KIBBUTZ MANARA, Northern Israel — The anti-tank guided missile came through the kitchen window, sparking a fire that burned so hot that it melted the glass in the windows and took 48 hours to go out. (The inhabitants of the house had long since been ordered to evacuate by the time the missile hit.) The flames did not reach the children’s bedroom and even some of the plastic toys inside did not melt, but the intense heat blackened the walls and left everything inside — a stuffed Mickey Mouse, stacks of board games, a wooden crib — covered in a thin layer of soot. 

Another missile — flying some two feet above the ground as it made the way up the mountain  — ripped past the trees and bushes, smashed through three fences, a plastic chair, a window and a pillar before it blasted through the concrete wall of the daycare center, which had been renovated just the summer before. Fragments of the missile were found on the roofs of surrounding buildings. 

A third hit a parked car, causing flames that burned hot enough and long enough that they melted the aluminum engine block, causing the metal to seep out of the charred husk of the vehicle and pool next to it, congealing on the ground next to it in a gleaming silver puddle.

And these are just three of the more than 100 anti-tank guided missiles that Naor Shamia, the head of Kibbutz Manara’s local security team, estimates were fired at the community by Hezbollah from October 2023 until a cease-fire agreement was reached between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist organization in late November.

Despite the cease-fire, Kibbutz Manara was still a ghost town when eJP visited the community on Dec. 25. The only people there were the community’s leaders, members of its security team and residents stopping by to pick up items that they had left behind.

“On Oct. 7, we had some 275 residents — from age zero to Rachel Rabin, who is the oldest of us,” Shamia told eJewishPhilanthropy. (Rabin, a famed educator and sister of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, turns 100 on Feb. 1.)

According to Shamia, of the 154 housing units on Kibbutz Manara — which straddles the Ramim Ridge, overlooking the Lebanese town of Mais al-Jabal on one side of the community and the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona on the other — 110 of them — more than 70% — have been damaged in some way. 

On the two streets that make up the main residential area of the kibbutz, which overlook the Lebanese border, all but two sustained direct hits from anti-tank guided missiles. “And the two houses that weren’t hit were damaged by the shockwaves,” Shamia told eJP as he walked along the road, pointing out boarded-up windows that had been shattered and craters in the sides of buildings built of reinforced concrete.

Other homes and critical infrastructure were damaged in a massive fire that broke out in the kibbutz over the summer as a result of a Hezbollah missile attack, and a number of homes — including Shamia’s — sustained damage as a result of an Israeli operation in October to destroy a large Hezbollah underground tunnel network using some 400 tons of explosives, a blast that was so large it triggered earthquake warnings in large parts of the country.

Since the entire kibbutz was declared a closed military zone for almost a year, unless a large fire broke out, authorities would not necessarily know that a building had been hit by an anti-tank guided missile. This meant that some would have their windows or doors blown out, leaving them open to the elements — and the rats, many of which infested such buildings — another problem that Manara will now have to deal with, Shamia said.

Roughly a third of the residents of the kibbutz — mainly the older ones — have temporarily settled in Kibbutz Gadot, some 35 minutes away by car, due north from the Sea of Galilee. The other two-thirds have scattered throughout the country.

Now that it was relatively safe to return, the community needs to start the lengthy process of assessing the damage caused to all of the 110 buildings in order to determine which could be repaired and which would need to be knocked down and rebuilt. Unlike many kibbutzim in Israel, most of Manara’s residents live in small apartment buildings, not individual family homes (due to its relative small size because of its location on top of a mountain). This means that for every one building hit, several families’ homes may be damaged, as a strike on one part of the building could compromise the stability of the entire structure, explained Shamia, a teacher by training and resident of Manara for over a decade.

In addition to the damage to the buildings, the Hezbollah missile attacks also caused extensive damage to the community’s infrastructure — power, water, sewage and gas lines throughout the kibbutz required repair. Roads, some of which were damaged by missile strikes and the fires that they sparked and others of which were damaged by the Israeli tanks that tore up the asphalt, would also need to be fixed before the community’s residents could all return, said Shamia, who has taken a role in the fundraising efforts for the community.

The Israeli government is committed to covering the costs of reconstructions through the Tax Authority and additional funding sources — “if you a window is broken, they’ll replace the window,” Shamia said — but these budgets have not all been provided and others are not guaranteed, meaning that Kibbutz Manara will have to lay out significant amounts of money and hope for full reimbursement from the government down the line, Shamia said.

The community was also meant to have new bomb shelters built and old ones renovated before the current war as part of a national fortification plan — a process that is meant to resume sometime in the future.

“All of this leads us to need a project manager for the kibbutz. That’s money that we have to spend, that’s not something that the government will pay for,” he said. “There are all kinds of things that the government won’t fund and even if it will fund, it won’t fund it today but in another six months. In the meantime, we need to hand over the money — and that’s millions [of shekels].”

Reflecting the general atmosphere of skepticism regarding the reconstruction efforts in northern and southern Israel, Shamia added: “I don’t believe that the government will pay for everything, first of all — but even if it does pay for everything, I need to have [things ready] now, not in another six months.”

The kibbutz also expects to expand its social welfare services, particularly around mental health and resilience in light of the past 15 months of war and displacement, Shamia said.

The kibbutz has already been in contact with several American and Israeli organizations to provide some of the funding needed for the reconstruction process, including the Jewish National Fund, Jewish Federations of North America and Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, as well as other individual Jewish federations, according to Ido Shelem, the community’s business and rehabilitation manager. The community has also launched a crowdfunding campaign and is in the process of hiring a professional fundraiser.

The kibbutz does not know how many of its residents will return to the community even once the repairs and reconstruction efforts have been completed. Most residents — particularly older ones — have proclaimed their intentions to return, while some have expressed hesitations and others have explicitly said they do not intend to come back. For parents of school-aged children, they may not want to again uproot their children in the middle of a school year and instead wait until the summer.

To encourage residents of northern Israel to return, the Finance Ministry this week released its plan to compensate people who return beginning in March, with adults each receiving NIS 25,360 ($7,000) along with NIS 12,680 ($3,500) per child for up to seven kids. However, if people opt to remain in the hotels where they have been living until now, the costs of their stay will be deducted from these compensation packages.

“If someone says they are returning, I’m not going to ask them when, because that puts pressure on them. Will they all really come back? No one knows,” Shamia said. “But we are not breaking up. We are strong. Against expectations, this community has actually gotten stronger during the war. We realized that we have cohesion and purpose.”

Shamia referenced the kibbutz’s founding, noting that the windswept mountaintop community was set up in the dead of a cold, wet winter in January 1943. The idealistic young founders were forced to take shelter in nearby caves because their tents blew away, he noted.

“Those people were made of iron,” he said. “And there’s still something of that here.”