Hi,
Kibbutzim, Mushavim and a city along the north border of Israel with Lebanon have been evacuated in the last weeks, and most of the border is just a line of empty settlements.
Those empty settlements can be easily recognized looking at them from above, from Golan Heights at night. Israel borders are held up by agriculture settlements, as this is the best way to hold large area by a small amount of people. Because those are agriculture settlements, there are still necessary workers to take care of the farm (so you can still see the lights of the guy going the milk the cows at 5:00).
The program to evacuate the settlements along the border was planned after 2nd Lebanon war and the threats of Hezbollah to “Conquer the Galilee,” the kind of thing that Hamas did on the Black Sabbath (October 7th) the settlements of Gaza surroundings.
People on the Northern border had complained for years that they can hear Hezbollah militants digging tunnels underneath their houses. Unlike the western Negev soil, which allows Hamas to easily dig tunnels around Gaza (to Israel and Egypt) the Galilee and south Lebanon has hard rock.
It was quite a surprise on Operation Northern Shield , on 2018, when Israel had managed to locate 6 attack tunnels, drilled in the hard rock between Lebanon and Israel to allow Hezbollah to conquer the settlements along the border.
Till now, Hezbollah had focused mainly on IDF targets (as part of its bookkeeping). But missiles and rockets are starting falling on those empty settlements, and the program, although it costs, saves people’s lives.
Take Care
Gad
The lighted village of Ghajar on top (an Alawite-Arab village on the border) and the empty Kibbutz of Dan on the bottom.
Empty city of Kiryat Shmona (around 19,000 people were evacuated out of population of 22,000)