Israel shoots down Iran's missiles, but we face tough questions about Gaza – and our future

Hours before Iran attacked Israel early Sunday with a barrage of more than 300 ballistic missiles, attack drones and cruise missiles, I tucked my children into bed and readied the in-home bomb shelter in our apartment in central Israel.

When the booms started outside shortly before 2 a.m., shaking my shutters and waking me from a fitful sleep, I went to my balcony to scan the skies. I didn’t get much shut-eye over the next few hours while Israel’s anti-missile system shot down the threats along with the help of Israeli, U.S., U.K. and even Jordanian warplanes.

We were lucky: Our city has no air-raid sirens, my kids slept through the entire assault and the worst casualty of the attack on Israel appeared to be a serious injury to a 7-year-old Arab Israeli girl.

Iran called the operation a “full success.”

Iran-backed Hezbollah is just over the next hill

I actually felt more danger a few days earlier, when I was in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona interviewing someone outside his fast-food restaurant and an air raid siren sounded. There, the threat is more immediate: Hezbollah is just over the next hill, and we only had seconds to take cover.

As our phones buzzed with alerts from Israel’s Homefront Command, my interlocutor hopped up from our sidewalk table and rushed me into his kitchen, along with half a dozen customers who were there for a late-afternoon lunch.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, was firing missiles, probably from the mountain ridge just a mile and a half away demarcating Israel’s border with Lebanon. A minute later came another alert and another siren: drone infiltration.

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When the immediate threat passed, we headed back outside and resumed our conversation. Just steps away from our table were the scorched remains of a Hezbollah strike from November, when a missile hit some gas canisters, exploded, and set the street and nearby vehicles ablaze. A bystander was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds to the chest, but no one was killed.

This city of 25,000 was evacuated in the early days of Israel’s war with Hamas, after Hezbollah joined in and began shelling northern Israel with rockets, antitank missiles and unmanned aircraft.

Six months on, the only change is that Hezbollah’s attacks – at least 3,100 so far, according to the Israel Defense Forces – have grown more frequent. About two dozen civilians and soldiers in northern Israel have been killed in the attacks, while Israeli reprisals in Lebanon and Syria have killed more than 350, most of whom have been Hezbollah fighters, according to Hezbollah tallies.

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Israel faces fundamental questions about our future

The persistence of the conflict in northern Israel, including Iran’s attack this weekend, is a reminder that although the war in Gaza has shifted to a low burn half a year since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the regional conflict it sparked is still is very much unresolved.

For those of us living in Israel, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re treading water, moving no closer to resolution of the urgent dilemmas the country faces.

That’s hard enough for ordinary Israelis. It’s gut-wrenching for the families of those still held captive in Gaza, the 60,000 residents of northern Israel who have been evacuated from their homes due to attacks by Hezbollah, and the countless other Israelis displaced from their destroyed communities near Gaza.

It also weighs on the spirits of those who have lost loved ones in this war and those still serving in the army.

Israel faces four major unresolved issues that raise fundamental questions about the country’s future:

• How will Israel restore security to its northern border region so that residents can return to their homes?

• How does Israel plan to resolve the war in Gaza, adequately address the humanitarian crisis facing Gazans and deliver real security to Israel’s southern border communities?

• Will Israel be able to recover its surviving hostages in Gaza, and how many more will die before that happens?

• How long must Israelis wait before they get a chance to weigh in on the country’s leadership with a vote, and what will Israel’s political realignment look like after elections?

The answers to these questions will shape Israel’s future. But instead of tackling them with the urgency they demand, Israel’s parliament went on recess, not to return till mid-May.

“The government is abandoning us,” said Tony Abutbul, owner of the shawarma restaurant I visited in Kiryat Shmona, where a few hundred people remain in the evacuated city. “We don’t know how we’ll return or when. I support any decision to end this situation so we can go back to normal life.”

In many ways, the war in northern Israel presents the greatest conundrum. Compared with Hamas, Hezbollah represents a much more potent threat. It has more and better trained fighters, more advanced weaponry and a powerful patron in Iran. Despite Israeli counterstrikes, including on Iranian military commanders and Hezbollah supply lines deep inside Syria, Hezbollah’s offensive capabilities remain very much intact.

In an all-out war, Hezbollah likely would wreak far more destruction inside Israel than Hamas rockets have. Yet without a war, Israelis who live near the border won’t be able to return to their homes until Hezbollah decides to stop attacking them.

Even then, how will they be able to sleep securely without the fear that one day, Hezbollah will storm across the border and do exactly the same thing to them that Hamas did to residents of southern Israel? It’s no secret that Hezbollah long has harbored plans for an Oct. 7-style attack as part of a quest to conquer Israel’s northern Galilee.

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In Gaza, the war to bring security to Israel’s southern communities is underway. But it’s far from clear that it will achieve its aim of defeating Hamas. The group’s offensive capabilities have been degraded but not destroyed, and 133 Israeli hostages remain in captivity. At least 30 of them are confirmed dead. Right now, it feels like a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Israel’s handling of the war, including the killing of more than 32,000 Palestinians, is ravaging its international standing.

Allies are halting arms sales to Israel or facing intense public pressure to do so, the United Nations Security Council recently has called for cease-fire in Gaza, and young people all over the world are calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” – a call that Israelis understand to mean the nation's elimination.

Finally, there’s the question of leadership. Israel’s leaders are the very people who failed to prevent the Oct. 7 attack or react quickly enough once it started to stop Hamas’ murder, kidnapping, rape and arson. There will have to be an accounting. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, clinging to power with the help of his far-right allies and unwilling even to offer an apology for his failures, has resisted calls for early elections.

So Israel is stuck – with its leaders, its hostage crisis, tens of thousands of internal refugees and an unresolved war.

How much longer can this endure?

Uriel Heilman, a native of New York, is a journalist living in Israel. 

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Israel shoots down Iran attack, but faces uncertain future beyond Gaza