While Kiryat Shmona has been evacuated for many months due to its proximity to Israel’s northern border, not all of the city’s more than 20,000 residents have left. Some 3,000 people have remained behind – and they make up the strongest and the weakest members of the city’s population, Yael Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) explained to The Jerusalem Post.
Israel’s North has been under near-constant attack since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7. Cities up to two kilometers from the border are evacuated, with residents spread throughout the country in hotels and apartments. In recent weeks, the number of drone and rocket attacks have been increasing, and huge fires have broken out as a result of impacts.
In spite of this, not everyone who is eligible to leave their home is willing or able to do so.
“You have two different groups of people who have remained,” said Eckstein. “One is the leaders, the strongest, the bravest, who are able to actually stay there in order to contribute.”
These are people “whose families were all evacuated, and they’re there driving [and living] under rocket attack, under drone attack, in order to make sure those who have remained are safe and in order to protect the infrastructure,” she explained.
The other group that has remained behind in the city are those who are not able to leave, the IFCJ head explained. Many of these people are elderly and struggle with financial difficulties, or without the support of their family. These are the people who say “‘I’d rather die in my home than live as a refugee’ – and they don’t evacuate,” Eckstein said.
Among those who have stayed because they could not leave are families with young children, many of whom also did not evacuate because of financial difficulties.
Although these families are offered government help in evacuating, for many who still have to pay mortgages and other expenses and whose employment has been hurt by the war, evacuating is not necessarily feasible.
MANY OF these families have moved into public bomb shelters. Eckstein described visiting a shelter, and meeting a family with three children. She spoke with one of the children and asked her what the hardest thing was for her about the situation.
“She said, ‘I refuse to shower; I was in the shower when an alarm sounded and I had to run out and I didn’t have time to put on my towel, and I didn’t know what to do. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life. And I heard the boom very close by and I’m never showering. I’m not showering until this is over.’”
Eckstein described meeting with another child living in a public shelter. The nine-year-old boy “looked a little bit, you know, punky. He had an earring and he had a mohawk” haircut, she said, adding that this led her to believe that he would put on a brave face for her.
But when Eckstein placed her hand on his back and asked him how he was doing, he surprised her. “He broke down crying like a little baby,” she remembered.
“He said, ‘I’m scared I’m going to die here. Every single day, there are more and more and more rockets; every day, there are more and more drones, they could just come over that mountain and come and get us like they did on October 7 around Gaza. I’m just scared I’m gonna die.’”
This feeling of fear and the inability to do even the most basic daily tasks was not felt only by the children Eckstein met.
A mother living in the shelter with her three children also described this existential fear. “She said to me, ‘every day, every morning, we do a sort of raffle for all the families living in the shelter [to determine] who’s going to go out and buy the pita – because by going out and buying the pita, we’re risking our lives.”
The fellowship’s leader recounted being shocked that one of the things the families asked her organization to provide them with, in the emergency kits they supplied, was water.
“Now, I have toured the war zone of Ukraine. I have gone around all the different parts of Ethiopia. I’ve seen that look of [needing] water during a war and during a crisis and in third world countries. But I was standing here in Kiryat Shmona, two hours away from Tel Aviv, and what they’re asking me for is water.”
How the IFCJ helps Northerners
THE IFCJ supports Beit Batya, a soup kitchen in Kiryat Shmona, along with 20 others as far south as Eilat. During the war, all of them have remained operational and they have increased funding to the Kiryat Shmona soup kitchen to enable it to provide more meals.
The soup kitchen’s chef is part of the first group of people who have stayed in the city described by Eckstein. While his family has evacuated to Tiberias, “he hasn’t missed a day of cooking hundreds of meals and having them distributed to people around the town,” she said.
While he used to arrive at the soup kitchen at around four or five in the morning to begin preparing meals, he now arrives at 1 a.m. because he has less volunteers than during peacetime, and works through the night, Eckstein said. He does this “to make sure that the meals are ready for when the elderly are waking up and expecting them.”
Many of the peacetime volunteers who have left the city have been replaced by members of the kitot konenut (emergency security teams) and other residents who have remained to contribute, she said.
“It’s kind of [a situation where] everyone who’s remained in the town, who’s in a position to be able to help, has taken on every single role.”
The soup kitchen’s operations have been significantly impacted by the situation. The lack of volunteers meant that the IFCJ had to supply it with a refrigerated truck to be able to deliver the food with less volunteers, and the kitchen recently took a direct hit from a rocket.
Miraculously, “within less than 24 hours, we were back in business making meals, which is simply mind blowing,” said Eckstein. The rocket did not detonate, and so did not destroy the building, she said.
“So it did the damage to the structure, but if it would have exploded, it would have blown apart the entire building.”
ECKSTEIN SAYS that nothing she heard about the city in the lead up to her visit prepared her for the suffering of its residents that she encountered. “It was heartbreaking and terrifying.”
She described bringing a meal to the one of the people the kitchen serves – a Holocaust survivor who told her that “at her age” she refuses to leave her home.
Eckstein only had one meal with her, and the truck with the other meals followed a few minutes behind, but as soon as people saw her with the food, many elderly residents came out to ask her if she had their delivery.
“It was like a ghost town,” she said, but “suddenly you [see] over a dozen elderly people coming out” to ask about food “because this is the food they are waiting for in order to eat that day,” she said, emphasizing how vital it is to the residents who have not been able to leave the town.
“People always ask me, ‘where’s the government? Where’s the government?’” Eckstein said.
“Our answer is always: We trust the government is doing as much as they can. We don’t look and say, ‘Where’s the government?’ We look and say, ‘How can we save lives?’ If there is a situation on the ground where people need us, we will not give in to the bureaucracy or [waiting for round] tables or waiting and pointing fingers – we will be there in an instant in order to help.”
Helping the residents of Kiryat Shmona is not only about providing for them, Eckstein said. “I think it’s a very incorrect assumption: to feel or think that we, in the rest of Israel, are not connected to what’s happening there,” the IFCJ leader said.
“If Kiryat Shmona is a ghost town, if there is absolutely no one there, then we don’t have Kiryat Shmona.”