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Israel this week says, after its intense onslaught in Gaza, that it will now turn its focus to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. For months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire on their shared border - the border with Lebanon. NPR's Ruth Sherlock visited towns and cities close to Israel's northern border to meet some of the residents who have been fleeing these rockets and airstrikes.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: (Speaking Hebrew).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Hebrew).
SHERLOCK: (Speaking Hebrew).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Hebrew).
SHERLOCK: (Speaking Hebrew).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Hebrew).
SHERLOCK: At a hotel in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, I meet Tali Amar.
TALI AMAR: (Speaking Hebrew).
SHERLOCK: She's a resident of Shlomi, a small hill town of homes with gardens set amid pine and cypress trees, right on the border with Lebanon. But for almost a year now, Amar has lived here in this hotel.
AMAR: (Speaking Hebrew).
SHERLOCK: It's because, she says, Hezbollah are so close by to her home. NPR's producer Itay Stern interprets.
AMAR: (Through interpreter) And now they're on the border. It means that basically, if I'm going to Shlomi at night, I have to turn off the lights of my car. That's how dangerous it is.
SHERLOCK: For now, Haifa, about 25 miles from the border with Lebanon, is mostly calm. But drive just a few minutes north to the ancient port city of Akko, a place of Phoenician fortress walls and citadels, and the atmosphere is already different.
SHERLOCK: Uri Jeremias owns a fish restaurant that's famous throughout Israel for its delicious and unique dishes.
URI JEREMIAS: And as you can see, on a day like this, this place should have been fully booked a month ago, and we are now almost empty.
SHERLOCK: Jeremias remembers drones laden with explosives appearing before the glass-fronted restaurant.
JEREMIAS: Just in front of here, you know?
SHERLOCK: Just over the sea.
JEREMIAS: And - yeah, in the sea. And then I saw there were three drones that were flying very low, and the plane came from Haifa and just - (imitating explosions) - exploded the three of them, you know? And people sitting here and looking - and they didn't know what to do.
SHERLOCK: The drones were intercepted, as are many of the rockets fired into Israel. And fewer civilians have died in northern Israel than have been killed on the other side of the border by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon. But it is still dangerous on this side of the border. In Nahariya, the most northern city in Israel, just around 6 miles from the border, the atmosphere is tense.
Now the streets here are really dead. There's a few cars but very few people out on the streets. There is a sense of, you know, questioning what is to come.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: Shalom.
We enter a hotel there just as news comes of a rocket attack, over 140 missiles, a few miles northeast of the city. In Nahariya, warning sirens only buy residents a few seconds, or sometimes, the rocket impacts before the siren goes off. So this woman tells me, when she has to go outside, she makes a plan.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I'm thinking, where is the nearest shelter, OK? So if something happened, where should I go?
SHERLOCK: She's in this hotel with her family, as the border village where they live has been evacuated. She feels too insecure to give her name because the situation is so fluid.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: We don't know what is going to happen. We are waiting that something will happen so we can end it. OK? We want to go back to our homes.
SHERLOCK: She says she doesn't necessarily want Israel, with its new focus on the north, to escalate the war, but she'll support it if that's what it takes to get her home. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Nahariya. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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