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KIBBUTZ DAN, Israel — More than a month into the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, life is slowly returning to this country's war-battered north.
Tourists are trekking through the verdant hills, mailmen are driving up windy roads to deliver packages, contractors are starting to repair a year's worth of missile and drone damage, farmers are hiring workers for their avocado and citrus fields. But of the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes, only a small number have gone back, uncertain whether the quiet along the border will hold.
"There is the trauma of Oct. 7 and the lack of trust in the security forces, in the government, that hasn't been restored," said Yoav Hermoni, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He is a member of the local security squad in Kibbutz Dan, a pastoral agricultural village about two miles from the Lebanese village Khiam. Khiam is a former stronghold of Hezbollah, whose fighters began attacking Israel's north on Oct. 8, 2023, following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
Israel's 15-month conflict with Hezbollah has decimated the militant group, killing most of its senior leadership and destroying much of its weapons arsenal. Though the two sides agreed to a 60-day ceasefire on Nov. 27, Hezbollah has continued to operate along the border, and the Israeli military has continued to carry out demolitions and strikes across southern Lebanon. For all of Israel's military successes, there are growing questions about its long-term strategy and whether it can deliver a sustainable peace to desolated communities in the north.
If Israeli forces remain inside Lebanon, "day 61 will be different," Mahmoud Qamati, deputy head of Hezbollah's political council, said this week, referring ominously to the day after the ceasefire ends. The group's military capabilities, including its stockpile of missiles, are "still present," he warned.
Of the 60,000 Israelis evacuated from northern towns and villages during the course of the war - most forced to shelter for more than a year with family or in hotels - only about 20 percent have gone home in recent weeks, according to Moshe Davidovich, head of one of northern Israel's largest local councils.
Among them was Gilad Shafran, 83, who returned with his wife to Kibbutz Snir, a border community he helped to found in the 1960s. He said Israelis have yet to fully understand how much has changed.
"Our evacuation was on the scale of the exodus from Egypt, of biblical proportions," he said of the flight of families from the region. "The moment in history, of unpredictability, it will last years." After the couple evacuated the kibbutz on Oct. 8, 2023, they shuttled around for months, staying first with their daughter and then in hotels across the country. Like them, many of the returnees to Snir are elderly, Shafran said. Most younger residents, including their daughter, a mother of young children who built a new house shortly before the war, have yet to return.
He and his wife will not leave again, Shafran said, even if the fighting starts up again. "Because of this war, we understood what is important: the state, the family and the home."
Hezbollah has fired nearly 20,000 drones, missiles and rockets across the border, Israeli officials say, resulting in vast devastation that the government is only now beginning to assess. In cliffside kibbutzim like Manara, just 400 feet from Lebanon, local officials say more than 70 percent of homes have been hit. As the months wore on, local residents said, wild boars and jackals began to invade abandoned neighborhoods.
The ceasefire agreement signed in late November calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and for the United States and the Lebanese army to create a mechanism responsible for dismantling the remaining Hezbollah outposts throughout the border region. The truce has held, despite accusations of violations from both sides, but Israel's regional war has morphed and expanded in the meantime.
The Houthis, an Iranian-backed proxy group in Yemen, have launched drone and missile attacks on Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and central Israel, sending millions of people running for air raid shelters in the middle of the night, including thousands of evacuees from the north. And Hamas, though weakened substantially by Israel's military campaign in Gaza, has recently resumed firing rockets on southern Israel and, last Saturday, on Jerusalem.
"If nowhere is safe in Israel, then why not at least be at home?" said Hermoni, the security guard in Kibbutz Dan.
Still, for many Israelis from the north, especially young families, the question of when to return is wrenching and complex. Schools in the region remain closed, and the government announced this week it is extending housing subsidies for evacuees until late February. Itai Gonel, who evacuated Kibbutz Dan with his wife and two children on the second day of the war, doesn't understand what's taking so long.
"Until the beepers, we were saying - everyone was saying - that there was no way we would go back there with Hezbollah sitting in front of our faces," Gonel said, referring to the attack on the group's electronic devices in September, which marked the start of Israel's major escalation in Lebanon.
"Now it's finally time," he continued, "and yet somehow we're still waiting."
The family has moved to a kibbutz about a half-hour's drive from Dan. As soon as the schools open, they'll return, said Gili Chen, Golen's wife, who works as a pediatrician, which puts her in daily contact with other evacuated families and their children.
"I don't think security has returned 100 percent, but the threat has receded," Chen said. "We need to go home."
Many of the residents who have come back to the kibbutz say that safety has become a relative concept. They are encouraged by initiatives like the David Division, an effort by the military to recruit combat soldiers who have aged out of reservist duty to act as first responders in the event of attacks on border regions. And they see their return as its own act of resistance.
"From the perspective of a former tank commander, I can say that defensible territory is critical," said Shafran, the elderly resident of Kibbutz Snir. "It is only when you sit on the land, physically, that it becomes a border."
But no one can say for sure what the future holds for this embattled region. Yarden Levy, a 31-year-old student from Kibbutz Dan, had his backyard scorched by a Katyusha rocket, but never left. The "ceasefire was the start of a new reality," he said, "though we don't know which reality yet."
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