Inside the shrapnel-pocked school building, children’s drawings are strewn about and traces of blood dot the floor. The playground outside is littered with debris, and a burned-out car sits in the parking lot. Children ride their bicycles through the streets while families in this Israeli village less than 1 kilometer from the border with Lebanon sip coffee on their porches, seemingly unperturbed by the risk of all-out war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school. …..more
