For months, Erez Bergman had been working to encourage the evacuated residents of northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, to return to their homes, with the hope that children could return to their schools this fall and residents could fix up the damage wrought by Hezbollah’s missiles and drones.
Like 80,000 other Israelis from the north, Mr. Bergman, 51, his wife Maya and their three school-age children left their house in Kibbutz Snir last October, after the Israeli government decided to distance residents from the northern border — the first such mass evacuation of the area in Israel’s history.
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel and the Israeli military was hitting back, leading to months of tit-for-tat attacks that hit villages and towns in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
In April, the Bergmans decided to return to Snir, a cooperative village in the picturesque Galilee Panhandle, a finger of Israeli territory that juts upward along the border. But in late July they had to leave again — for how long this time, they don’t know — as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah reached their highest level in months. Mr. Bergman and other northern residents now say they feel as if they may be looking at “another lost year.”
Before the latest escalation in violence, Mr. Bergman had been spearheading a “Coming Home” project on behalf of the local council with the aim of bringing as many of the evacuees as possible back for the start of the new school year on Sept. 1. He came back with his family “out of Zionism,” he said in mid-July, sitting at the family’s dining table with a panoramic view of southern Lebanon.