On Thursday morning, after Hezbollah launched 200 rockets and some 20 drones at northern Israel, causing damage and lightly injuring two people, farmer Ofer Moskovitz worked in his avocado grove, situated about 100 yards from the UN-designated Blue Line marking the border with Lebanon.

“It’s dangerous, and it’s stressful, but there’s nothing to do about it,” said Moskovitz. “The field is so close to Lebanon and the Hezbollah stronghold that they see us and we see them.”

Moskovitz, 60, said he has always believed in the strength and will of the IDF, trusting the army when it told northern residents that it had distanced the Hezbollah terror group from the border, allowing locals to return home after many had been evacuated following the fears of a Hezbollah invasion after the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught.

About 60,000 northern residents were evacuated when Hezbollah began near-daily rocket and mortar attacks on military installations and residential towns in the north following Hamas’s October 7 massacre. They were allowed to return home 13 months later, when a ceasefire with Israel was reached in November 2024.

In the meantime, Hezbollah had wreaked widespread damage in the north.

“Most of the residents are here; they came back,” said Moskovitz. “There’s an amazing community here, and we go through everything together.”

But Hezbollah is still out there, said Moskovitz, and that is nerve-racking.

“I went to the lookout near us, and as I took pictures, I saw the Hezbollah flags hanging again,” said Moskovitz. “Someone is telling stories to calm us.”

The biggest fear is a Hezbollah invasion into local communities such as Kibbutz Misgav Am, where Moskovitz lives. Many homes on the kibbutz lack safe rooms, even though the government promised to build them for residents after the first round of the war that began in October 2023.

Moreover, said Moskovitz, the walls of their buildings are not strong enough to withstand the newer Hezbollah rockets.

“We just hope they won’t fall in our area,” he said. “I heard the defense minister say today that the northern residents need to hold steady. Easy for him to say when he’s safe within his bunker.”

The regional councils of the communities along Israel’s northern and Gaza borders wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday to protest the broad three percent cuts to the budgets of all ministries in order to bolster the defense budget.

Sharing the letter in a post on X, former prime minister Naftali Bennett said that “while the residents of the north were........

© The Times of Israel