EILON, Israel—When the sun sets on this depopulated kibbutz near the Israel-Lebanon border, packs of jackals roam its streets and add their voices to the thuds and explosions that reverberate here 24/7.
The jackals moved in recently—along with owls, porcupines and wild boars—following the departure of almost all residents after Oct. 8 last year. That was when Hezbollah terrorists began firing thousands of rockets from Lebanon into Israel in solidarity with Hamas’s massacre the previous day.
As in dozens of border-adjacent locales in Israel’s north, only a handful of Eilon’s 1,100-odd residents remain in the once-vibrant community two miles from the border. Now, its manicured hedges and lush lawns are slowly being reclaimed by nature.
Guided by the pioneering Zionism that began bolstering Jewish presence in the Galilee a century ago, some remainers have declined government-funded room and board further south. Others stay because they’ve not been offered this option—and would leave if they were.
Whether by choice or not, those who stay do without public transportation, medical or postal services. Many have only partial access to groceries. The children who live here have no real educational frameworks. In addition to rocket and drone fire, the threat of cross-border raids worries some here, too.
Nimrod and Zvia Getzov rue the government’s decision to evacuate Eilon’s residents along with some 60,000 other Israelis from border-adjacent communities.
“It was a huge error. A panicked reaction of the leadership, including the local leadership,” said Nimrod, an archeologist who also does metalwork for the kibbutz. “It’s a terrible, terrible look. You don’t leave this land,” added Nimrod, a septuagenarian who is one of about 20 remainers in Eilon.

Not all of the area’s communities were evacuated. In Avdon, a moshav near Eilon that’s also about two miles from the border, hundreds live in Hezbollah’s crosshairs amid frequent rocket sirens. The government has declined their requests for state-funded housing, stating that “operational considerations” don’t require its evacuation. This has drawn allegations of callousness and arbitrariness from some of the locals, including Dikla Nasimi, a single mother of one.
“It’s not suitable for raising small children,” Nasimi said of her moshav, established in the 1950s by immigrants from Tunisia. Her son, Eliron, has anxiety. His rehabilitation for medical issues that have complicated his development has stopped because the clinic that does it is closed.
“I simply don’t have the money to move. Like many in Avdon, I’m trapped here,” said Nasimi, who works as a lawyer. She is encouraged by the government’s decision last month to intensify the fighting against Hezbollah after nearly a year of a more constrained approach toward the terrorist group. “But they’re still firing rockets and we’re still sitting ducks,” Nasimi told JNS.
Back in Eilon, the sounds of war and wildlife that fill the kibbutz can feel eerie to some, Zvia Getzov, a mother of four, told JNS, “but not to me. I get startled by the rockets, sure, but overall I feel safe here,” she said. The couple had tried a state-provided luxury hotel in Israel’s south, they recalled. “It was fine for two days. On the third we wanted to go home,” she said.

Nimrod has attempted to persuade other kibbutzniks—the ones without small children in need of education frameworks—to return, he said, noting how “only a handful of rockets” have hit Eilon and the unlikeliness of a cross-border raid from Lebanon.
“They responded with a blanket ‘no’,” Getzov noted dryly. Some are genuinely afraid, “and I can’t argue with that,” he said. Others, however, “enjoy the situation’s comforts. The hotel buffet,” he alleged.
Getzov worries about the situation’s optics.
“In 1948, many Arabs fled because their leaders told them to evacuate temporarily. They never returned. Now we look like we’re in their shoes. We’re not, we’re here to stay and the Galilee will be rehabilitated. But it looks bad,” he told JNS.
Eilon, Getzov noted, had been partially evacuated before, in 1948, when children and pregnant women left, following weeks of internal debates, during the War of Independence. By contrast, the decision to evacuate the kibbutz this time around “was made so lightly, so arbitrarily, by a handful of bureaucrats,” he said at the couple’s three-bedroom home.
Established in 1938, Eilon is full of reminders of its Zionist heritage. A main square features disused tractors and agricultural machinery, painted in bright colors and turned into climbable statues. An old bunker overlooks the main road to the kibbutz, complete with a gutted machine gun painted pink.
A relatively large kibbutz, Eilon is usually a vibrant place, with a pool and sports center, and even a music conservatory with its own student dorms. Now, however, it appears deserted but for the graying group of stayers and some troops—mostly reservists—who guard it.

Some of the reservists are themselves locals who stayed behind while their families were evacuated. One of them, Asaf Ben Lulu, recently described to this reporter how it felt to guard the depopulated locale where he and his wife have raised their two children since 2019.
It’s “like watching the shell of something beautiful after its soul has been taken out,” Ben Lulu said of his kibbutz. “Every other tree is a memory, every path brings back the echoes of where the kids played hide-and-seek or learned to cycle or just helped me rake some leaves.”
A number of Eilon’s remainers are young. One resident, a dental-implants dealer, moved back to the kibbutz after spending several months at a hotel in Acre, a nearby city that is also often targeted by Hezbollah. “Acre’s under rocket threat. Tel Aviv. Jerusalem, Haifa. There’s nowhere to evacuate to. So I might as well stay home,” said the man, who has no children. He requested not to be named in this article to avoid damage to his business, which exports implants abroad.
Like many veterans of Israel’s kibbutz movement, the Getzovs are unapologetically left-wing and loathe the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They blame its pro-settlement policies for the absence of peace between Israel and some of its neighbors.

Netanyahu’s reluctance to help establish a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, Nimrod said, is partly to blame for the Hamas-led onslaught on Oct. 7, 2023, in which its terrorists murdered or killed some 1,200 Israelis and abducted Another 251.
“If we had a Palestinian state, then it could replace Hamas in Gaza,” Getzov said, expressing a view that polls suggest is shared by a minority of Israelis. This scenario would have prevented the current war, he said.
“The only way we live here long-term is through dialog and agreements,” added Getzov. He opposes an Israeli ground invasion into Lebanon and wants a “negotiated agreement” with the terrorists in Lebanon and a prisoner deal with the ones in Gaza, he said.
Like the rest of Israel, the northern stayers are radically divided on politics even as they inhabit the same dramatic reality.
Nasimi dismisses outright the possibility of negotiating a deal with Hezbollah. “They’re monsters; there’s nothing to discuss,” she said. “We need to carpet-bomb their outposts and villages until they need our permission to touch the border. Things look like they’re moving in the right direction, but it will take a long time. I’m not sure my son and I have that time to wait here like this.”