Israel has began to evacuate the town of Kiryat Shmona, the northernmost urban area in Israel, because of the possibility of war with the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Times of Israel reported on Friday:
The evacuation comes amid repeated rocket and missile attacks by the Hezbollah terror group and other allied Palestinian factions targeting northern Israel.
Yesterday, three people were wounded in a rocket attack on the city.
Kiryat Shmona has a population of some 22,000 residents, though many have already left amid the ongoing tensions.
Israel is evacuating all towns within two kilometers of the border with Lebanon. Both the U.S. and Israel have warned Iran against opening a northern front against Israel, which it may do in an effort to save its terrorist proxies in Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, from destruction.
In 2006, Hezbollah did exactly that to interrupt an Israeli attack on Gaza after Hamas infiltrated Israel and kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. The result was the Second Lebanon War, which saw northern Israel bombarded by rockets in the era before the Iron Dome provided protection.
Nearly 50 years ago, in 1974, Palestinian terrorists infiltrated from Lebanon and murdered 18 Israelis in an apartment building in Kiryat Shmona — a brutal terrorist attack event similar to that which Israelis experienced on Oct. 7, on a much larger scale.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.