Jack Jedwab: All the hostages are home, but near-ghost towns leave Northern Israel vulnerable |
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Jack Jedwab: All the hostages are home, but near-ghost towns leave Northern Israel vulnerable
Kiryat Shmona and Metula remain scarred, depopulated, and strategically exposed to Hezbollah threats
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From the hills near Metula, Israel’s northernmost town, distance is not measured in kilometers but in seconds. I know this not as a metaphor, but from standing there myself — looking out at the Lebanese border and realizing how impossibly close it is. Neither a map nor a military briefing is needed to see the danger. You need only look up.
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The Lebanese hills directly overlook Metula and Israel’s northern communities. In theory, whoever controls those elevations can affect what happens below. The vantage point is absolute. The proximity is undeniable. From that height, Israel’s border towns are not abstractions; they are visible, vulnerable and within the closest proximity.
Jack Jedwab: All the hostages are home, but near-ghost towns leave Northern Israel vulnerable Back to video
It’s more than a geopolitical challenge. It is a lived reality for tens of thousands of Israelis along the northern border. In the weeks following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Hezbollah entered the conflict, firing tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones into northern Israel. The response was immediate: more than 60,000 Israeli civilians — Jews, Druze, and Maronite Christians — were evacuated from border towns and villages. Families fled southbound, dispersing across hotels, relatives’ homes, and temporary housing across the country.
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Israeli cities like Kiryat Shmona and Metula became near-ghost towns. Kiryat Shmona — Israel’s northern anchor city and the main civilian, commercial, and transportation hub of the Upper Galilee — saw schools close, businesses shutter, and municipal services grind to a halt. What Israelis now simply call “the North” ceased to function as a lived space.
More than two years later, the damage is not just physical — it is demographic. Roughly one-third of Kiryat Shmona’s pre-war population of 26,000 has not returned. Across northern communities, tens of thousands remain displaced, unable or unwilling to come home so long as Hezbollah’s weapons remain embedded in the hills overlooking their towns. A region that once anchored Israel’s periphery is being slowly emptied.
For many observers of the Middle East conflict, the story of the North hardly registers. Part of the reason lies in how this conflict is described. The war with Hamas and the fighting with Hezbollah is generally treated as separate wars, when they can also be understood as distinct fronts of the same regional conflict. Strategically, both are tied to Iran’s proxy network and a coordinated effort to exert pressure on Israel on multiple fronts. Hezbollah’s entry into the fighting was not reactive or accidental; it was a deliberate choice to widen the war.
Treating them as distinct allows many international observers to insist that escalation is contained, preserves the fiction that the southern part of Lebanon is not at war with Israel. But this framing risks minimizing the sustained displacement of Israeli civilians and obscures Hezbollah’s role as an active belligerent. This reality persists despite repeated and ultimately unsuccessful efforts by successive Lebanese governments, under both domestic and international pressure, to disarm the terrorist group.
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Hezbollah’s decision to escalate at this time, by rejecting the four-month disarmament timeline proposed by the Lebanese government, is enabled by its unique status in Lebanon as a state within a state. While formally part of Lebanon’s political system, it operates an independent army, answering to no one and making the unilateral decisions to go to war with Israel. Its priorities are shaped not by the needs of Lebanese citizens but by its role within a regional axis led by Iran. When Hezbollah acts, it is Lebanese civilians — and Israeli civilians — who pay the price.
Lebanon was once described as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Today, that observation feels less like the most distant dream, long placed out of reach by decades of conflict, corruption, and militarization. By maintaining an armed force outside state control and seeking confrontation with Israel at every opportunity, Hezbollah has entrenched instability and foreclosed serious prospects for recovery.
From Northern Israel, the consequences are painfully concrete: prolonged southbound evacuations, abandoned homes, shuttered schools, and towns waiting to learn whether they still have a future. Standing in Metula, looking up at the hills across the border, I can understand why so many residents have not returned. It’s not their lack of resilience, but the reaction to an ongoing threat that is not fully resolved.
Yet amid these persistent challenges, a profound national shift has began across the country with the long-awaited return of the hostages from Gaza.
Across parts of Israel today, the yellow ribbons and the “Bring Them Home Now” posters bearing the faces of the hostages — once omnipresent — have gradually given way to something more familiar: Israeli flags. The blue and white that filled public spaces long prior to October 7 have returned to many streets, balconies and public squares.
On my last visit to Israel in January 2024, the hostage imagery was unavoidable. Their faces stared back from bus stops, convenience stores, office buildings, and construction sites. Ribbons and buttons were worn across the political spectrum. The effort to secure the hostages’ release had become a rallying point for a society reeling from a profound existential shock. For many Israelis, the State’s unwritten contract to protect its citizens was suddenly broken.
With the return of the living and dead hostages, there has been an inevitable shift. The transition reflects a society moving from emergency mobilization to reckoning, from an all-consuming campaign for their return to some reaffirmation of solidarity.
Nowhere is this shift more palpable than at Hostages’ Square in Tel Aviv. Once a site of relentless protest and urgency, the square has entered a new phase. A large digital clock that counted the days since October 7 — measuring captivity as time suspended — was stopped after the return of the remains of the last hostage Ran Gvili.
Much of the Square’s physical landscape remains. A mock tunnel, representing the underground captivity in Gaza, still stands. Some large photographs of the hostages continue to confront visitors. New banners have appeared, offering messages of gratitude, peace, and reflection, including quotations from those involved in securing releases. At Hostages’ Square, gratitude and grief now coexist in the same spot. The yellow ribbons have not entirely vanished, nor have Israeli flags fully replaced them. Instead, the two symbols now exist side by side, representing a journey from captivity to return, from rupture to endurance.
The reappearance of the Israeli flag at the Square and elsewhere in the country is a stark contrast with the move by many western societies to treat the Israeli flag as a provocation with stigma attached to its display. The renewed prominence of the flag cannot be separated from developments beyond Israel’s borders. Israelis are acutely aware of the growing attacks on their flag abroad — of its restriction, or social sanction in several once friendly countries. In Israel, such acts are widely seen not as attacks on Israelis. For many Israelis, the flag’s return to public visibility is sober and insistent. It reflects a society that understands itself to be under unprecedented global scrutiny but largely opting for affirmation in response to denigration from several countries previously seen as reliable allies.
The frequent desecrations of the flag are widely regarded as a symbolic attack on Israel’s legitimacy and as trying to sever the tie with Israel on the part of those attached to the country outside its borders. Such external hostility hasn’t weakened national pride in Israel and more often has served to reinforce it.
The shift from hostage posters to symbols of national pride is a declaration that mourning does not require self-erasure, and that solidarity does not depend on external approval. The name “Hostages’ Square” endures because Israel has chosen not to normalize what occurred. The clock has stopped. The days are no longer being counted, but they have not been forgotten.
Yet for many Israelis, closure still feels out of reach. Beneath the rituals of mourning and appreciation is a persistent and unresolved preoccupation: how did October 7 happen in the first place? Questions about intelligence failures, operational assumptions and political machinations remain unresolved. The return of the hostages has renewed rather than diminished the call for answers. For many Israelis, the stopped clock does not mark the end of reckoning, but the point at which reckoning commences.
Jack Jedwab is president of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute.
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