‘We don’t know what will happen’: northern Israeli town holds breath as Lebanon ceasefire to end

At a lookout on Tsfiya mountain in Metula, Israel’s northernmost town, a reservist commander delivered a geography lecture to dozens of new army conscripts, pointing out landmarks in the Lebanese valley below.

The two-month-old ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah meant the trip was safe, but the soldiers had been instructed to remove epaulettes and pins denoting their units anyway. Both sides warily observed the other: Hezbollah scouts were present in the nearest villages, the commander said, while an Israeli drone hummed overhead.

A 60-day truce that went into effect at the end of November between the Iran-allied militia and Israel halted a two-month-old Israeli ground invasion and more than a year of cross-border aerial attacks that drove tens of thousands of people in both countries from their homes. It is supposed to become a permanent ceasefire when it expires on Sunday – but just a day before the deadline, neither side has fulfilled their obligations.

“I was against the ceasefire. I would rather keep doing this for another year, or two years, if it means that Hezbollah is completely gone from the border,” David Azoulai, the head of Metula’s regional council, told the Guardian during a visit to the town’s underground command centre last week. The town is the most bombarded in the whole country, which is unsurprising given its location – a thin finger of land jutting north into the Lebanese countryside.

“If we stop now, residents will come back, we will rebuild, we will reinforce security. But we will be letting [Hezbollah] decide when the next disaster like 7 October will be,” Azoulai added, referring to the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 that triggered Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

On Friday, following a security cabinet meeting, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confirmed that Israel would not meet the deadline. In a statement his office said that since Lebanon’s armed forces had not “fully and effectively” enforced the agreement, in which Hezbollah is supposed to withdraw north of the Litani river, the Israeli army’s “gradual withdrawal process will continue, in full coordination with the US”.

What happens now is unclear. A day earlier, the Hezbollah MP Ali Fayyad warned that Israel’s failure to withdraw from Lebanon before the deadline would bring about the ceasefire’s collapse. While the Trump administration for now appears to support the Israeli decision, the president’s first term was characterised by a capricious approach to foreign policy.

“There are officials in the White House who are close to the president and oppose allowing the IDF to delay the withdrawal from Lebanon. What happens over the weekend will be critical not only to the Lebanese theatre, but also to the relationship between the administrations in Washington and Jerusalem,” commentator Ron Ben-Yishai wrote in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth on Friday.

Hezbollah, a Shia paramilitary group founded to fight Israeli occupation in the 1980s, started firing rockets, drones and missiles at its neighbour in solidarity with Hamas on 8 October 2023. The two traded cross-border fire for almost a year before Israel stepped up its air campaign and sent in ground troops.

Over two months of fighting, the Lebanese group suffered heavy losses of personnel and military equipment, including the killing of its longtime secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, in a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut. The faces of hundreds of its slain commanders and fighters now line walls and roadsides in the capital and Shia-majority areas.

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Hezbollah eventually limped to the negotiating table, agreeing in talks mediated by France and the US to a ceasefire that heavily favoured Israel. Crucially, Hezbollah dropped its demand that a ceasefire was contingent on an end to the fighting in Gaza. Since then, it has been further weakened by the collapse of ally Bashar al-Assad in neighbouring Syria.

On the other side of the UN-mandated blue line separating the two countries, the damage Israel has wrought on Lebanon is clear. The village of Kfar Kila, just 500m away from Metula, was home to about 10,000 people before the war, according to figures from the Lebanese non-profit Civil Society Knowledge Centre. Today, only a handful of buildings are still standing, the rest reduced to piles of broken concrete; the scene repeats across the south.

Many buildings in Metula are missing roofs, or have been damaged by fires caused by rockets and drones – but it is very clear which side has emerged better off. “You can see looking at the Lebanese side that we made them pay a price,” said the reservist commander, who asked not to be identified.

The war killed about 4,000 people in Lebanon, among them 1,000 women and children, according to the Lebanese health ministry. In Israel, the government says about 80 soldiers were killed, along with 47 civilians.

Despite repeated violations of the truce by both parties, many Lebanese have returned to damaged towns and villages the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have vacated. For Israelis displaced across the north of the country, however, going home still seems unthinkable.

Only 16 of Metula’s 1,700 residents have returned since the area was evacuated in October 2023. Nearby Kiryat Shmona, the area’s economic hub, was also deserted last week, save for a few factory workers. Findings from the Maagar Mochot research institution, released at the end of last year, suggested 70% of evacuees from northern Israel were considering never returning home.

In Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, 72-year-old Mezal Simcha, from the Bar’am kibbutz near the blue line, said she had been living in a hotel for 15 months. Her family was tired of the situation, she said, but her grandchildren would need to stay in the Tiberias area until schools in the north reopened.

“I went back to visit my house last week and it was fine, there were no rockets, but it still felt strange, like it wasn’t home any more,” she said. “I will go back when they say it’s safe, but it’s different for my daughters. They have to decide whether they want to risk their children’s lives.

“There are a lot of outside forces shaping these decisions. We don’t know what will happen, and it is not up to us.”