Rubi Bar and her son Yonatan in their room at the Dan Hotel in Jerusalem, where they have been staying for more than six months.Yaniv Nadav/The Globe and Mail
When Rubi Bar and her family left their home near Israel’s border with Lebanon on Oct. 16, she thought the internal exile would last maybe two weeks at most.
Instead, Ms. Bar, her husband and three kids have been living in two adjoining rooms of the Dan Hotel in Jerusalem – 185 kilometres from their four-bedroom bungalow in the town of Shlomi – for almost seven months. And with the Israeli military still regularly exchanging fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia across the northern border, the Bars have no idea when they might be able to safely return home.
In the south, Israeli troops have entered Rafah, the last city beyond their control in the Gaza Strip. There’s also a ceasefire offer that on Monday Hamas said it was ready to agree to, holding out the faint possibility that the fighting could come to an end, at least temporarily, and allow both Gazans and residents of southern Israel to return to their homes.
But in the north, there’s a sense that the conflict with Hezbollah has yet to really begin and that a larger war could erupt. Recently, the 500 Shlomi residents living in the Dan Hotel were told to plan to stay in Jerusalem until at least July. No one is sure if their kids will be back home for the start of the new school year in September.
“The hardest part is not knowing,” Ms. Bar said in her fourth-floor room, where a view of the historic Old City of Jerusalem is partly obscured by laundry racks she has erected on the balcony. “We do not know our future. We don’t know when we’ll go back.”
Early in the war in Gaza, the Israeli government ordered the evacuation of 60,000 people from towns close to the Lebanese border amid fears that Hezbollah would open a second front. Since then, the two sides have traded near-daily strikes across the border.
Rubi has been at the hotel with her children for more than six months, while her husband still lives in Shlomi due to his work.Yaniv Nadav/The Globe and Mail
Eighteen Israeli soldiers and nine civilians have been confirmed killed by Hezbollah fire in northern Israel over the past seven months, while 289 Hezbollah fighters have been killed by Israeli strikes, according to a count by Lebanon’s L’Orient-Le Jour newspaper. Almost 100,000 Lebanese have reportedly been driven from their homes on the other side of the border.
Rocket launches targeting southern Israel have become less frequent in recent months, as Israeli troops have gradually taken control of more and more of Gaza, allowing many of the residents of cities such as Sderot to return to their homes. But there has been no let-up in the Hezbollah attacks. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in a drone strike on the northern town of Metulla last Monday, and air-raid sirens – now a rarity in much of the country – sounded over the largely deserted north several times Tuesday.
Some of the evacuees living in the Dan Hotel find themselves hoping for a war that would see their country’s army enter Lebanon and create a “security zone” in the south of that country that would prevent Hezbollah from ever launching the kind of attack that Hamas carried out on Oct. 7, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis.
“We have to go in and move Hezbollah 20 kilometres back,” said Vladimir Kirzhner, a 46-year-old resident of Kiryat Shmona, another town near the Lebanese border, who arrived with his family in the Dan Hotel this week after being transferred from another Jerusalem hotel. “We won’t go back until things are different.”
Evacuees from the city of Kiryat Shmona.Yaniv Nadav/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Bar also finds it hard to fathom returning home to Shlomi while Hezbollah remains just across the border. The family’s home is so close to Lebanon, she said, that Israeli troops would occasionally come in to monitor Hezbollah from her son’s bedroom window.
“I hope there will be a war in the north,” Ms. Bar said. “If there isn’t, we won’t feel safe going back. We’ll fear that what happened in the south will happen to us, too.”
Avraham Levine, the director of educational programs at the Alma Research and Education Centre, which studies the security situation on Israel’s northern border, said he expects Hezbollah will keep up its attacks for as long as the war in Gaza continues.
The question Israeli leaders will face afterward, he said, is whether they are willing to return to the tense status quo in the north or whether they will decide they need to confront Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed militia is larger and better equipped than Hamas and fought the Israeli army to a standstill in a 2006 war that left more than 2,000 people dead.
“Even if Hezbollah stops shooting, it doesn’t resolve anything. We didn’t deter them, we didn’t stop the threat in any way in the north,” Mr. Levine said. “Hamas has been badly hurt over the past six months. Hezbollah is just fine.”
For now, the evacuees living in the four-star Dan Hotel remain in limbo. It’s not an uncomfortable one – the rooms would be considered spacious for a short stay, and there’s a pool and other sports facilities. Basic costs, including three buffet meals a day in the hotel dining room, are being covered by the Israeli government, and the kids are now attending schools in Jerusalem.
But it doesn’t feel like home. Ms. Bar’s husband, Daniel, and their dog, Luna, are only with the family on weekends, as he has been deemed an essential worker at a factory in the north tied to Israel’s defence industry. Sixteen-year-old Yonatan has tired of sharing a room and a bed with his two younger sisters.
“They fight all day,” Ms. Bar said of the kids as she sat in her own room, which is crowded with a microwave, an electric hot plate and a small refrigerator she bought in order to prepare meals in the room and give the family an occasional break from the hotel buffets. “My 11-year-old is starting to become a teenager and she doesn’t always want to be in the same room as her siblings.”
Kinnert Iluk, the hotel’s guest relations manager, said she has come to regard her “guests from the north” as a big extended family, even as their presence sometimes confuses others who come to stay at the hotel and are surprised to see people in pyjamas wandering the lobby, sometimes with their pets, and conference rooms booked for use as kindergartens and nurseries.
Rubi Bar's son Yonatan is 16 years old.Yaniv Nadav/The Globe and Mail
“I feel like we’ll be here for years, because things aren’t moving in the north,” a dejected Mr. Kirzhner said as he and his wife, Olesya, sat in the hotel lobby earlier this week.
Olesya said being driven from their home by the sounds of war – and now living in hotels in another part of the country – has been particularly hard on the couple’s two young sons, 13 and 7, who are both on the autism spectrum. “They need order. Any changes in their routine are difficult for them,” she said. “The younger one screams at night. He keeps screaming, ‘When is this war going to end?’ ”
Mark MacKinnon