This cease-fire deal won't get me to return home to northern Israel
The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Lebanon feels like déjà vu — and not the good kind. As a resident of Shlomi in northern Israel who has been displaced for more than a year since Hezbollah unleashed a relentless rocket-fire campaign the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in the south, I do not support this deal. It shows that the Israeli government hasn’t learned the lessons of Oct. 7 and expects my family and neighbors to pay the price.
The government also hasn’t learned the lessons of 2006. That’s when Hezbollah sparked a 34-day with Israel by killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others in a surprise cross-border attack. Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of two others, ended with the acceptance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701. This cease-fire agreement, which serves as the model for the recently proposed one, established a buffer zone — mandating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the presence of the peacekeeping U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the area and Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River — and required the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.”
Instead, Hezbollah reoccupied the buffer zone and rearmed under UNIFIL’s indifferent supervision, if not its tacit approval. Iranian and Russian weapons flowed in, and sleepy Lebanese villages were transformed into fortresses. For years, residents of the north — my neighbors — had reported hearing the sound of digging. I heard it myself. Our government dismissed these concerns, telling us we were imagining things or hearing rain in the gutters.
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