Manara, Israel
Orna Weinberg can read my eyes. “In peacetime, this is heaven,” she says from atop a mountain ridge overlooking the Hula valley. The kibbutz of Manara, in Israel’s Upper Galilee, is breathtaking. Yet it feels obscene to take in the beauty amid so much pain. The only conclusion from our brisk walk through her battered, dangerous, evacuated community is that Hezbollah has made the north of Israel into hell.
The people here are no fragile flowers. “I learned to walk in a bomb shelter,” Ms. Weinberg, 57, a caregiver, says cheerfully. Frederieke Shamia, 48, stresses that “this community had never evacuated, ever—until now.” Rockets from Lebanon and Syria are nothing new to northern Israel, “but the antitank missiles changed everything,” Ms. Weinberg says. Her home was the second in Manara to be hit.
The southwest of the kibbutz is closed off. “The moment Hezbollah sees movement inside a building there, they fire,” Ms. Shamia says. “Turn on a light or adjust a blind—they fire.” Unlike the rockets, which can be intercepted and are typically inaccurate, the antitank guided missiles hit their targets in seconds.
Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy that holds the real power in Lebanon, fired on Manara half an hour before I got there. We drove east through an empty Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, which received 30 rockets that day, the first of Ramadan.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.ruthfullyyours.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.