Travelling Through Israel’s Abandoned Borderlands

A months-long ceasefire may have quieted the guns between Israel and Hezbollah, but the scars of war still run deep along Israel’s northern frontier. Entire communities — Jewish and Bedouin alike — remain ghost towns, deserted save for a handful of IDF soldiers and a few defiant residents who’ve chosen the dangers of home over the sterility of Tel Aviv evacuee hotels.

Last week, I joined a Canadian media delegation with the Exigent Foundation to visit three of these towns: Kibbutz Hanita, Arab Al-Aramshe, and Shtula. What we witnessed wasn’t peace. It was aftermath.

A Fragile Ceasefire Tested

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas's brutal massacre in the south, Hezbollah opened a second front in the north. In response, Israel ordered the complete evacuation of its northern border towns. Since then, residents have survived on government stipends (200 shekels per adult and 100 shekels per child per day) but those payments are now scheduled to end. And as they do, Israel’s displaced civilians are expected to return and rebuild, even as Hezbollah operatives continue to test the ceasefire.

According to IDF Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Jordan Herzberg, Hezbollah militants are still being “routinely eliminated” when they enter the 10-kilometre demilitarized buffer zone inside southern Lebanon — a fragile space maintained by both the IDF and the Lebanese Army under a ceasefire agreement brokered by France and the U.S.

As we stood on Israel’s northern border, Herzberg shared that just hours earlier, IDF forces had neutralized a militant who crossed into the buffer zone. He wouldn’t say what the man was doing. “You shouldn’t be moving in these areas,” Herzberg told us.

Hanita: Life on the Edge

Kibbutz Hanita, a small Jewish village in Israel’s North-East border region with Lebanon, was the target of multiple Hezbollah rocket and drone strikes, first starting on October 8, 2023. On October 11, explosions along the border wall in the area caused “minor damage” to the security fence and triggered infiltration alerts in the kibbutz. This resulted in multiple IDF posts along the border section coming under small arms fire from Hezbollah militants.

Hanita's Head of Security, Major Yaki Shalom, confirmed that on at least three occasions, Hezbollah militants have tried and failed to infiltrate the village since October 8, 2023.

According to the Telegraph, at least 20 rockets have hit the small kibbutz since the start of the conflict, and in July 2024, a Hezbollah rocket strike hit the yard of a preschool in the village. Inside one house that was hit by Hezbollah anti-tank missiles, you can see the state of ruin that is familiar across the entire border region – roofs caved in, shattered glass, and homes scorched.

The Israel-Lebanon border is not only divided by border walls and fences, but also by a stark contrast in tree canopy. As part of the IDF’s operation to confront and root out Hezbollah’s secluded positions along the border, the Defence Force has undergone a monumental deforestation operation, laying total waste to Lebanon’s southern trees and ecological life. A reminder of the fact that life in the middle of this war, in all forms, isn’t spared from the destruction of combat.

Arab Al-Aramshe: The Bedouin Frontier

The small Bedouin village of Arab Al-Aramshe, a town which we were told had returned to everyday life, but appeared as yet another ghost town inhabited by Bedouin Muslim IDF soldiers and a small handful of residents, also bore the scars of multiple suicide drone attacks and UAV bombings.

The Bedouin IDF force that took control of Al-Aramshe after residents were evacuated from the village in October 2023, utilized the town community centre, once a facility that provided for the children of the village, as a makeshift headquarters during the year-long war. Despite residents returning to the town, the community centre, now a bombed-out shell of its former self, remains the base of operations for the IDF security team.

In April of 2024, the community centre came under heavy attack by Hezbollah suicide drones and other UAVs. We were able to see the carbon-fibre remains of a crashed drone lying just feet away from the community centre building. In the same attack, a UAV landed directly in front of the community centre, sending shrapnel through the windows of the headquarters, wounding several IDF soldiers.

The IDF security leader of the town, who did not want to be named or photographed due to security concerns, told our group that he believed the decision to evacuate Al-Aramshe residents from the village was a mistake, even though the town was a clear target for Hezbollah strikes.

Shtula: Art Meets Ashes

Of all the border towns we visited, Shtula was the most visually jarring. In 2018, a 200-metre concrete wall separating the city from Lebanon was transformed into a public art installation called Talking Walls — a mural-covered barrier meant to symbolize hope. Today, those colours are interrupted by pillboxes littered with shell casings and bullet holes.

IDF Major Shlomi Hatan, tasked with protecting Shtula, showed us a video on his phone of a Hezbollah position across the border being obliterated by IDF artillery fire. It was filmed before the ceasefire, but the destruction still felt close.

Just 100 metres from the border wall, a gleaming white hillside home, resembling something from Malibu, was gutted by Hezbollah anti-tank missiles. One shell pierced straight through the structure, demolishing the roof and blowing out the living room. The home’s front façade remains as a hollowed skeleton, watching silently over the valley.

A Frontline in Waiting

From an observation deck in the Golan Heights, the contrast between the two sides of the border is stark. On the Israeli side, organized farmland stretches right up to the wall. Life persists. On the Lebanese side, villages stand in ruins: trees have been leveled, homes reduced to rubble, and fields lie barren.

The ceasefire may be holding, for now. But the landscape speaks louder than any agreement. What we saw was not peace. It was the eye of the storm - a tense, waiting silence held in place by artillery and walls, by patrols and prayer.

Israel’s northern frontier isn’t home yet, but it stands stubborn and brave — still a frontline. Not just in a physical war with Hezbollah, but in the global struggle between sovereignty and terror, order and chaos, the will to rebuild and the ever-present threat lurking just beyond the trees.

Harrison Faulkner

Canadian Journalist | Content Creator

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