War coverage: North versus south

Incoming!

It was summer in 2024. I was upstairs in my room at my parents' house when the air raid siren went off. With somewhere around 20 seconds to get to a safe spot - there are disputes over the exact amount of time - I grabbed my phone and hurtled down the stairs as fast as possible, to join the rest of my family members huddled under the small staircase. I had barely arrived in the "safe spot" when the rockets started to fall.
At that point, we were fairly used to it. The normal sound of rockets being intercepted overhead, and the rockets not intercepted falling into the nearby nature reserves (burning down endless swathes), were what we expected, until the loudest explosion I had ever heard blasted my ears. The house shook as if it were about to collapse.

After the rocket rain had ended - we learned afterward it was probably around 50 rockets - and we waited the required ten minutes to be sure there was no longer any falling shrapnel, we went to investigate. After verifying that the rocket had not, in fact, hit our house, I ventured outside. The smell of smoke greeted my nose, and the sight of it greeted my eyes - a column of thick, black smoke, drifting into the air a block away. There was a different siren this time - the sound of ambulances and fire engines.

The house that was hit was destroyed. I passed by as soon as the police allowed it; it was nothing but a pile of rubble. The couple living there was unhurt, having reached a shelter in time. Several other buildings in town had also been hit, although none destroyed to the same extent. It was an intense day.

In the town of Beit Hillel, next to the city of Kiryat Shmona, there's a pumptrack. I used to go there around once a week - usually on Tuesdays - to practice my mountain biking skills, particularly cornering, even after I had stopped training with a competitive team and coaching. Not once the rockets started, though.

Beit Hillel was one of the places that had air raid sirens almost every day. Unlike my hometown, the residents were evacuated and the town was practically abandoned. The entire area became a closed-off military zone. In other words, I wasn't getting in there; the town was under constant fire.
In Kiryat Shmona itself, most of the residents were evacuated. The city was half destroyed; rocket shrapnel lay in the streets for months. The roads were pitted with impacts, and buildings lay in ruins. The firefighters who remained did what they could, but with the sheer amount of rocket fire directed at the city... the end results were not pretty. I used to visit Kiryat Shmona regularly as well; that's where the bike shop I went to was, it's where I used to train with my cycling team, and it was a relatively close "big city" - it was a place to go. It's where a sibling learned how to drive and where I was planning on doing the same. Seeing places you used to frequent sit there fire-blackened, windows shattered, and walls collapsed, is quite the gut-punch.

Nobody cares about the north

But the fact remained that the war with Hezbollah was only a footnote in the story. The main event was Hamas in the south - despite, theoretically at least, Hezbollah being a much more capable threat with better-trained militants and higher-quality weapons. The meat of the story was Gaza.

Stories ran in local publications about how the north was literally on fire and nobody cared. The eyes of the country - and the world, for that matter - were on the south.

Out of curiosity, now in April 2025, I checked how many Google hits there were on three particular news sites for "Hamas" versus "Hezbollah", since October 7, 2023, in both English and Hebrew:

Very clearly, there's a huge difference in the level of reporting on the conflict involving Hamas and involving Hezbollah. And to a certain extent, that's justified; Hezbollah did not perform a ground incursion the way Hezbollah did, and (this time) didn't take hostages. But even so, there was a sentiment in the north that we had been abandoned. We were under fire, in a very literal sense; there was the constant smell of smoke, and hundreds of dunams of nature preserves and agricultural fields burnt down. Rockets and drones were an everyday fact of life. (I created a keybind in a game I played at times, which if I pressed would send a pre-written message explaining that I had vanished because of an air raid siren and would return in about ten minutes.) And yet the national focus remained on the south.
Articles appeared in the local publications, complaining that nobody was paying attention to what was happening. People couldn't work; tourism - both international tourists and tourists from within the country had stopped entirely; every time you got on the road you were risking your life, since the Iron Dome didn't shoot down missiles that were going to land in open areas. Sometimes that was fatal; a couple from a nearby town, friends of friends, was killed when a rocket directly struck their car while they were driving, leaving three children without their parents. There had been no attempt to intercept the missile because it was going to land in an open area. The incident made (national) headlines for a day. Nothing changed.

Ceasefire deals

Today, there's a ceasefire with Hezbollah. The rocket attacks from Lebanon have - for the most part - stopped. Hezbollah still exists as a militant and political group in Lebanon; there are internal Lebanese negotiations going on between the new Lebanese government and Hezbollah about Hezbollah ceding its weapons to the state, but at the moment Hezbollah still has its military capabilities. They're significantly weakened, but still exist.

In fact, Hezbollah today is in a much better position than Hamas. Hamas has had its entire leadership eliminated, the Strip is almost entirely in ruins, they have almost no experienced fighters left, and are relying on fresh recruits in their teens to continue fighting. They've depleted their rocket reserve. Politically, they're losing power; there have increasingly been protests within Gaza itself calling for Hamas's removal, and they're losing their hold on the Strip.
Hezbollah, on the other hand, still has a large number of fighters under their command. They were able to continue launching rockets right up until the ceasefire went into effect. They exist as a political party with a presence in the Lebanese parliament. They've suffered losses, but they still have the military and political power that Hamas is losing.

The government refuses to sign a deal with Hamas that would return all of the 59 remaining hostages in exchange for ending the war in Gaza. Utterly destroying Hamas is more important at this stage, they said - rather explicitly in the case of one finance minister. In their view, the war must continue until Hamas has zero political and military power left, so that they can never again massacre people like they did on October 7th.

But they were perfectly willing to sign a ceasefire deal that left Hezbollah's political and military power to a certain extent intact, without even the added consideration of hostages.

Those of us in the north can only draw one of two conclusions: Either the government doesn't care about dismantling Hezbollah and making sure that an October 7th-like event can never happen in the north; or that destroying Hamas to make sure that another October 7th doesn't happen isn't the real reason for refusing to sign a hostage-end-the-war deal.

Neither conclusion is a good one.

Today, the people who were evacuated from border towns such as Manara and Metula report seeing Hezbollah operatives over the border, in violation of the ceasefire deal. They complain that once again, they have been abandoned - told to return to their homes (many of which were destroyed, and those that weren't were heavily damaged) despite the threat not having been eliminated. But the focus remains, both militarily and narratively, on the south. If you're not from the north of Israel, you may not even be aware of the extent of the damage caused - entire towns lying in ruins, fields burnt to a crisp, nature reserves destroyed... even other Israelis don't realize, because the media attention just isn't there. As those in the north continue crying out for attention, calling that the danger is still present and that the destruction is real, hopefully the country will wake up to the double standard applied to the north and to the south and begin to address it.