “but it’s better not to pay too much attention.”
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