ARAB AL-ARAMSHE, ISRAEL — Inside the shrapnel-pocked school building, children’s drawings are strewn about and traces of blood dot the floor. The playground outside is littered with debris, and a burned-out car sits in the parking lot. Children ride their bicycles through the streets while families in this Israeli village less than 1 kilometer from the border with Lebanon sip coffee on their porches, seemingly unperturbed by the risk of all-out war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school.
“It’s an academy for the children, but the soldiers were inside,” the 33-year-old Suidan said. The kids “go there to learn, for activities, and the soldiers during the war go to sleep there.” For the village’s Arab community, the school is incredibly important, as it allows a degree of autonomy relative to sending their children to schools in nearby kibbutzim.
Photo: Theia Chatelle
While the Israeli government ordered residents of this and other nearby villages to evacuate last October, Suidan estimates nearly 70 percent of Arab al-Aramshe’s residents have returned as the war drags on. Yet the military has not changed course, continuing to station soldiers in the villages that dot the country’s northern border, putting civilians in harm’s way.
Those risks have intensified over the past week, as Israel accused Hezbollah of bombing the occupied Golan Heights in a strike that killed 12 children and retaliated by assassinating a Hezbollah commander in a targeted strike outside Beirut. The assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday added even more fuel to an already volatile situation.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions from The Intercept.
The IDF’s practice of embedding its troops among civilians in the north mirrors the alleged “human shields” policy for which it has repeatedly condemned Hamas. “Israel’s engagement with the issue of human shields is double-edged,” said Tamara Kharroub, deputy executive director of Arab Center Washington D.C. “While Israel routinely uses civilians as human shields in its military operations, it employs this very accusation as a primary element in its propaganda operations and in justifying the killing of civilians.”
Though international law dictates that schools and hospitals have special status as safe havens for civilians, if a military force stations its troops or other military infrastructure inside of the school or hospital, it can then be declared a legitimate military target. This is the pretext Israel has used to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure in the wake of October 7, claiming, for example, that Gaza’s largest hospital was actually a Hamas command center. The military has also claimed to find weapons in a school building where civilians were sheltered and has released propaganda footage displaying weapons inside of schools in Gaza. Meanwhile, rights groups have documented the IDF’s use of human shields in the besieged enclave — sometimes quite literally. In June, for instance, Israeli troops detained a family in front of their tanks to protect their soldiers from gunfire.
Whether Israel’s decision to station its troops alongside civilians in the north is willful negligence or a conscious decision to create a strategic advantage in its fight against Hezbollah isn’t known. Either way, the fighting in Israel’s north varies significantly from its war on Gaza. Compared to Gaza, the mountainous north is sparsely populated, meaning Israel has ample opportunity to install troops and outposts far away from civilian infrastructure.
“It is evident,” Kharroub said, “that Israel exploits civilians by any means necessary for its goals of expansionism, domination, and ethnic cleansing.”
A Short-Lived Evacuation
Fearing Hezbollah would launch an invasion in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel immediately ordered an evacuation in the north, a district with a population of 1.2 million people, the majority of whom are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the vast majority live in Nazareth in the center of the region or along the coast, there are dozens of villages that line the Israel–Lebanon border, some within 1 kilometer. About 60,000 residents of those villages were displaced because of the war. Many of them fled to Akka and Haifa, two coastal cities located outside of the evacuation zone but still within 40 kilometers of Lebanon, and others left to live with family in other parts of the country.
As the fighting continued indefinitely, they eventually decided to return.
Families with school-age children who had been displaced by the war struggled to find suitable alternatives for their education. Israel’s Druze and Arab minorities yearned for the communities and families they had established in their villages. The financial compensation offered by Israel to evacuee families was deemed insufficient by local residents. “We don’t really need much money, but with children, it’s not enough. If you have to rent a house somewhere and send children to school, it’s inadequate,” said a woman from Mattat, an Israeli settlement near Lebanon.
“It’s absurd to stay in a motel for six or seven months. It’s crazy. And the compensation is minimal even if you do leave,” Suidan expressed. “We had a war here in 2006, but I think this is worse. It’s dangerous with Lebanon so close by.”
Unlike the well-equipped southern Israel with numerous bomb shelters, villages like Arab al-Aramshe lacked sufficient shelters to protect their residents during wartime. Even after a strike in April, the IDF maintained a presence in the village. IDF vehicles were still present in late July, and a holding pool was set up for firefighters to combat wildfires caused by Hezbollah attacks. Thousands of acres have been burned due to falling debris and missile impacts since October 7.
Israel continued to mobilize reservists to combat Hezbollah, whose military capabilities had grown since the 2006 conflict. While Israel condemned Hezbollah for targeting civilians, the casualty numbers painted a different picture. Lebanon reported 450 deaths, including 100 civilians, compared to 23 civilian and 17 soldier deaths in Israel.
“There’s no better place for me than this,” he said. “Maybe Hezbollah can kill me, but you cannot make me afraid,” said Amitai, who along with his wife Golani, shared only their first names with me.
Amitai and Golani, both born in 1948 and 1951 respectively, welcomed me into their home and offered me coffee and pastries. They mentioned that they had never left Israel since birth. Amitai did mention visiting Jordan and Syria but added, “they are Israel too,” referring to those countries.
While many Israelis see the conflict with Hamas as a matter of existence, opinions differ when it comes to the rising tensions with Hezbollah. “I don’t think we can win,” said Rafael, a resident of Mattat who preferred to remain anonymous. “There is no winning. We occupied Lebanon in the first war, and it was terrible. Nothing good came out of it.”
Rafael was cautious when discussing military activities in Mattat, where the IDF had recently set up an outpost. He mentioned that after a foreign journalist visited the kibbutz in June to report on the impact of the war on Israeli civilians, the military instructed residents to evacuate, fearing that the journalist might reveal their location and attract Hezbollah attacks.
“So we prefer not to disclose how many people are here,” Rafael explained. “We don’t even know.” The deserted outpost is situated just a few feet away from houses that, as per Rafael, have been sporadically occupied during the war.
