ARAB AL-ARAMSHE, ISRAEL — Inside the shrapnel-pocked school building, children’s drawings are strewn about and traces of blood dot the floor. The playground outside is littered with debris, and a burned-out car sits in the parking lot. Children ride their bicycles through the streets while families in this Israeli village less than 1 kilometer from the border with Lebanon sip coffee on their porches, seemingly unperturbed by the risk of all-out war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school.
“It’s an academy for the children, but the soldiers were inside,” the 33-year-old Suidan said. The kids “go there to learn, for activities, and the soldiers during the war go to sleep there.” For the village’s Arab community, the school is incredibly important, as it allows a degree of autonomy relative to sending their children to schools in nearby kibbutzim.
While the Israeli government ordered residents of this and other nearby villages to evacuate last October, Suidan estimates nearly 70 percent of Arab al-Aramshe’s residents have returned as the war drags on. Yet the military has not changed course, continuing to station soldiers in the villages that dot the country’s northern border, putting civilians in harm’s way.
Those risks have intensified over the past week, as Israel accused Hezbollah of bombing the occupied Golan Heights in a strike that killed 12 children and retaliated by assassinating a Hezbollah commander in a targeted strike outside Beirut. The assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday added even more fuel to an already volatile situation.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions from The Intercept.
The IDF’s practice of embedding its troops among civilians in the north mirrors the alleged “human shields” policy for which it has repeatedly condemned Hamas. “Israel’s engagement with the issue of human shields is double-edged,” said Tamara Kharroub, deputy executive director of Arab Center Washington D.C. “While Israel routinely uses civilians as human shields in its military operations, it employs this very accusation as a primary element in its propaganda operations and in justifying the killing of civilians.”
Though international law dictates that schools and hospitals have special status as safe havens for civilians, if a military force stations its troops or other military infrastructure inside of the school or hospital, it can then be declared a legitimate military target. This is the pretext Israel has used to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure in the wake of October 7, claiming, for example, that Gaza’s largest hospital was actually a Hamas command center. The military has also claimed to find weapons in a school building where civilians were sheltered and has released propaganda footage displaying weapons inside of schools in Gaza. Meanwhile, rights groups have documented the IDF’s use of human shields in the besieged enclave — sometimes quite literally. In June, for instance, Israeli troops detained a family in front of their tanks to protect their soldiers from gunfire.
Whether Israel’s decision to station its troops alongside civilians in the north is willful negligence or a conscious decision to create a strategic advantage in its fight against Hezbollah isn’t known. Either way, the fighting in Israel’s north varies significantly from its war on Gaza. Compared to Gaza, the mountainous north is sparsely populated, meaning Israel has ample opportunity to install troops and outposts far away from civilian infrastructure.
“It is evident,” Kharroub said, “that Israel exploits civilians by any means necessary for its goals of expansionism, domination, and ethnic cleansing.”
A Short-Lived Evacuation
Fearing Hezbollah would launch an invasion in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel immediately ordered an evacuation in the north, a district with a population of 1.2 million people, the majority of whom are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the vast majority live in Nazareth in the center of the region or along the coast, there are dozens of villages that line the Israel–Lebanon border, some within 1 kilometer. About 60,000 residents of those villages were displaced because of the war. Many of them fled to Akka and Haifa, two coastal cities located outside of the evacuation zone but still within 40 kilometers of Lebanon, and others left to live with family in other parts of the country. Yet when they realized there wasn’t an end in sight to the fighting, they started to return.
Families with school-age children who had been forced out of school by the war had been struggling to find suitable replacements for their children. Members of Israel’s Druze and Arab minorities longed for the communities and families they had built in their villages. And then there was the cost of displacement. While Israel offered financial compensation to families who had left home, it was hardly enough, local residents told The Intercept. “We don’t really use much [money], but with children, it’s not enough. And if you have to rent a house somewhere, a place to live, and then to send children to school, I don’t think it’s enough,” said one woman who lives in Mattat, an Israeli settlement just 3 kilometers from Lebanon that was built on the depopulated Palestinian villages of Dayr al-Qassim and Al-Mansura.
“It’s crazy to stay in a motel for six months or seven months. It’s crazy. And they don’t pay you very much money, even if you do leave,” Suidan said. “We [had] a war here in 2006. I think this is worse. It’s dangerous. I mean, Lebanon is right there. You can see it.”
Unlike southern Israel, which is fortified with abundant bomb shelters in case of rocket attacks by Hamas, communities like Arab al-Aramshe have few shelters — hardly enough to protect the village’s 1,100 residents during a time of war. Even after the April strike, which killed a deputy company commander, the IDF maintained its presence in the village. In late July, IDF vehicles were still inside the village, and the military had erected a holding pool for firefighters to use in combating the wildfires caused by Hezbollah strikes. Thousands of acres have been burned since October 7 due to falling debris and missile impacts.
All the while, Israel continues to call up reservists to fight against Hezbollah. The group’s military capabilities have greatly expanded since its last confrontation with Israel in 2006, which lasted only 34 days but left much of Southern Lebanon in ruins. While Israel has criticized Hezbollah for targeting civilians in recent months, including when it killed two Israeli civilians driving in the occupied Golan Heights, the casualty counts tell a different story. Since October 7, 450 have been killed in Lebanon, including at least 100 civilians; in Israel, 23 civilians and 17 soldiers have been killed in the fighting.
Military Buildup
Driving along Route 6 to the north, Israel’s military buildup since October 7 is obvious. Tanks and armored vehicles stream into the Galilee, a mountainous region in the northern part of the country, alongside a steady flow of civilian traffic. Signs reading “No pictures” are ubiquitous. The Israel Defense Forces have installed checkpoints along highways in the north with two soldiers typically stationed at each. While the soldiers aren’t authorized to speak with journalists, many of them spoke to me informally. They shared their reluctance to fight in a war with Hezbollah and hoped that tensions would soon deescalate.
Much of the new military infrastructure — which includes bunkers, concrete walls, sniper towers, and rocket launchers — was installed along the so-called Blue Line: a U.N.-designated line demarcating Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 2000. In a video from October 17 that Suidan shared with The Intercept, Israeli tanks standing just feet from homes in Arab al-Aramsha shoot into Lebanon. In the towns of Shlomi and Sasa, both located within 5 kilometers of the border, military outposts line the hilltops along with infrastructure for Israel’s Iron Dome, the country’s missile defense system.
The area’s staunchly Zionist residents view their presence in the north as a way to assert their claim to the land. In the Israeli settlement of Shlomi, just 3 kilometers from the Blue Line, a 77-year-old man named Amitai told me he had no intention of leaving. “What can I do? It’s my land. I don’t go to any other place. No better than this place for me,” he said. “Maybe Hezbollah can kill me, but you cannot make me afraid.” (He and his wife Golani gave me only their first names.)
Amitai and Golani, who invited me into their home to share coffee and pastries, both said that they hadn’t left Israel since their births in 1948 and 1951, respectively. Amitai later said that he had visited Jordan and Syria, but according to him, “they are Israel too.”
While many Israelis view their war against Hamas as existential, few share the same opinion on escalating tensions with Hezbollah. “I don’t think we can win,” said Rafael, a resident of Mattat who asked to be identified by only his first name. “There is no winning. We occupied Lebanon in the first war, and it was horrible. Nothing good happened there.”
Rafael was hesitant to speak about military activity in Mattat, where the IDF recently had an outpost. He said that after a foreign journalist visited the kibbutz in June to write on the impact of the war on Israeli civilians, the military ordered residents to evacuate, fearing that the journalist might expose their location and draw Hezbollah strikes on the area.
“So we like not to tell how many people are here,” said Rafael. “We don’t even know.” The now-empty outpost is located only feet away from houses that have, according to Rafael, been periodically inhabited throughout the war.
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