Northern Israel Residents Fear a Broader War

Razor wire curls around the nectarine and almond trees flowering in this tiny farming community a few yards from Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Farmers are buying guns. The children spend afternoons in bomb shelters. Bullet holes pockmark the local military base. And many families are thinking of leaving.

“People are terrified now,” said Haim Briton, 32, who heard shots whiz by his head last week as he tended his fruit trees growing along the border fence. “All day, every day, we are in great danger.”

For the first time in decades, Hezbollah and Palestinian guerrillas are repeatedly attacking small northern Israeli towns and military bases outside the traditionally disputed territory along the frontier.

Launched in response to Israel’s offensive in the West Bank, the attacks threaten to broaden the conflict into a wider war with Lebanon and Syria, which back the radical groups.

And they could draw the Israeli army into a demanding, two-front conflict that would drain resources and invite even more intensive terrorist activity by Palestinian militants within the country.

“This place could escalate in minutes,” said Maj. Dinor Shavit, an officer in the northern command responsible for the border.

In the last two weeks, Hezbollah batteries have launched Katyusha rockets against several small towns along Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria. Guerrillas have fired machine guns and launched mortar rounds at Israeli surveillance stations and military outposts.

There have been 23 attacks, including gun and mortar assaults, since January against border areas, including a disputed region that Hezbollah claims belongs to Lebanon. That compares with 19 over the last two years. Mortar and rocket attacks have long taken place in the disputed region, known as Shabaa Farms, but they now occur almost nightly.

So far, the attacks have failed to do serious damage. Several soldiers have been wounded, and some military buildings have been hit. No civilians have been killed or injured.

As a result, many Israeli political and military figures speculate that the attacks are intended to divert Israeli military forces from the West Bank, or are meant as a political gesture by Hezbollah to demonstrate support for the Palestinians.

The danger remains, however, that a stray round or a rogue militant could end up killing a civilian. And that would bring retaliation of some sort against Lebanon, Syria or both.

Yossi Sarid, leader of a left-wing opposition party, is intimately aware of the dangers. During a recent visit to his second home in the northern border town of Margaliyot, he stepped outside his front porch to watch mortar shells burst against a distant mountain.

From his kitchen window, he could see Hezbollah guerrillas at a border post a few hundred yards away prepare their breakfast. Rockets had sailed over his home in recent days.

“One shot through a window, and the Israelis will come. Once a border village is attacked, retaliation will be inevitable,” he said. “The whole Middle East will be in a war that no one intended to launch.”

One of the sad things about the new wave of attacks is that the border region along Lebanon and Israel has defied expectations since Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon two years ago, ending nearly two decades of occupation.

Instead of renewed border skirmishes, communities on both sides experienced two years of relative calm. Israeli towns saw an influx of tourists. Unemployment dropped, and industry returned. Lebanese families returned to towns abandoned during the occupation and began planting crops along the border again.

But the recent surge in violence has reversed those gains, at least along the Israeli side. Avivim is a case in point.

The town, a collective farm known as a moshav, lies only a few yards from the rusted fence that marks the border with Lebanon, in a remote region of northern Israel. This time of year, bright red poppies and yellow daisies fill broad meadows. The rolling hills are green, filled with the scent of pine and fruit blossoms.

The town is surrounded by orchards, chicken coops and Lebanon. An Israeli military surveillance station sits on one side of the town. Villagers can see Hezbollah guerrillas guarding their own outposts on the hills above.

Two Katyusha rockets and several mortar shells came streaking from those hills April 7 about 6 p.m., according to villagers and military officials. A few moments later, as residents ran with their children to the village’s cheerily painted bomb shelters, Hezbollah guerrillas pulled alongside the fence in several cars and opened fire with a machine gun.

The attack seemed directed mostly at the surveillance outpost. A rocket landed close to the guard shack, leaving a black hole in the ground. Bullets nicked holes in the building. At least four soldiers were injured.

The only damage done to the town was in the chicken coops, where eggs were shattered.

Still, it reminded villagers of the dark times in the 1970s and early 1980s when such attacks were frequent. A monument in the center of the village commemorates the deaths of 12 children in an attack against the village’s school bus.

Farmers have stopped going out into their fields, leading to economic worries. After-school activities now take place in bomb shelters that have been wired for computers and television sets. And some farmers have begun to arm themselves.

“We’ve never been frightened like we are frightened today,” said Joshua Levi, a 26-year-old egg farmer. “We are hoping things will be OK, but we have no idea what will happen.”

Menara, a small kibbutz a few miles up a winding mountain road from Avivim, has not been attacked, though a nearby Israeli military post was hit by small-arms fire April 7.

But the sound of rockets fired on another nearby town has echoed through the community, located on cliffs overlooking the Hula valley. And the threat of violence has scared away tourists. Of 51 guest rooms, none are occupied.

“It’s unbelievable. Nothing happened all along [Menara’s] border until last month,” said Dan Ilan, the 65-year-old community director.

“We were the quiet place to be,” Ilan said. “Since things have heated up, nobody is coming here.”

The attacks have not been confined to small villages. In Kiryat Shemona, the largest regional town, Katyusha rockets have begun falling, leaving fragments in outlying areas, according to locals and Israeli military officials.

The rockets have not done any damage to the town or its residents. But they have brought back memories of the past, when about 36 local people were killed and many more wounded in hundreds of such attacks before the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

The question for many here is what the Israeli army will do. There is no appetite for an invasion of Lebanon or Syria, though Sarid, the opposition leader, said such a move could not be ruled out.

Most Israelis here in northern Israel continue to call for restraint. Kiryat Shemona’s mayor has gone so far as to ask that the military stay put even if civilians are killed by accident.

“If we remain restrained, everything can return to normal,” Mayor Haim Barbivai said.

So far, efforts to stop the bombing have focused on Syria, which also wields considerable power in Lebanon. Vice President Dick Cheney called Syrian President Bashar Assad to ask him to halt the operations. In a visit to the region Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded the same thing.

Even as Powell received a briefing on the situation from Israeli military officials, mortar shells flew across the disputed border about 20 miles away.

*

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report from Safed, Israel.