The sirens give you zero seconds. That is not a figure of speech.
In Kibbutz Snir, in the Upper Galilee Regional Council, pressed against the Lebanese border in Israel’s far North, a missile can cross the boundary and find you before the alert has finished sounding.
Anat Datner-Mualem knows this. She has learned it in the 23 years she has called this region home, ever since she came to Israel as a student, fell in love with the pace and nature, and decided to stay.
The North was plunged into war again when Hezbollah began firing rockets in early March, drawn back into conflict in the wake of Iran’s confrontation with Israel. The regional schools were shut down and when the children gathered for informal education activities, they did so inside bomb shelters – an hour or two in concrete rooms.
Many businesses were forced to shutter again – those that somehow survived the last evacuation following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack that sparked war on the northern border too, the ceasefire reached at the end of 2024, and then the long, tentative year of 2025 when the North was trying to remember how to be itself.
Staying open
Datner-Mualem and her husband, Aaron Mualem, run a catering company in the neighboring Kibbutz Kfar Giladi called Nanush, which has stayed open. Mualem, born in Kiryat Shmona and father to 24-year-old May, is the chef; Datner-Mualem runs the logistics and the events.
During the fighting, they supplied food to essential workers and first response teams, refusing to stop.
“From the very first moment,” Datner-Mualem said, “we understood one thing. This time, we were not leaving.”
She did leave once. Most people there did.
In the days after the October 7 massacre, as the scale of Hamas’s attack in southern Israel became clear and Hezbollah began its own cross-border fire, the head of the regional council put out a call: Anyone who could evacuate should.
What hung in the air was not just the threat of rockets but the far more terrifying possibility that Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force could breach the border within minutes, launching coordinated ground raids on nearby towns, overwhelming local defenses, and carrying out an attack on civilians on a scale reminiscent of the southern invasion.
Datner-Mualem and family packed two sets of clothing per person, which included her three daughters from her first marriage – Lia, 17, Emma, 15, and 10-year-old Leni – and drove away from Snir, terrified and confused, but convinced they would be gone, at most, 48 hours.
They were gone for 14 months.
Nomadic wandering
What followed was a blurred period of nomadic wandering – a family of shell-shocked people at a relative’s home in Zichron Ya’acov; a family friend’s place in Neveh Yam – before joining the community of Snir at evacuation hotels. First, the Ramada in Nazareth, then Kibbutz Ayelet Hashachar, where they lived for three and a half months, the bed serving as sofa, office, and place of refuge all at once.
“I missed being able to go into my own kitchen and cook up a meal,” Datner-Mualem said.
“You get tired of eating all your meals in a hotel dining room after three months.”
It was her husband who finally said, “Enough.” They found a house to rent in Mishmar Hayarden, no small feat, with displaced families competing for every available property across the Lower Galilee.
They hung things on the walls. They brought furniture. And they cooked, together, around a table that was theirs, into a kitchen they could walk into, the aroma of a proper meal filling a home that was not quite home but was beginning to feel like one.
Datner-Mualem was careful to say the house was good. The people around them were kind. But the feeling she returns to, again and again, when she describes those 14 months, is not fear or exhaustion. It is strange.
“Wherever we were temporarily, it was hard to connect. We felt that we weren’t part of the community. Strangers,” she said.
Even the two cats they had adopted just before the evacuation, left behind on the kibbutz and fed by the security team in those first weeks, returned changed.
Datner-Mualem described how they tried to rehome the cats when it became clear that they were not coming back any time soon, but each time the adoptions failed. She eventually had to “beg as I’ve never begged for anything in my life” to get their landlady in Mishmar Hayarden to reverse her no-pets policy and allow the cats to live with them.
All that time, she said, they were waiting to go home.
They were far from alone. The conflict forced approximately 96,000 people from their homes across northern Israel in October 2023. When the ceasefire with Lebanon came in November 2024, around 55,000 returned.
Kibbutz Snir was turned from an army base into a civilian kibbutz by members of the HaShomer Hatzair youth movement in 1968. Its population had reached 750 just prior to October 7.
Returning home
Now the evacuated members were starting to return home again. For the Datner-Mualem family, the decision to return was made the moment it became possible.
It was not without dilemmas, especially after they had finally found a decent house in Mishmar Hayarden. But the girls’ friends were heading north, their father lived on the kibbutz, and the pull of Snir, with all its memories, was not something they could easily ignore.
Husband Aaron had made quiet trips to Snir throughout the evacuation, cleaning and airing the house. They brought in a gardener before returning. When they finally drove north in December 2024, they came back to a house in fair condition.
The return, Datner-Mualem said, was exciting and emotional but also deeply disorienting. Like stepping back into your childhood home as an adult, everything is familiar, yet slightly off, the proportions changed, and nothing quite fits the way you remember it.
She walked around the kibbutz for weeks, bumping into people she had not seen in over a year, everyone carrying their own version of the same strange journey. “Everyone had grown by two years,” she said. All of 2025, she reflected, was about acclimatization.
And then February 28, 2026.
The news came in the morning. Israeli and American troops were at war with Iran. Within days, it was clear the North was back in the cycle. Hezbollah was firing. The sirens were back. The zero seconds were back.
Datner-Mualem does not pretend that the fear was not real. The sleeplessness was real, the tension, the constant mental arithmetic about where the nearest shelter is, the calculations that run automatically now whenever you think about leaving the house.
“An unimaginable reality,” she called it, “knowing that a rocket can come within a second, with no forewarning.”
But their decision, she said, was never in question. Not for her, not for Aaron, not for the girls, not even for young Leni, who was eight years old when they first drove away from Snir and has spent a significant portion of her conscious life either displaced or under fire.
“Our home is our place, where we belong. We are not willing to leave it under any circumstances,” Datner-Mualem asserted.
Every family around them, she added, feels the same.
What carried them through it all, Datner-Mualem said, was not bravado. It was something simpler and harder to break than that.
“You pass every day as normal as possible within an abnormal reality,” she emphasized, adding that they try to project something to the girls that does not come naturally under rocket fire: “A lot of resilience, strength, and joy, despite the challenges.”
Now, with a shaky ceasefire in place, Datner-Mualem says her family – and her neighbors – are trying to get back into some sort of routine, even though they cannot return to the way things were before.
“The ceasefire is still in its very early stages, so we’ll see how things develop,” she said. “We’re very relieved to be back in business – May is traditionally a busy month, full of weddings and events and being able to work and create brings so much joy to everyday life.”
“We sincerely hope this marks a meaningful shift in our security situation... and for now, we are choosing to remain optimistic,” Datner-Mualem said, emphasizing that after months of living in other people’s spaces and of not belonging anywhere, they are convinced more than ever that their forever home is on the border, despite its challenges.
“If we’re not here,” Datner-Mualem said simply, “Hezbollah will be here. Therefore, it’s so, so important that we stay.”■