Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel spark fires and destroy thousands of hectares of land

Before October 7, Sigal Malachi woke up at 5 a.m. every day to water her plants, remove weeds and produce cuttings. She co-owns a greenhouse in northern Israel and says her home was once a lush paradise.

Now it is a war zone.

Like others living near the Lebanese border, Malachi is one of thousands of Israelis the Israeli government estimates have been displaced from their homes because of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Forced to close her family business, Malachi packed her belongings and left Moshav Liman, an agricultural community in northern Israel on the Mediterranean coast, just a few kilometers south of the Lebanese border.

The Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah began launching almost daily rocket attacks on northern Israel on October 8, a day after the Iran-aligned Palestinian militia Hamas led an unprecedented incursion from the Gaza Strip into neighboring southern Israel, sparking the war. Hezbollah has said it is attacking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians and will not stop until there is a ceasefire in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where sustained air and ground attacks by the Israeli military have caused widespread devastation.

In Israel, at least 1,200 people were killed and 6,900 others wounded by Hamas and other Palestinian militants in the October 7 attack, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In Gaza, more than 38,000 people have been killed and 87,000 others wounded by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry. Meanwhile, cross-border gunfire has erupted between Israel and Hezbollah as tensions in the region escalate.

On June 12, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, the largest attack on the country since the Gaza war began. The group said it was retaliation for an Israeli airstrike that killed one of its senior commanders in southern Lebanon.

Malachi, a 46-year-old mother of two, is one of an estimated 60,000 people who have been evacuated from northern Israel for their own safety in the face of Hezbollah rocket attacks, according to the Israeli government.

However, the attacks also caused environmental damage in the form of thousands of hectares of forest fires.

“It’s dangerous, it’s coming right up to the houses,” Malachi told ABC News about the fires. “Even if it doesn’t come right up to the houses, it’s destroying forests and all life on the ground.”

Yehoshua Shkedy, chief scientist at Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, is monitoring the environmental damage caused by the fires. Vegetation in northern Israel is much more widespread than in the south, he said, meaning the risk of fire is much higher in the north.

“If this war continues, we will see more and more fires in the forests,” Shkedy told ABC News.

He said the fire was destroying vegetation, damaging soil quality and burning small animals that could not easily escape, including lizards, rodents, snails and invertebrates.

“The further we go, the worse the effects of the fire become,” Shkedy said. “Sometimes the soil itself burns – it gets cooked. It’s like an oven, and then it’s barren for quite a while.”

He warned that September and October could be very dangerous after a hot, dry summer.

“Right now there are four times more fires than usual during the year,” said Shkedy. “It’s bad now, and it will be even worse in the fall.”

Gilad Ostrovsky is the chief forester for the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), a nonprofit that has helped manage Israel’s forests for decades. He said workers are treating the forests and working to reduce fire risk by creating firebreaks — buffer lines with little or no flammable vegetation that separate settlements and forests by about 70 meters.

“These buffer zones in the forest are wide enough for fire trucks to pass through safely. However, if the fire gets bigger and more intense, we will have to call the planes,” Ostrovsky told ABC News, adding that using planes is also dangerous because Hezbollah can shoot them down with rockets.

“We are very concerned,” Ostrovsky said.

With tensions rising between Hezbollah and Israel, the prospect of future fires is worrying. Ostrovsky said flames from previous fires had reached some homes near Israel’s northernmost town of Kiryat Shmona. Some farmers, he said, had lost orchards and farmland in the fires.

Ostrovsky said that in two weeks in June, wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets in Israel burned about 5,000 hectares – more than 12,000 acres – affecting Biriya National Park, the Naftali Mountains and the Bar’am Forest Reserve, all of which are just a few kilometers from the border with Lebanon.

Ostrovsky said that even Hezbollah rockets intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system can start fires. “Even if we manage to repel the rockets, there is a huge explosion in the air. And then thousands of fragments are scattered everywhere and any fragment can start a fire,” Ostrovsky said, which in turn makes fighting the numerous fires more difficult.

“It didn’t just start in one place. Now, because of the war and the missiles, it’s starting all over again everywhere,” he continued. “It’s very difficult for us to say, ‘Okay, we can be prepared.’ The uncertainty is very high. That’s the problem.”

Apart from immediate safety measures, restoring the forest will take years, Ostrovsky said.

“In the north of Israel, we prefer natural regeneration,” he said, pointing out that the north of Israel receives more rain than the south and that there is more vegetation there. Therefore, forest regrowth can be assessed a few years after the fires and thus determine which parts of the forest need to be reforested.

The positive news, he added, is that many volunteers arrived in June to help the firefighters.

Malachi, who now rents an apartment in Givat Ela, a small village east of the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, told ABC News that she makes the hour-long drive to Moshav Liman three days a week to tend to her plants and property. Others also began venturing there in June to cut grass, remove dried herbs and do other tasks to prevent future fires, Malachi said. But with so many empty towns, she fears the land is more vulnerable to fire because it hasn’t been cared for for so long.

“It’s not going to be easy and it’s sad and I hope it stops,” she said of the violence. Although her house was spared, Malachi said it was shocking to see the north in flames.

“You cry and you can’t believe it happened,” she said. “You see people fighting the fire and it’s scary. It affected everyone.”

Malachi said it will take a long time for communities and agriculture to recover. “It’s not like we’re going to plant a new tree tomorrow and try to make everything like new. It’s not that easy,” she said, stressing the scale of the fires. But she is confident it will happen.

“Everyone will come and help renew the north,” she said.