Israel Iluz, Messianic Jewish pastor of Congregation Kiryat Shmona, longs for quieter days.
For more than a year, he braved the Hezbollah rockets raining down in his northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona.
Sometimes, Iluz was too worn out to care about the missile threats. On several occasions, his wife interrupted his shower to alert him to the air-raid siren. Iluz told her to go on ahead to the bomb shelter. He just wanted to wash the shampoo out of his hair.
The past few months have been calmer, and Iluz hopes Hezbollah won’t start firing rockets again now that Israel is returning to Gaza and renewing its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. On Friday, Israel bombed Beirut for the first time since the November cease-fire with the terrorist organization. A separate ceasefire with Hamas ended in mid-March when Israel resumed bombing Gaza after two months of quiet. The attacks killed 400 in the deadliest day of the war in more than a year, according to Gaza’s health authority.
The day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, Hezbollah began pounding northern Israel with rocket fire. In response, Israel conducted airstrikes and later ground operations against Hezbollah forces. The fighting drove tens of thousands of people to evacuate the border regions of both countries.
Unprepared for war on multiple fronts, Israel sent soldiers to makeshift camps in the north with limited supplies of canned food. So Iluz’s congregation began cooking hundreds of meals daily for troops protecting the northern border.
Close to 80 percent of Kiryat Shmona’s 23,000 residents evacuated, but a dozen members from Iluz’s church volunteered to serve the soldiers. Some drove in during the day from safer locations. When they heard air-raid sirens, they paused their cooking and hustled to the church’s bomb shelter.
The team learned to decipher the sounds and patterns of Hezbollah’s rocket fire. The attacks seemed to escalate after 5:00 p.m., so they timed their deliveries accordingly.
Some meal deliveries required a windy drive into the foothills where Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, was stationed. Iluz prayed for protection from rocket fire before departing in his van.
He understood the risks. Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel since the war began, and some made it through the country’s Iron Dome defense system. One missile incinerated a car just around the corner from Iluz’s home during the first month of the war. Another missile damaged his church’s new facility only hours after his team left the building last May.
Now, the skies are quieter. Locals began moving back into their homes in early March, Iluz said. A November cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel gave the residents of Kiryat Shmona some hope for a safe return.
Iluz is grateful Kiryat Shmona no longer looks like a ghost town, yet that reprieve may be temporary with the end of the cease-fire. Iluz also continues to worry about the larger issues Israel faces as Iran-backed forces surround the country and are aligned under a common mission to destroy the Jewish nation. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to wield power in Gaza.
In March, as negotiations to extend the cease-fire repeatedly stalled, Israel blocked all humanitarian aid destined for Gaza. Then Israel launched a wave of attacks against Hamas operatives. At least five senior political figures died in the offensive.
The bombings killed nearly 600 Palestinians, bringing the death toll to more than 50,000, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. More than 130 children and entire families were killed, Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal told CNN.
Israel claims it is sending troops back to Gaza to roll back the gains Hamas made during the cease-fire and force the terrorist group to negotiate another hostage deal. During the cease-fire, Hamas released 33 hostages in exchange for nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners.
Polls show that both Palestinians and Israelis are ready for the war to end.
Protests in Israel swelled last week, with more than 100,000 gathering in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other cities across the country. The protestors demanded an immediate deal between Israel and Hamas to release the remaining hostages and an end to government plans for a judicial overhaul, which protesters say would empower the ruling coalition.
In Kiryat Shmona, Iluz and his volunteers are winding down their meals for troops. This week, they hosted a barbecue offsite for close to 100 Israeli soldiers. They want their church to return to a sense of normalcy, so they spent the past few weeks organizing the remaining piles of plastic utensils, food containers, and cooking supplies while deep-cleaning the kitchen.
“You come to our church for the past year and a half, [and] you smell onions every time you go there,” Iluz said. “So now we [just] want the aroma of Christ.”
Iluz feels safer in Kiryat Shmona than he did last year. Israel has killed dozens of senior Hezbollah commanders and hundreds of fighters in targeted attacks across Lebanon and Syria. Israeli soldiers continued to dismantle miles of tunnels Hezbollah had been planning to use for an attack in northern Israel.
The repairs on Iluz’s church building are almost complete, and last Friday, Congregation Kiryat Shmona held its first church service since the war began. The next day, Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted three rockets over the small town of Metula, just five miles north of Kiryat Shmona. Hezbollah denied any involvement, but Israel retaliated with air strikes against Hezbollah bases across Lebanon.
Iluz said the people in his town and the members of his congregation are tired and want peace. “Another round of war would be devastating,” he said.
Despite the war’s continuation, both Iluz and Pileggi remain hopeful.
“We look forward to the promises in Isaiah 19 that the Middle East will one day be a blessing in all the earth,” Pileggi said. “I know it doesn’t look that way at the moment, but we believe that God has great promises for Arabs and Jews.”
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