Sitting on the smooth stone of his stoop on an empty street, Yitzhak Azoulay stretched out his legs with a grimace. On the heights of Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, there was hardly anyone left. Artillery fire in the mountain, which rises steeply just beyond the deserted neighborhood, revealed the proximity of Lebanon, just a few kilometers away as the crow flies. Fresh exchanges of fire were underway between Israeli forces and those of the nearby Hezbollah militia.

On the Israeli side, the evacuation of 14 border communities was announced on Sunday, October 22, in addition to an initial list of 28 communities and kibbutzim, clearing a 4-kilometer-deep strip for military operations. Among Azoulay's neighbors, those with cars have filled the trunks and headed further south. The rest were waiting for government-chartered buses.

A few days earlier, the town had been going about its business. On Sunday, everyone was leaving. At a bus stop, a small group had formed, luggage in hand. There was a little nervousness in the air. A lady with a pretty rose tattoo on her forearm, adorned with the word "family," was exasperated at not having any details about the exact location of the bus that was to take her family, including her two headstrong boys, to areas of Israel far from Hezbollah. "I got a message saying the departure was at 11, but they didn't say where the meeting point was."

Well-tuned logistics

But the logistics were well organized. "We have to leave. I don't want to die," said a mother who was on edge, while her two teenagers were engrossed in contemplating their phones and a neighbor's little dog began barking for kibble. All of them would soon be boarding their bus.

It was an orderly evacuation, with the necessary resources. Azoulay warned that he would only agree to be relocated by the government to the shores of Lake Tiberias, "otherwise I'll stay at home." The 78-year-old injured his back last month when he fell from a chair he'd climbed onto to repair an electrical wire in the ceiling of his terrace. All things considered, he would prefer Israel to invade Lebanon, to "settle this matter," rather than be evacuated. It all seems so familiar. His beloved terrace, cobbled together over the years, has already been hit twice by shots from Lebanon. In 1994, the shrapnel of a rocket wounded her daughter Hannah in the leg, as she slept in the bedroom beneath the terrace. She has already fled Kiryat Shmona and settled at the other end of the country, in Eilat.

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