KFAR GILADI, Israel -- By the time the air-raid sirens sound in this kibbutz near the Lebanon border, Hezbollah's missiles are often only seconds away.
Since war between Israel and Hezbollah returned in early March, the place looks like a well-maintained ghost town, with clean roads and tidy gardens, but no one around. The hundreds of people who live here keep mostly out of sight, trying to stay within steps of a shelter. The clap of outgoing artillery fire is almost constant as the Israeli military lobs explosives at the forests just across the border.
It is dangerous. It is loud. But to those who can bear it, it is home.
Israel is trying to carve out a buffer zone inside neighboring Lebanon that is deep enough to put communities like this one beyond the reach of Hezbollah. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, the group launched its own missile and drone strikes across the border, triggering Israel's most forceful offensive against it in two decades. Israel's strategy requires massive manpower and risks entangling it in a long and unpopular occupation.
Many Israelis still think it is a better option than evacuating civilians from the border.
"We want them to finish this, so we can feel safe," said Natasha Amir, 57, whose front porch on the edge of the kibbutz overlooks the border. "Mine is the first house between us and them, and as long as Hezbollah is there, this is what they'll do," she said.
After the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli authorities feared a similar incursion by the much more powerful Hezbollah and ordered some 65,000 people who lived along the northern border to leave their homes. Abandoned towns became battle zones in their absence. The decision was costly and controversial, with critics saying it ceded ground to militants and undermined civilians' trust in the state to protect them.
The north has slowly been repopulated, and almost everyone from Kfar Giladi came back. Some residents said their families had been here for generations. Amir, a Christian who migrated from South Africa some 30 years ago, said she was drawn by the socialist-inspired lifestyle of the kibbutzim, and the pastoral landscape of nearby hills draped with the purple flowers of almond trees in bloom.
Staying in the north has meant adjusting to a state of high alert. Elisheva Blum, a teacher who lives in the nearby town of Metula, said she strategizes when to run out for groceries, and drives as fast as she can. If she walks somewhere, she's constantly scanning her surroundings for a shelter or a ditch to hide in.
Since its foundation, Israel has incentivized the settlement of frontier lands as part of its security architecture. The idea was that a civilian presence legitimized the state by creating facts on the ground, while also serving as a physical barrier between hostile neighbors and Israel's power centers. The Oct. 7 attack showed how dangerous that could be -- Israel's protective buffer needed a buffer of its own.
"By choosing to live here we're the first line of defense," said Raz Malka, a 25-year-old resident of Kiryat Shmona, a town next to Kfar Giladi. "We provide security for Israel, and Israel must provide for us."
Israeli military leaders say they have three aims in Lebanon: damage Hezbollah as much as possible, strengthen defenses and push the threat far enough away from the border that it can't hurt Israeli civilians.
Tactically, that has meant a blistering offensive that has displaced more than a million people in Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley. Lebanon's Health Ministry said last week that the fighting had killed more than 1,000 people but didn't specify how many were combatants. Israel's military said it has killed more than 400 Hezbollah operatives. Airstrikes wrecked entire neighborhoods in the capital along with bridges Israel says were used to move weapons and fighters to the south.
On the ground, Israeli troops have crossed the border to search homes and stake out what the military calls forward defensive positions on strategic hilltops. Israeli officials have said they aim to empty the area south of the Litani River, a natural border demarcating a demilitarized zone overseen by United Nations peacekeepers, in which Hezbollah nonetheless survived and secretly sought to rebuild.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said this week that the military was ordered to destroy all bridges and houses used by militants in the south, likening the operation to Israel's leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza.
Whether and how quickly Israel can achieve its goals in Lebanon remains to be seen. Overshadowed by the war with Iran, Israel has so far faced little resistance from the U.S., its most important ally, over its actions in the north.
"I think right now the Israelis have carte blanche in Lebanon," said David Daoud, an expert on Hezbollah at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.
Long considered one of the world's most formidable militias, Hezbollah was weakened by Israeli attacks over the past two years. But the group has proved that it is still lethal with a series of drone, missile and rocket attacks that have killed at least two Israeli soldiers and injured civilians since early March.
Before Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hezbollah was estimated to possess around 75,000 missiles and rockets capable of reaching anywhere in Israel, according to Tal Beeri, head of the research department at the Alma Center, an Israeli security think tank. On the eve of the current conflict, about a third of that was assessed to remain in its arsenal, Beeri said.
Most are short- to medium-range, about 50 to 130 miles, Beeri said. Alongside those are a small number, up to several dozen, of longer-range missiles such as the Iranian Fateh-110, which can travel about 200 miles, and likely a few Scud-D missiles that can carry an 1,100-pound warhead some 400 miles.
An Israeli military official said one of the biggest threats is highly accurate, short-range antitank missiles like Russian Kornets and Iranian Almas with up to a 10-mile range. These were used to devastating effect during the group's 2024 war with Israel, ripping through schools, homes and vehicles.
Orna Mizrahi, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser who is now with the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank, said their short flight time makes them harder to intercept than bigger, longer-range weapons.
"We have a very good aerial defense against medium- to long-range missiles," she said,"but these, less so."