Once a picturesque Israeli mountain resort with panoramic views into Lebanon, Metula is now off limits to civilians. Under fire for months from Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles, every other house has by now been damaged or lies in ruins. Over the past year of fighting, it has been one of the hardest-hit places in Israel.

More than a century old and a storied symbol of early pioneering Zionism, Metula, a pastoral border community and Israel’s northernmost town, juts upward like a finger into Lebanon, which surrounds it on three sides. The roughly 2,500 residents of Metula were officially evacuated a year ago, for the first time since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Now, even as Israeli ground forces pursue Hezbollah’s fighters in southern Lebanon, Metula’s future is in question.

Thirty percent of the evacuees do not intend to return, whatever the outcome of the war, according to the town’s mayor, David Azulai. Those who have gone for good, he says, include many of the families with young children.

“We call it an enclave — encircled to the north, east and west by Lebanon,” he said, adding that up to 90 percent of the houses were exposed, within direct line of sight from the Lebanese villages across the border. One of them, Kafr Kila, is less than a half-mile away as the crow flies.

“There are neighborhoods even we don’t go to,” he said, referring to the two dozen or so members of Metula’s armed civil response team who have stayed behind to guard the town, along with a couple of essential council workers and an influx of soldiers.

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