Hizbollah’s drones have loitered over Haifa for months, slipping past Israeli defences and mapping out targets in a simmering conflict that is suddenly on the edge of war.
The country’s largest port, the navy’s brand new Komemiyut vessel, the famed Iron Dome batteries and even the individual offices of military commanders have been charted.
So too has Israel’s third-largest city, still scarred from the 2006 war between the Jewish state and the Lebanese militant movement just a 40-minute drive north on the border, when hundreds of Hizbollah rockets pounded northern Israel.
The mayor has installed remote controlled doors on public bomb shelters that open automatically, Rambam hospital has readied an emergency unit on a five-acre floor of an underground parking lot, and Ilya Kaluzhnyy, a recent émigré from Russia, a little confused about what exactly is going on, has packed his secure room with water, batteries and personal documents.
“The Iron Dome should do its job, I hope,” he said, sweating from a run along the Mediterranean on a muggy Friday night. “It will, right?”
After nine months of war on its southern border with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, Israel is bracing for a conflict along its northern border, too.
Mightier than Hamas, better equipped and battle-hardened, Hizbollah has been trading fire with the Israeli army since October 8, when it kicked off a low-intensity conflict in support of Hamas. It led to the evacuation of 70,000 Israelis and more than 90,000 Lebanese from their homes. Hundreds have been killed in Lebanon, and dozens in Israel, including civilians.
The conflict had been kept below a boiling point by both the US’s shuttle diplomacy and a hesitation by both enemies to avoid a full-blown war that risks devastating Lebanon and inflicting serious harm on Israel.
But twin assassinations this week in Beirut and Tehran of senior Hizbollah and Hamas leaders — the first claimed officially by Israel, and the second blamed on Israel — now threaten to shatter that delicate balance.
Hizbollah vowed to make “Israel weep terribly” for its July 30 assassination in Beirut of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in the militia.
Hours later, Iran — Hizbollah’s patron and Israel’s regional rival — also vowed revenge, after the killing in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the political chief of Hamas. Hours earlier, Haniyeh had hugged Masoud Pezeshkian, the Islamic republic’s president at his inauguration.
Taken together, the two threats all but guarantee an intense retaliation against Israel, which could widen the theatre of conflict in Israeli territory and perhaps bring war to Haifa’s doorstep.
The US has deployed warships while Israel has readied its forces and threatened a counter-retaliation, which risks sucking the region into a conflict unlike any in recent decades.
Watching their 18-month-old son Rafiq gambol on the grass, Hassan Jabareen and Rina Rosenberg ponder Haifa’s situation: a mixed city of Palestinians and Jews, just like their family, poised once again on the precipice of war.
In the 1948 war that gave birth to Israel, some 70,000 Haifa Palestinians fled to Lebanon for safety, ending up as life-long refugees. Haifa was bombed in Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars, and in 1991 by Saddam Hussein.
But the 2006 war was the worst, said Jabareen. In little more than a month, hundreds of Hizbollah rockets hit Haifa, abandoned by most of its residents after Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah exhorted the Palestinian population to flee.
Now, Hizbollah has a significantly larger and more sophisticated arsenal.
“Haifa is a symbol of war between Israel and Hizbollah,” Jabareen said. “Haifa and Beirut — they are like sisters. If Beirut is hit, so will Haifa.”
The couple, who were married at the US Supreme Court by Ruth Bader Ginsburg because Palestinians and Jews are not allowed to marry in Israel, are struggling to make plans to seek shelter if the retaliations lead to a wider conflict.
Rina cannot flee to Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the occupied West Bank, with Jabareen, unsure if she will be welcomed there at a time of heightened tensions between Jews and Palestinians.
And given the reach of Hizbollah’s rockets, and the fact that a Houthi drone from Yemen exploded in downtown Tel Aviv weeks ago, she is not sure where to run to in Israel. Jordan might be safest, she thinks.
“It fills me with a sense of doom,” she said. “Just as there is no place in Gaza that is safe, I feel like what’s happening now is that there will be no safe place in Israel.”
In Haifa, Mayor Yona Yahav installed the automatic doors for the bomb shelters days after the war with Hamas erupted in October, said a spokesman for the municipality. Underground car parks have been converted into mass shelters, with WiFi and generators, and smaller concrete shelters have been dropped into older neighbourhoods.
“Haifa is ready,” is the mayor’s message. Palestinians in Haifa, about a 10th of the population, disagree. Despite Haifa’s reputation as a model of Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, Palestinian neighbourhoods have far worse infrastructure than Jewish neighbourhoods, said Raja Zaatreh, a member of the municipality.
By his estimate, half of the Palestinian population does not have a bomb shelter near their home. On the prominent Abbas Street, home to several thousand middle-class Palestinians, the local community centre that has been turned into a bomb shelter can only hold a few hundred people.
“This time, compared to 2006, things will be even worse,” he said. “Things will be really bad — the way the state discriminates against Palestinians, the city is not well prepared [to protect its Palestinian population].”
At Rambam, the largest hospital in northern Israel, the lessons of the 2006 war are being acted on, when doctors battled to save lives on unprotected wards, said David Ratner, a spokesman.
Since then, the hospital has built an underground car park, where the two lowest floors can be converted into a fully functioning hospital with 2,200 beds within 72 hours. Special pipes have already been installed for oxygen lines and the walls set up with special ports for medical equipment.
On October 8, the hospital called in the navy to help turn one of the floors into an 1,100 bed emergency hospital. Within six hours, every patient in the hospital, and 150 elderly patients from nearby hospitals, can be moved down there, while the rest of the beds can be left aside for trauma patients.
Staffing the hospital will not be a problem either. As the situation on the northern front deteriorated, nearly all airlines stopped flying to Israel, so “the airlines decided for us”, Ratner said. “There’s no way to leave Israel now.”